 Well thank you all for coming. We appreciate it. It sounds like an interesting program. Hugh came in one day and presented his book, and Mr. Chetka said if we owned it, which we didn't, unfortunately, so what we do now, and he's offered to do this program and talk about his book and the history of Portland that probably a lot of people don't know about. So anyway, I won't take up any more time. Mr. Hugh McLean. I thought the topic of today's talk is a book I wrote a few years ago, and I wrote it from 4th Floor 245 Commercial Street. You might recognize some of the establishments. It doesn't change in 200 years. That was in 1892, and you may recognize some of the places. Dewey's is on the corner there, Union Street and Commercial Street, and this was an excellent place to write this book, Our Main History, because I thought it was part of the history just being in there, as I do in this facility here, which predated the state of Maine, I understand. In 1820, Maine became a state. In this organization, the Maine Charitable Mechanical Association is one of the oldest and longest historically speaking buildings and institutions in the state of Maine, and you can see from the pictures behind me an incredibly important facility it was then. We forget about the movers and shakers. We're often these folks here. There were the architects and designers and engineers and fabricators of equipment and buildings, and really building this great city, which is here today. It's just incredible. You may have found the stairs sort of narrow coming up, and the elevator sort of narrow, but it's basically kept the original facility the way it was, and I understand that upstairs is even more remarkable. Isn't that true, Pat? It is, too. And that was the major hall and that kind of thing, and out front is one of the major halls. I asked Pat, are there going to be enough chairs? Of course, there are probably for today, but she said, no problem. If a bunch of people come in, we'll get them from neighbors and this kind of thing. It was kind of nice. She said these people will step up and help her with that, so I just didn't worry about it anymore. I thought I'd introduce my wife Barbara, who is acknowledged in the book in the beginning. Introduced Harry Pringle, I already have, our managing partner of our firm of Drummond Woodson, otherwise known as Drummond Woodson and McMahon, and I would thanks also to all the members of my firm who helped me with the providing facilities, the capacity through internet research, and so forth. They dig into basically 200 years of main law, going back that far and bringing it up. I could not have done it without the firm's help, and I appreciate it, and this is why I acknowledged Dick and Harry in the book and could not have been done without them. It could not have been done also without the encouragement of Frank Coffin, the late and great Frank Coffin, who was a chief judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeals for the U.S. Court of Appeals, and lived in South Portland. He had a great interest in this history and told me that I had a duty. Now that I've written it, he says, you have to get it out there and not just the lawyers. Make sure you get it out there to historians, anybody that's interested in history, because you've got 200 years of social history here, told through these court decisions, no one has ever done it before, and you've brought this all to life. So this maybe feel like I'd actually accomplished something as I got to the end of it, because you get a perspective. It gets kind of like you're grinding away, writing something up on the computer, and all of a sudden this is a great judge. He's probably regarded as one of the great judges of the 20th century, and certainly in the federal judiciary, and Judge McCusek, who also signed on to the back of this, these were my great encouragers. And if you're going to write anything and do anything, I find you really need to have encouragers. So anybody that started out to do something now, I really encourage them, do it, because it's not going to be all the time to do it, and you may as well just get it done, and you have to encourage them. And Dick was a great help. Dick said, this is going to be a classic. All I had to hear is the word classic, I know that I'd done something. Thank you, Dick. Let's hope so, or not. So thank you all. As you can see, this picture hasn't changed much at all. That's not me, by the way, walking across there. That's some poor soul probably going back to his shop to do something. But it might have been me if I was back then. I can't say enough about the firm, and Judge Coffin and Judge McCusek, they're just incredible what they've done. I was almost at the point of getting in shape to show it to Judge McCusek, and he showed it to me, he said, we should definitely do this. So what do you need other than that? And the point was no one had done it before. This is a first, and it's a, it turned out to be my contribution to the community, and to the greater Portland, and hopefully beyond. What have I done here in this book? I started out, as I was getting ready to retire, I was coming down to the end of, I, getting down to the end of my time with the firm, and I was going to be retiring, and I had a little extra time, and I thought I would go back and look at the, look at the cases. Beginning with the earliest days of Maine in 1820, when Maine became a state, a separate state from Massachusetts in 1820, and go back to the first cases, and I pulled the book off the shelf, and it was there, dust covered, blew it off, and started reading from page one right on through. And I looked at the cases, and pretty soon I realized I better get some notes here. I started taking notes. I got a big folder, you know, the three-ring deals that have large clamps on them. I put the cases in there, summaries of my work, and pretty soon I had about 50 different categories, topics of law, from everything from the rights of women, to the rights of the poor, to the rights of corporations, to the rights of the railroad, and all of this in there, I had all of these topics, and then I slotted my summaries of these cases in there, and it took an awful long time. I would bring the books home to a day and try to read them at night. I think you may remember, my wife I'm sure remembers this, I'd be sitting there, and what are you doing reading books again, and I would be reading these old law books, and I found these old cases, and I found these are interesting. They may be about horses, and they may be about this and that, but the same themes that we deal with today are all in those early cases, and we've come out a little bit different in the way we look at these things, but they were all there, and I got this whole body of law, and fortunately one of my partners came in and said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm almost up to 100 years. He says, why don't you stop there? I said, I think I will. I was getting tired, so I stopped at 100 years, but then of course, law being what it is, you don't want to leave a false impression. So if any of the cases I had referred to in the book, in the next 100 years had changed, been overruled, and so forth, I had updated it. And I did that in the book, so it says a ramble through the early years of main law, 1820 to 1920, but in fact, it's pretty much up to date, generally speaking, in terms of coming into the end of the 20th century. So that's the background on that. Some of the topics I covered in there were poppers. That jumped out at me immediately. The poor people, the poppers, the indigent, who were treated like they were nobody really. They were just told to, I was thinking the relevancy of that one today, when you see the people walking around in these intersections and begging for money. It's certainly timely even today that people that don't have money have to find money somewhere. And with the way the main court treated those folks back then, it's covered in here. Railroad accidents, of course, railroads, huge. First it was animals and agriculture, and then you come into the middle of the 19th century, all of a sudden you almost feel the trains coming. And I have several train pictures in the back of this book. I brought a few extra copies if anybody wants one. The train coming in was just an amazing thing coming into a community. It'd be like having a jet aircraft building plant come in, or like in Seattle, having a Boeing plant right here in Augusta. And all of a sudden you see airplanes that are as high as 10 stories high coming into your community. These were trains coming in that were three stories high. An engineer would be up somewhere above the ceiling. These were massive engines and massive works that people had prepared to really develop and industrialize the country. And they took over wherever they were. They were the, and still are, really major contributors to the economy. Public schools, I get into that because I spent a lot of my career representing school districts and that kind of thing. And there's cases in here about corporal punishment which used to be allowed, but no longer is. And interesting, I was just reading the other day a case in the Supreme Court of the United States where some kids in Alaska were engaged in some, they had some drug paraphernalia and they were told to knock it off. And the case went up to the Supreme Court. The school board won the case. But the point that Clarence Thomas was making, and I think maybe another judge was that these kids can't, we can't give these kids all these rights in school. You go to school, you go to school to learn, you don't go to school to tell the principal what you want to do. And this is basically what the main court had said. And he quotes this very case that I have spent several pages of my book on. He quoted the same thing from that case, that the object of the schools is to instruct the youngsters in moral conditions and treat them to, teach them to be good citizens. And of course, you can see today, if we ever get away from that, what the courts may have been right then, I don't think it necessarily makes sense to have the children in the school at whatever age maybe telling the teachers how they're going to spend their day and what they're going to do with their free time when they're on school time and that kind of thing. So this is still up for grabs. The Supreme Court has given a lot of rights to students in terms of free speech and probably in some respects, it's right. But in some respects, it may not be right and the history is still playing out. All of this, we're in current history now. 100 years from now, people will be writing about these cases and they'll be asking, how could they have been so right or how could they have been so wrong? And that's what keeps me interested in this thing is to really, when you see the cases in the book, it looks in some respects as to why court was really hard headed and really tough to the point that we would think it was unfair. And you wonder how that happened, but you go back and you can understand how they felt. They were building an economy here. They were trying to build up a state. Maine was at the end of the line. We had to have corporations empowered to develop this state the industry had to be there. And yet at the same time, it was unfair in some respects, at least it seems that way today, but to the employees. So I make the point in the beginning of this book that if I was back there in those days, I probably would have made the same decisions they do, but I'm operating under 2020 hindsight. But I'm operating under 2020 hindsight. But if I don't make, if I don't state my opinions in the book, I don't think I've done justice to it. I owe it to people that are my readers to hear my opinion, because I've researched it. If they want to reject my opinions, that's fine. I'm not trying to sell them on my opinions, but I'm trying to get them thinking. That's my only object. This this book then ended up with some 330 p 33 pages of text, 23 pages of photographs, 247 cases mentioned in there. It became quite a thing. And it became like, I gotta get, I gotta stop this thing at some point and pull it together. So that's what I finally did. And the firm was very helpful in this, helping me pull us all of this information together and produce this book that I think is a value to the, to the state. And it's a contribution to the bookshelf that says history of main law. It's the first book in there. But there it is. Some have written about parts of main law. And judges, they've written about judges. But this, this does report to be a coverage of the law per say. And as Judge Crawford on the back said, he was kind enough to say it was a remarkable first. So he was pleased with it. And that made my I was going to say day made my year, I'm sure. When I did this book, I had to refer to the early main law, you know, if you're going to be critical of something, it's not a very diplomatic to be overtly critical. So I don't want to be critical of the Kermit judiciary. And more than I have to be an attorney and not being my desire to offend. But it would not be candid if I didn't take shots, if you will, or take opinions at the early main court where I felt in retrospect, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, it's warranted. So the summer could learn something about what I thought. Judge Coffin also felt strongly was very important to get this out to the what he called the general reader, history buff, that kind of person. I think all of those people would be interested in this book. And particularly people that are interested, family members thinking, maybe I'll go into law, maybe I'll study history, that kind of thing. I tell people this to make the perfect Christmas present. Because it's the book I wanted. When I started looking back, I wanted this book to be available for me at many, many times during my practice. That give me some idea of what came before I came in. It wasn't it wasn't there. And not that it's complete and comprehensive and to the entire, it's selective. But it is a book and gives you some, some idea of the past. I should also explain at the beginning, I'm almost getting to the end, I'm just in the beginning with the common laws. If anyone heard of the common law, the common law is basically judge made law. There's the statutory law made up by the legislature, made by the legislature in Augusta. And then it's the common law which is court decisions. They hand down court decisions. They look kind of like this. And there are words on them and they are decided, they decide the case, here's the decision, here's the reason. And that's what is that case has been decided. That is a precedent for future cases and it becomes part of the body, thousands of cases of what is known as the court made law or the common law. And that's what I'm dealing with in this book, more than I am with legislation and statutes. How did the main court handle the whole question of slavery in the period leading up leading up to the civil war and during the civil war? Okay. The main court dealt directly with this problem of slavery. It so happened that in 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States, in what is widely regarded as a misguided opinion, ruled by majority Justice Tawny, the 77th or two decision, ruled that blacks, African Americans, basically slaves could not be citizens. And even if slaves were released from slavery, they could not be citizens. Basically black immigrants from Africa, even if released from slavery could not be citizens. There were not citizens in the ID eyes of the US Supreme Court. It's considered one of the worst turns, if you will, the court ever took. But there it is. And it came directly to the state of Maine, surprisingly enough, because the Maine Constitution says if you want to vote in Maine, you have to be a US citizen. And here we have the Supreme Court in Washington saying that blacks cannot be US citizens. First of all, the legislature in Maine really got offended by that decision and said that it was a terribly wrong decision. It was a case that it was a decision that denied, went against the grain of all people that believed in freedom and equality, that it was a disastrous decision and one that they didn't have to even think about a bang. But they wanted our court, our Supreme Court, to give them its opinion, an advisory opinion, as to whether under Maine law, the blacks in Maine, there were a number of blacks in Maine and whether they could vote. Because here we have the Supreme Court saying blacks can't be citizens of the United States on the one hand. And we have the Maine Constitution saying that to vote you have to be a citizen of the United States. So this went before our court. There were, I think, eight members on the court at that time. And they all came down with one exception, saying that they were not going to be following that decision because it didn't affect the meaning of the word citizen of the United States as that word is used in the Maine Constitution. It may affect the meaning of the phrase citizen of the United States as used in the US Constitution, but not the Maine Constitution. So it could be said they sidestepped that by just saying it really doesn't apply to us because we're dealing with the Maine Constitution. And we interpret the Maine Constitution, thank you, and there's a clear history in the Maine Constitution that when the Maine Constitution was being put together, probably right down the street from where the building is, when this building was in operation, someone made a motion that they exclude blacks from voting in Maine. And the chairman of the drafting committee, Holmes, he said that's not the way it is at all. God made no difference between us and the blacks and whites and our Constitution didn't matter. We're not going to go there with that. And we've always been a free state. In fact, we came in as a free state. So our court had nothing but bad, nothing but a good decision. They had a good decision. They disagreed with the US Supreme Court, but they didn't really have to take issue with them because they were saying that as far as we're concerned, under the Maine Constitution, their citizens of the United States can be, even though they may not be under the US Constitution, but they didn't have to deal with the US Constitution because the legislature asked them about voting in Maine. Now two members of our court really were so offended by this. And one of them was, this is my new, I got a picture of him for this event or for other events. That's the great John Appleton, probably the most famous judge in America in the middle of the 20th century, right here in Maine, a Bangor boy. He was on the court for some 36 years and really a truly great judge. He's the one that spearheaded the whole motion of letting defendants and criminal cases testify. If you were charged with a crime in those days, you couldn't testify because they didn't trust you. And he, they, they didn't, you couldn't testify. I mean, it seems incredible. But Appleton went overseas, he went over here, he went around, he wrote a book on this. It's in the Maine State Library, on evidence, Appleton on evidence. I found it up there, it's right on the shelf. And he was credited, it's in the book, by the US Supreme Court, Appleton of Maine, having done this great work. And nowadays, no one even knows about it, the sad thing. So my job is to bring this all out. He is a great judge. He sometimes got it wrong, if you will, from our 20th century perspective. But but a great guy said, he said, it's worth noting what he said. This is, this whole research, transformry, and this is part of it. So you can't read this history and going back to Jefferson. And here's what Appleton said, the equality of all before the law is the elementary principle of our institutions. He had a way of stating this. The equality of all before the law is the elementary principle of our institutions. He said, the Constitution of Maine recognizes this fundamental idea, the great principle upon all, which all popular governments rest, the equality of all before the law. It confers citizenship and entire equality of civil and political rights upon all its native born population. The fact that someone may have been a slave, maybe emancipated as a slave, obviously, certainly if you've been emancipated, you're not like a slave. And when you're able to walk around and go to the polls, anyone in name, black or good folk. He said, the people of this state, and he was, I think enjoying getting this down, because you know, these judges don't get a chance to make decisions whenever they want to. They have to wait, some say like an oyster, waiting at the bottom of the sea for a case to drift by, that they can grab. Otherwise, they have a party. Why a life? Oh, I'm going to be a judge in all these exciting cases. You may not. You may wait a long time. It just so happened that he was the Chief Justice and one of the great writers and judges. Where is he? Right here. Still there. Distinguished looking, that's for sure. And he said, the people of this state and constitution assembled formed a constitution based on principle of the purest democracy, making no distinctions and giving no preferences, but resting on the great idea of equality before the law. The fundamental idea of the main constitution is equality of all before the law. And this turned out to me to be the most and it really changed my thinking about politics and everything. You can't read these things and not be transformed. And in addition to the great Appleton, we have Judge Davis, Woodbury Davis, who also has a picture in the book. It's in with the rest of them. Woodbury Davis said this is appalling. He was really saddened by what they'd done in Washington with that decision that he couldn't believe what they had said. The great Davis, I don't want to refer to the book too much. I try not to take me in court to judge us. Where in the record do you find that? You don't want to have to look around for it. I'd have it in my head, of course. The great Davis. He said, and this is a lot like Lincoln-esque. Because at the same time that the main court was getting back to the legislature with its opinion on these issues. It's incredibly important issues. Same time the main court was getting back from Abraham Lincoln was reading the decision. And Abraham Lincoln read the Dred Scott decision, which looked at what we're talking about, the Supreme Court said by majority that blacks could not be citizens. Lincoln wrote that he said he could not believe us. It was not, in his view, a very persuasive precedent. He didn't want to come to the point of saying he was going to disregard it, but he certainly said the Supreme Court has reversed itself before and we're going to see that it does again. We're not going to stand. And Davis was saying this. He says freedom are the privileged classes and equality among themselves. While trampling on the rights of others was no new thing, the world did not need to be informed of it. That's not the Declaration of Independence was all about. It was not to do that. He says if that was all the Declaration of Independence was doing, it wouldn't have merited the respect of mankind. It would not have justified a revolution. It would not have justified Washington. It would not have justified the Revolutionary War and their toil, sacrifice, and blood would have been in vain. He says he is so wrong on this. He says, but it was not so. It was not that. He says the Declaration of Independence was a heroic utterance of great truths for all men, meaning men and women I think today, so understood by the world and so intended by its authors they freely devoted fortune, honor, and life to sustain it. And then he goes on and he says the idea that one group of people can basically dump on another group of people and say we're going to be citizens and you guys aren't. It's so offensive to him. He says the worst enemy of our institutions could hardly say anything better to blacken the character of our ancestors. He said the idea that one group of people can lord it over another group of people and say we're citizens and you are not citizens. He said it would be just as legitimate to inquire what the African race intended to admit the whites to the privilege of citizenship. I mean it just didn't buy the thing. They all resided together, whatever their disparity in numbers and so forth. He says such a right to declare one of them, one group of people non-citizens, such a right does not exist under any free government. And he was so appalled by this. He says these assertions and doctrines need only to be stated in order to be rejected. So the great Davis, and I do make a point in here that we only have to imagine to appreciate the significance of Davis and Appleton, really taking on the Supreme Court on these questions. We need only imagine a gaping hole that would be left in the history of Maine law if the injustice of Taney's decision had been allowed to go unchallenged by any member of the court. I say this is a high point in the history of our Supreme Court. I was not aware of this research until I got into this project. I dare say many lawyers are not aware of it. And I dare say many people that are litigating in the courts aren't aware of it. But to me this is the kind of thing that you read through all of this, you have a completely different view of the law whether it's civil rights or whatever. You just see what these great people were doing in terms of charting out the rights for all of us citizens and making this hopefully the kind of community we want to be proud of, be proud of. Now there was one member of the court just half the way. He said he didn't go along with this. He's going to go along with Taney. He said I don't agree with that. We want to have a uniform rule of national citizenship. And he couldn't persuade anyone to his viewpoint. And I spent a little bit of time before I decided how to deal with this and put in there, put in this book. Hathaway found no support for his view that Taney was going to control what happened in May. He found no support for that view from his colleagues on the court and with the passage of time his opinion has fared no better. Considered from the perspective of the present day, everything's through 2020 hindsight. And I'm doing that. I don't have to benefit. I would have made the same decision some of these other people did back then. But with the benefit of hindsight, Hathaway's willingness to disenfranchise Maine's free black residents who were descendants of slaves which in practical effect would be to establish a race-based caste system that got two categories of people, whites and blacks. Blacks would be non-citizens. They could walk around, they just couldn't vote. They wouldn't be like slaves. They just, they were freed but they wouldn't, they're just, you know, in between. This is what would be the result, the race-based caste system that stands out, that stands out from the pages of Maine's legal history as a radical misjudgment that betrays the ideals of liberty and equality in a democratic society. And then I want further. It's all the more incredible and all the more misguided for Hathaway to have pronounced that opinion because if truth be known, Maine was the only state in the union. And this has been established by scholars that at that time by James Kent in his early commentaries on the law in the 19th century. And Tawney even cited this in his decision that Maine's the only state in the union where blacks were treated with complete equality. So why having, even Tawney having said that, Hathaway felt he had to disenfranchise them, we'd have to find out. He felt so strongly in terms of uniformity and a universal rule for the country that he was unwilling to take issue with Tawney. But Appleton and the rest of them, and Davis and the rest of our court said they were not going to go along with that so that the rights of blacks were secured by the Maine court. It's a great high point I think in the history of our Supreme Court to stand tall for the equality of rights for all our citizens. And it should be known I think. When you're finishing this I have a question. You used the word that writing this book transformed. It did it transformed me. Could you elaborate? Right. You cannot, it transformed me. See if I can explain that to you. I read the Declaration of Independence on this Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self evident at all. I'm going to create it equal and endowed by the creator, the certain nonalienable rights all were created equal. Basically the king we don't have kings. We don't have people that are up there down here they weren't born into it all or created equal. The main constitution starts off right out of the gate unlike our Supreme Court like our federal constitution which starts off by saying this is how we're going to govern. The executive will do this, the legislature it's basically allocating the powers of the various three parts of the government. Legislative judicial and executive. The main constitution starts off with a declaration of rights. It basically constitutionalizes the Declaration of Independence and that's what I put that in the book. It's a very liberal and provides a basis for a lot of lawyers and a lot of citizenry to perhaps eke out a few rights that they might not be able to find in the Supreme Court under the federal constitution. When it came into this union it became Ian after many years of trying to get in it became Ian as a free state as part of the Missouri, so-called Missouri Compromise. It was a very important event and Maine was a free state. From the get-go from the beginning the Maine Court started talking about equality. In one case where someone wanted to get a special deal cut for them in Augusta and the Supreme Court said no look we boasted we operate under a system of laws but that cannot be a valid boast unless we apply the great principle we should be mindful of the great principle of equality of constitutional equality. In this other case the Donoho case, well let's call it the red scot in the opinion of the justices on red scot. I have just discussed Lincoln's speech on red scot where he was against it and he said that he said that it was a misguided decision and then we have Lincoln and Gettysburg forescore in seven years a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Then we have a civil war which cut a great ripping through the nineteenth century of everything in this country and thousands were killed and massacred and died prison camps and death in that horror of war and then we have Lincoln at Gettysburg forescore in seven years. So all men are created equal? What was the court saying about women at this point? The court was not saying anything about women at this point. That's a good point, Harry. The court was basically the main court was divided on women. Thanks for asking that question because that does bring up. Mr. Dickerson, that picture there next to you. Dickerson is the only one who said it's just, well, the question came up this way. The legislature asked the court, can women be judges? Can they be justices of the piece? We've got to process these applications so women apparently want to do these things. And it went to the court. The court by five to two to one. Five said, and including apathy, who just ruled on the blacks, he said women it's a different case. Women were not part of this state when it was founded. They were not voting on the separation from Massachusetts. They aren't mentioned as being entitled to be judges. And the Massachusetts court had just ruled that women could not be judges. And the main court said, no, women can't be judges by vote of five. There were two others on there that said, wait a minute. He doesn't say they can't be. The main constitution says to say they can't be. So maybe they can be. In fact, that's the way we're going to end up beside. So you had five to two. And then you had Dickerson, this scholarly judge, Colby graduate, from Belfast. He came in and said, I got to tell you, he says you guys are missing it. You guys went right back to Brett Scott. He says there's no question that women can be. They should be. They must be on our court. And probably one of the great decisions was the dissenting opinion, the great dissenting opinions of all time, right up there with some of the great ones in the Supreme Court. This gentleman from Maine deserves, like Appleton did in another case, a seat in the Hall of Fame, because he said this is definitely something that should be allowed. He says women should definitely be on there and he was about 100 years ahead of his time because we had Supreme Court judges in Washington saying women should stay home. They're supposed to be in the domestic sphere. They are not supposed to be out and just get off of this. We don't want women being judges. This is what the Supreme Court's attitude was at the time in Washington. And you have this Dickerson from Belfast there. Dickerson is saying, hold on guys, it was really a heroic thing he did to take issue with the Supreme Court and get out there with this view of his. He used the same years later in the Supreme Court when there was a question about there, blacks could be separated but equal, separate but equal. The Supreme Court said in 1890, blacks could be separated but equal. They could be separate but equal. There was a dissenting opinion by a guy named Harlan, John Harlan. And he said that this is not right. It was whether separate but equal he said it's basically putting down blacks. We don't have a caste system in this country. We don't have it. We have all people are equal. And I think he may have taken some of the language of that particular decision which is considered a great, this is Harlan in Washington with the Supreme Court. I think he may have taken some of his wording of that. From the earlier opinions, Dickerson on women's rights in Maine. And I've asked the students if they want to go research. I tried to find out myself. I got lost in some state box that someone had found in some of the early writings of Harlan. I'll let someone else look it up. But it's an excellent question. So the Supreme Court of Maine was very solid in the protection of blacks as we've covered. When it got to the question whether women could be judges, they kind of like didn't stand up there for the rights of women. Well, with all of them, it was like five to three. And one of them was very strong, fair with the rights of women. But they were basically doing, I think, what was standard at that time. It would have been remarkable that women didn't, a lot of women didn't feel they were discriminated against. They were in the lot as we could see it today. But he wasn't going to jump right out there on that one. And, yep. I think he was the father of Franny Appleton, who was Longfellow's wife. She was very learned. I don't think... I don't know if that's true or not. I know this. Longfellow's wife, Franny Appleton, died in that tragic fire. Right. She burned in Cambridge. Longfellow has a history to it. Different person. They're related. I don't think that's true. Yeah. But this was one of, probably Maine's most famous judge. I think in the 20th century when that's written, Judge McCusek would be right up there. Still living down cables of us. And he's one of the founders of at least the present version of Pierce Atwood. And I mentioned him previously. He's in my book as I considered him such a good help to me in his work. What was the worst decision you encountered in the whole thing other than the ones you've mentioned? The worst decision was, I think, the case of a woman who married this guy and became pregnant and had a falling out with him and got a divorce. Now in those days, she couldn't... got an abortion. She had a first fall. She had a divorce. Then she had an abortion. The abortion was done by a friend of her, X's, where he actually restrained her. This is post-divorce. Held her down while her husband's, ex-husband's friend performed an abortion. They didn't call it an abortion, they called it an abortion. It's another word for an abortion. It was an abortion. Miscarriage. Miscarriage. He said in the court, the decision says, by using instruments unknown, I guess, you know, something he used. And it caused her great pain. It caused her great injury, she said. These were her allegations. And she took this claim into the main court. After her divorce, she sued this guy and done it. She couldn't sue her husband or her husband after the marriage because according to the Supreme Court of Maine in the 19th century, a woman was not allowed, or her husband, to sue the other party during marriage. Divorce, maybe, but not a lawsuit. And, our court said, the parties to a marriage, once it's dissolved through divorce, are forever unable to bring suits against each other. They didn't want anything to disturb the stability of a marriage. That's what they said. That's why they didn't want the parties to a marriage to start suing each other. And they thought that it would be undermined if they could get out of a marriage and then start suing each other. So they said, no. They said, you have to pull the curtains on the marriage and leave things as they are. And that's the way it is. Then they even went so far, this is where I think it's the worst decision, they went so far as to say that after the marriage, the ex could not sue the other. And nor could she sue the person who was asked by her ex to perform this. She could not sue him. That somehow he was cloaked with the same immunity that the husband was. There's no reason for that. It's like this convoluted idea. So in order to protect the sanctity of marriage, there's the steps they put. You cannot sue a wife during the marriage. You could not sue, I mean husband or wife after marriage. And you cannot sue anybody that performs wrong on you at your ex-husband's verging. I mean it's like, you've got a hit man, or hit man, to shoot your wife. This was the old way of looking at things. I want to make clear, that's not allowed. That would get you, don't do this. I'll give you history here. But someone asked for the worst case. And I think I covered that case in the book. In fact, I know I did. And I said, if anything is designed to make people not want to get married, to discourage marriage, it's that case. So think of the irony. In order to encourage marriage, they tell people, you'll get married to be fine. You won't be able to sue each other. I'm willing to go on with that maybe. But you've got to realize even if you after you get divorced, you cannot sue your husband. I'm so in love I'll go on with that at the time. But they never tell you, if your husband tries to cause you damage by using your party, you can't sue that person then. That I think is my it's right up there with probably some of them. It was not my job to find cases that I thought were out of line with the present day. But I come across these cases. This ought to be in my book because it's in the chapter on women's rights and I cover that extensively all of the issues involving women's rights, women's witnesses, divorce and everything else and the rights of women which are so different from the way they are today in this book. Before I wrap this up, anyone have any questions right now? I have one question here. Go ahead. What was the worst labor condition case that you ran into? The worst labor condition case I think was there were many of them. It was the woman aged 59 plus who had worked in this milldown in Bideford who had a do-it-job required to pick bobbins up which were used in the making of woven products. She had to pick these bobbins up under this spinning thing under a dowel, a metal dowel that spun at 280 rpm, 280 revolutions per minute. That's pretty fast. Even in the 19th century that was fast. And she'd been there working for years and there was screws on that, set screws they called and they connected this, they called it a dowel. It was a rod of some kind that got her into the machine and then you know what happened of course so she went down it was something it was so obvious it was dangerous. She caught her hair in it and the way the court describes this she was scalped. It's scalped her. And I get it pretty good if what it is I don't even want to go into detail on it but she sued the company and the main court said the risk of that would happen was so obvious and then the conclusion was not that they should never have allowed her to have that job it was so obvious that she should not have allowed that to happen to her hair. So she was blamed for that. That was life in the mill was in those days and I have all the pictures but some of the pictures of the youngsters and most of them in the mills you can see that Because juveniles were treated no better. Juveniles were treated no better. They got them in early because they could get a family if you had eight kids you might bring them in under 14 I think it was you could bring in ten if you were bringing your kids you had a chance of getting enough to pay for your food if you know whatever basic nourishment. So these were hard times in the mills look at these kids they're barefoot running around it's very dangerous is anything they're probably acquiring all kinds of difficulties by working in that mill and the Lewisson Library let me make these and I have another one that seemed to be misplaced both the women in the mills so this was another world the other one was a yeah, question Pat I just wanted you to touch briefly on the case you mentioned that related to the ice cutting industry Ice cutting yes in the ice cutting industry well the ice cutting industry was a risky business because during the time of the ice cutting or particularly on the large rivers ice cutting was done everywhere because there was no way of refrigerating products so Maine had a huge business a wonderful seasonal business once the woods were closed and people couldn't work in the woods they turned to ice and ice was harvested and major numbers out of the sabbatical leg it was harvested in the Kennedbeck right up through Augusta there in that region Gardner and Bowdenham and all of that it was favored because it was hard it would last longer it was colder in the spring it would still be good whereas the Massachusetts ice was getting softer and horses were falling through the river from time to time and into the water and of course if you lose your horse you'd be like having your car your truck and your pickup and everything else so these ended up in litigation and the court had to craft out this law that would govern whose rights on the rivers like that and it's mentioned in here it's mentioned it's no longer I think one or two places still do ice cutting small little operations but it's not a big deal right now because once the refrigeration came online ice cutting was no longer needed and it was not a good thing to invest in I think people probably get out of solar stock at that point once refrigerated but at the time it shows how in the cases that came up show how the court was dealing with these I've only covered the small part there's no spare because I've got to go any longer but I wanted to mention this one that you may have heard of the Dono case a 15 year old girl who was a Catholic up in Elseworld wanted to read the Bible which was required reading was considered a textbook in the school and she wanted to read it in the Catholic version the Dewey version she said in the King James version of the Bible and the schoolboy said no you've got to read our version she said later I don't have some protection here and they said no so again applicant I think he got this one wrong if you will by our standards today but he said we can't have this has been a textbook it's a textbook we can't have kids depicting our textbooks that's an argument but it's a different kind of textbook it happens to be a religious holy book of the Christian religion and Protestant religion and the Catholic religion and why couldn't they have given her an option to opt out and maybe read her version and that became a constant lever which is dealt with extensively in my book and it involved a huge fracas between the powers that be in the town of Ellsworth this was a dark chapter in their history and the Catholic minister a priest down there who wanted to read the duet version and they ultimately the townspeople a bunch of bullies got together and tried and feathered this priest and left him out in the dock somewhere and he became quite a martyr and ultimately became the first president of Boston College I believe that and I was a lot of time I spent wondering how could this be because I didn't want to put that in there this is how could this guy become the president of Boston College such people don't look at that I checked it out you can check it out and there's a library down there the John Bap's library there's John Bap's school those places he became quite a national figure and this all grew out of a very hateful time and the main court by today's standards got that one wrong but here's the good news in each of these areas race have always recovered the main stance of town always has race, religion and women's rights as far as women's rights women's rights today have all come out in favor of the development of more equality for women so that it's virtually impossible to justify any discrimination against women and so blacks and women there's a black president it's incredible based on what Connie was saying back there and I'm glad our main court stood tall and that one blacks women and in terms of religion the Supreme Court in 1983 recently you see Bridget Donahoe was this 15 year old girl in Ellsworth she was 150 years ago she was told no she has to read this book and she refused her and she thrown out of school and she lost her case but her argument she was making was like I say in this book a smoldering ember that kept going there was truth in what she was saying there was power in it and that ultimately ended up prevailing in the Supreme Court so in each of these areas race, religion and gender the good news is that out of all of this out of the civil war out of all these various precedents the good news is that the power of equality the irrepressible power of civil justice the irrepressible power of food not favoring one group the power of equality was so strong that in each of these areas it ultimately triumphed that's what I mean to transform me I couldn't look around anymore without being transformed by this and then you'd have Martin Luther King Martin Luther King in Montgomery he's out there preaching to his people and he says it will not be one they say how long? he says it won't be long we're going to get this he says how long? truth pressed earth shall rise again he says they say how long? there's a great speech how long? it's called truth pressed earth shall rise again and he also said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice so this is important to note because it affects how you look at your surroundings how you look at the state how you look at your people my only hope is that lawyers particularly and people historians just as particularly will read some of this in here and find this because it's not anywhere else it's not anywhere else and be informed by that and be transformed as I end the book I gave it to Judge Coffin my script, my pages he said I like this but he says you need to have a conclusion I said well I have a conclusion I need more of a conclusion just a code of some kind summarizes your whole thing and I worked on it just before I went over to see my ed this last sentence I think we liked it it says here it would be unrealistic to expect courts to be the dynamo that drives change at the cutting edge of each and every new development in the ongoing evolution of society yet that being said and looking back over the entire history of main law some of the most inspiring judicial opinions from that era are those that invoke the irrepressible power of simple justice in the face of lingering inequalities of rights reminding us down through the years that justice remains the gold of which all will have to aspire and once you've been in the in the books reading this all these people all coming at you these victims of this and that these people that were doing this and that over 200 years you really begin to see the history it's like a DNA it remains a historical outlook it's driving it's moving the arc of justice is the line but it as Martin Luther King said the moral justice may be the line but it's bending the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice and with that I'd rather leave you there I'm Martin Luther King I hope that answers your you just can't see things the same way after you've been through 200 years of main law my hope is that lawyers particularly others also anyone interested in history will go through the same experience I had by looking at some of these cases I wrote this book so it was readable I think by non-lawyers you can ignore the footnotes and you can also start in the beginning the first introduction preface it just talks about how maybe my wife got started on some of this and you can go to the final chapter and you can fill in chapters you want to read in between as you're so moved and you don't have to read the whole thing it's not that kind of history book you have to start in the first page you read on the page of the history it's all by tropics so it's pretty readable 30 tropics only about 10 pages each at most so there you go thank you for your time