Author Description

Kent, William. Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, L.L.D. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898. x, 341 pp. Reprinted 2001 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 00-026688. ISBN 1-58477-100-3. Cloth. $75. * Kent's great-grandson William has collected James Kent's memoirs and selected letters in one of "the chief sources of information on James Kent." Hicks, Dictionary of American Biography V:347. His own words reveal Kent as a man of wide learning and literary acumen, gathered here in his views on the Federalist cause, secession, the political situation in Europe, his love of literature, his admiration for Alexander Hamilton and Washington Irving, his career before and on the bench, his life as chancellor, and his correspondence regarding the Commentaries. "Next to my wife, my library has been the source of my greatest pleasure and devoted attachment," he wrote in 1828. (DAB V:347). Included here are notes penned in some of his volumes. Of special interest are the notes that he wrote in Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman and Tucker's Life of Jefferson. Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 1103.