Field and Henry M. Field. At the age of thirteen he accompanied his sister Emilia and her husband the Rev. Josiah Brewer (the parents of the distinguished judge of the Supreme Court, David J. Brewer) to Smyrna, Turkey, for the purpose of studying Oriental languages, but after three years he returned to the United States, and in 1837 graduated at Williams College at the head of his class. He then studied law in his elder brother’s office, and in 1841 he was admitted to the New York bar. He was associated in practice there with his brother until 1848, and early in 1849 removed to California, settling soon afterward at Marysville, of which place, in 1850, he became the first alcalde or mayor. In the same year he was chosen a member of the first state legislature of California, in which he drew up and secured the enactment of two bodies of law known as the Civil and Criminal Practices Acts, based on the similar codes prepared by his brother David Dudley for New York. In the former act he embodied a provision regulating and giving authority to the peculiar customs, usages, and regulations voluntarily adopted by the miners in various districts of the state for the adjudication of disputed mining claims. This, as Judge Field truly says, “was the foundation of the jurisprudence respecting mines in the country,” having greatly influenced legislation upon this subject in other states and in the Congress of the United States. He was elected, in 1857, a justice of the California Supreme Court, of which he became chief justice in 1859, on the resignation of Judge David S. Terry to fight the duel with the United States senator David C. Broderick which ended fatally for the latter. Field held this position until 1863, when he was appointed by President Lincoln a justice of the United States Supreme Court. In this capacity he was conspicuous for fearless independence of thought and action in his opinion in the test oath case, and in his dissenting opinions in the legal tender, conscription and “slaughter house” cases, which displayed unusual legal learning, and gave powerful expression to his strict constructionist theory of the implied powers of the Federal constitution. Originally a Democrat, and always a believer in states’ rights, his strong Union sentiments caused him nevertheless to accept Lincoln’s doctrine of coercion, and that, together with his anti-slavery sympathies, led him to act with the Republican party during the period of the Civil War. He was a member of the commission which revised the California code in 1873 and of the Electoral Commission in 1877, voting in favour of Tilden. In 1880 he received sixty-five votes on the first ballot for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati. In August 1889, as a result of a ruling in the course of the Sharon-Hill litigation, a notorious conspiracy case, he was assaulted in a California railway station by Judge David S. Terry, who in turn was shot and killed by a United States deputy marshall appointed to defend Justice Field against the carrying out of Terry’s often-expressed threats. He retired from the Supreme Court on the 1st of December 1897 after a service of thirty-four years and six months, the longest in the court’s history, and died in Washington on the 9th of April 1899.
His Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, originally privately printed in 1878, was republished in 1893 with George C. Gorham’s Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field.
FIELD, WILLIAM VENTRIS FIELD, Baron (1813–1907),
English judge, second son of Thomas Flint Field, of Fielden,
Bedfordshire, was born on the 21st of August 1813. He was
educated at King’s school, Bruton, Somersetshire, and entered
the legal profession as a solicitor. In 1843, however, he ceased
to practise as such, and entered at the Inner Temple, being called
to the bar in 1850, after having practised for some time as a
special pleader. He joined the Western circuit, but soon exchanged
it for the Midland. He obtained a large business as a
junior, and became a queen’s counsel and bencher of his inn in
1864. As a Q.C. he had a very extensive common law practice,
and had for some time been the leader of the Midland circuit,
when in February 1875, on the retirement of Mr Justice Keating,
he was raised to the bench as a justice of the queen’s bench.
Mr Justice Field was an excellent puisne judge of the type that
attracts but little public attention. He was a first-rate lawyer,
had a good knowledge of commercial matters, great shrewdness
and a quick intellect, while he was also painstaking and scrupulously
fair. When the rules of the Supreme Court 1883 came
into force in the autumn of that year, Mr Justice Field was so
well recognized an authority upon all questions of practice that
the lord chancellor selected him to sit continuously at Judges’
Chambers, in order that a consistent practice under the new
rules might as far as possible be established. This he did for
nearly a year, and his name will always, to a large extent, be
associated with the settling of the details of the new procedure,
which finally did away with the former elaborate system of
“special pleading.” In 1890 he retired from the bench and was
raised to the peerage as Baron Field of Bakeham, becoming at
the same time a member of the privy council. In the House of
Lords he at first took part, not infrequently, in the hearing of
appeals, and notably delivered a carefully-reasoned judgment
in the case of the Bank of England v. Vagliano Brothers (5th of
March 1891), in which, with Lord Bramwell, he differed from the
majority of his brother peers. Before long, however, deafness
and advancing years rendered his attendances less frequent.
Lord Field died at Bognor on the 23rd of January 1907, and as
he left no issue the peerage became extinct.
FIELD (a word common to many West German languages, cf.
Ger. Feld, Dutch veld, possibly cognate with O. E. folde, the earth,
and ultimately with root of the Gr. πλατός, broad), open country
as opposed to woodland or to the town, and particularly land for
cultivation divided up into separate portions by hedges, banks,
stone walls, &c.; also used in combination with words denoting
the crop grown on such a portion of land, such as corn-field,
turnip-field, &c. The word is similarly applied to a region with
particular reference to its products, as oil-field, gold-field, &c.
For the “open” or “common field” system of agriculture in
village communities see Commons. Generally with a reference to
their “wild” as opposed to their “domestic” nature “field” is
applied to many animals, such as the “field-mouse.” There are
many applications of the word; thus from the use of the term for
the place where a battle is fought, and widely of the whole
theatre of war, come such phrases as to “take the field” for the
opening of a campaign, “in the field” of troops that are engaged
in the operations of a campaign. It is frequently used figuratively
in this sense, of the subject matter of a controversy, and
also appears in military usage, in field-fortification, field-day and
the like. A “field-officer” is one who ranks above a captain and
below a general (see Officers); a field marshal is the highest
rank of general officer in the British and many European armies
(see Marshal). “Field” is used in many games, partly with the
idea of an enclosed space, partly with the idea of the ground of
military operations, for the ground in which such games as
cricket, football, baseball and the like are played. Hence it is
applied to those players in cricket and baseball who are not “in,”
and “to field” is to perform the functions of such a player—to
stop or catch the ball played by the “in” side. “The field” is
used in hunting, &c., for those taking part in the sport, and in
racing for all the horses entered for a race, and, in such expressions
as “to back the field,” is confined to all the horses with
the exception of the “favourite.” A common application of the
word is to a surface, more or less wide, as of the sky or sea, or of
such physical phenomena as ice or snow, and particularly of the
ground, of a special “tincture,” on which armorial bearings are
displayed (see Heraldry); it is thus used also of the “ground”
of a flag, thus the white ensign of the British navy has a red St
George’s cross on a white “field.” In scientific usage the word is
also used of the sphere of observation or of operations, and has
come to be almost equivalent to a department of knowledge. In
physics, a particular application is that to the area which is
influenced by some agent, as in the magnetic or electric field.
The field of observation or view is the area within which objects
can be seen through any optical instrument at any one position.
A “field-glass” is the name given to a binocular glass used in the
field (see Binocular Instrument); the older form of field-glass
was a small achromatic telescope with joints. This terms is also
applied, in an astronomical telescope or compound microscope, to
