1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Thayer, James Bradley

THAYER, JAMES BRADLEY (1831–1902), American legal writer and educationist, was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the 15th of January 1831. He graduated at Harvard College in 1852, and at the Harvard Law School in 1856, in which year he was admitted to the bar of Suffolk county and began to practise in Boston. In 1873–83 he was Royall professor of law at Harvard; in 1883 he was transferred to the professorship which after 1893 was known as the Weld professorship and which he held until his death on the 14th of February 1902. He took an especial interest in the historical evolution of law.

He wrote: The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law (1893); Cases on Evidence (1892); Cases on Constitutional Law (1895); The Development of Trial by Jury (1896); A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898), and a short life of John Marshall (1901); and edited the twelfth edition of Kent’s Commentaries and the Letters of Chauncey Wright (1877), and A Westward Journey with Mr Emerson (1884).