The Editor

James G. Dana was a politically attuned attorney and experienced newspaper editor. His paper had once owned the contract to publish the acts and journals of the state legislature. Dana was one of many educated easterners who immigrated to Kentucky to find their fortunes in the professions and in politics. The New Hampshire–born Dana maintained a law office in Frankfort while he edited the Commentator, the unabashed defender of the Old Court and Henry Clay, as well a spirited adversary of Amos Kendell’s Western Argus and the presidential ambitions of Andrew Jackson. In 1833 Dana would combine his two professions and begin his service as reporter of the Court of Appeals, eventually producing nine high-quality volumes.

The Brother

Alexander K. Marshall was the younger brother of US Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall. A gentleman farmer, he practiced law more as a passion than a profession. Despite a workman-like career as an appellate lawyer, he left a slender legal legacy. However, his fertile fields in Mason County, Kentucky, are still tilled, and the mailbox outside the home still bears the Marshall name.

The Barrister

As a legislator, James Hughes drafted laws to reform the muddled property laws inherited from Virginia; as an attorney, he litigated the myriad land cases that clogged the new commonwealth’s courts. While waiting to have his many cases heard in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, he took detailed notes on the cases he observed. To these accounts he added notes from his own arguments and those of his friends and fashioned the first case reporter for the state of Kentucky. Hughes was also a Lexington civic leader.

Introduction

The introduction provides the background history of American law reporting. After the American Revolution, the early law reporters helped create a new common law inspired by the law of England but fully grounded in the printed decisions of American judges. English law reports, whose reporters eventually achieved the same authority as their reports, were the model. It took time for the first state opinions to appear in print because publication was not commercially feasible. The first law reporters collected the opinions of the court, selected the best, and financed their printing; later they received state subsidies. The early Kentucky law reports were extensions of the personalities of their creators, an individualistic group of rising young lawyers, future and former judges, aspiring politicians, and enterprising journalists. The history of Kentucky courts and the state’s political environment are also surveyed.

The Soldier

The scion of a distinguished pioneer family, the handsome young Martin D. Hardin would be an able law reporter and later an accomplished appellate advocate, but his native conservatism and moral inflexibility hampered any sustained political career. He was most proud of his service during the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Hardin raised volunteers in Washington and Franklin Counties and was commissioned a major in his brother-in-law Colonel John Allen’s First Kentucky Rifles. The Kentucky volunteers were part of General William Henry Harrison’s campaign to relieve Detroit from British forces. After the war he served as a US senator.

The Reporter Who Was Not

Achilles Sneed was the clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals from 1801 until he was ousted in 1824 as a result of the Old Court–New Court controversy. He was a Frankfort civic leader, and his home still stands near the Old Capitol and adjacent to the Kentucky Historical Society.

The Banker

The details of the life of James Parks Metcalfe are elusive, despite his success as a lawyer, banker, and civic leader. He thrived as a behind-the-scenes operator, advising both politicians and clients while quietly building a fortune that would take him from his widowed mother’s rural home to an estate in the suburbs of Lexington. He was an adviser to Kentucky governor Lazarus Powell and to congressman, US vice president, and Confederate general John C. Breckinridge, as well as a member of the Central Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party. He promoted Lexington’s growth through the establishment of the University of Kentucky.

The Rebel

Early on, Monroe was yet another man caught up in the Old Court–New Court controversy, but he would go on to be a giant of the bar as both an influential federal judge and the leader of a private law school at his Frankfort estate. With homes in both Kentucky and Louisiana, his intellectual reach extended far beyond his Bluegrass home. His large extended family and network of family were woven into the fabric of the Confederacy. Monroe was one of only a handful of federal jurists who renounced their lifetime appointments and gave their allegiance to the rebel government.

The Poet

William Littell was known for his great scholarship, literary competence, and publishing experience. Nearly a dozen imprints bearing Littell’s name have been published, including a set of Kentucky statutes that were the state’s de facto code for decades, Kentucky’s first historical monograph, law reports, and a book of satire. Littell was a curious figure. He almost single-handedly created the infrastructure of legal research in the state. Outside of the law, he wrote history, poetry, and political satire and was learned in theology and medicine. But Littell was a solitary, eccentric figure; disliked by many; and politically and socially neutralized by his uncompromising pen, which skewered slave owners, abusive husbands, bankers, and politicians.

Conclusion

By the late 1870s, Kentucky legislators recognized that the system of reporting developed by the nominative reporters had become so regularized that it could be absorbed into the (still undersized) machinery of state government. In 1878 a new law was passed that put the printing of reports in the hands of the public printer and retained copyright for the state. The existing nominative reports (including the much criticized Sneed’s Decisions and Thomas B. Monroe’s legally questionable second volume) were renumbered volumes 1–77 of the new Kentucky Reports. They soon faced an aggressive national competitor, West’s South Western Reporter, established in 1886. By the 1950s, the South Western Reporter had become so preferred that the state discontinued the official Kentucky Reports. Today, the Westlaw Next database contains all Kentucky case law from Hughes through the South Western Reporter.