CLASSICS IN LEGAL HISTORY VOLUME TWENTY-FIVE A SERIES OF REPRINTS General Editors ROY M. MERSKY J. MYRON JACOBSTEIN Professor of Law and Law Librarian Stanford University A Reprint Edition by WILLIAM S. HEIN & CO., INC. 1285 Main Street Buffalo, N. Y. 14209 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG 74-82122 INTRODUCTION Legal Masterpieces by Van Vechten Veeder, originally published in 1903, contains a carefully selected group of masterpieces of English and American legal literature, including forensic arguments and judicial and professional opinions presented during the nineteenth century and the closing half of the eighteenth. The purpose of the collection, as expressed by the editor "is to bring together, from the whole field of legal literature, specimens of the best models of the various forms of discourse and composition which the lawyer's work embodies." This purpose of illustrating precisely how great jurists have argued great questions has been fulfilled in these two volumes of over 1300 pages. The reader is introduced, perhaps for the first time, to the well known and not so well known legal giants of the past two centuries. Although much has been written about the well known legal figures such as Marshall, Field, and Webster, the true value of this collection can be measured by the new dimension it adds to their work, as well as to the work of those jurists who fall into the category of less well known giants names such as Sir Alexander Cockburn and Benjamin Curtis. How many students of the law know that it was Cockburn who argued in defense of Daniel M'Naghten in the now famous nineteenth century murder trial? In 1843 Daniel M'Naghten shot and killed the private secretary to Sir Robert Peel, mistaking him for the statesman who M'Naghten conceived to be heading a conspracy against him. Although the jury accepted M'Naghten's claim of insanity, the furor surrounding the case caused the House of Lords to debate the question of the proper standards for acquiting a defendant due to insanity. The conclusions of the House of Lords were appended to the report of the original case and are now considered to be part of the decision.1 The test developed was that an accused is not criminally responsible if, at the time of committing the act, he "was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.' ."2. The M'Naghten rule remains the predominant test for the defense of insanity in the majority of jurisdictions in this country. |