CRANCH, WILLIAM
“IT OFTEN HAPPENS THAT THE PRISONER SEEKS TO PALLIATE HIS CRIME BY THE PLEAS OF INTOXICATION; AS IF THE VOLUNTARY ABANDONMENT OF REASON . . . WERE NOT, OF ITSELF, AN OFFENSE SUFFICIENT TO MAKE HIM RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL ITS CONSEQUENCES.“ —WILLIAM CRANCH
William Cranch served as a federal judge for more than five decades, and was also reporter of decisions for the SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES from 1801 to 1815.
Cranch was born July 17, 1769, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. His father, Richard
Cranch, was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature and judge of the court of COMMON PLEAS, and his mother, Mary Cranch, was the sister of Abigail Adams, wife of the future president JOHN ADAMS. Educated privately in his
early life, Cranch entered Harvard in 1784 and
graduated with honors in 1787. He then studied
law in Boston and was admitted to the Massa-
chusetts bar in 1790. He subsequently practiced
law briefly, first in Braintree,Massachusetts, and
then in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
In 1791, Cranch moved to Washington,
D.C., to become a legal agent for a real estate
firm that made large and speculative invest-
ments in the city based on the municipality’s
recent selection to be the nation’s capital. The
venture later proved to be financially disastrous,
and Cranch was financially ruined as a result of
its collapse. In 1800, John Adams, by then presi-
dent, came to Cranch’s rescue by appointing
him a commissioner of public buildings for the
District of Columbia. In early 1801, the District
of Columbia Circuit Court was established, and
Adams appointed Cranch an assistant judge of
the court. Cranch was elevated to chief judge in
1805 and served on the court for fifty-four years.
About the same time Cranch became a
judge, the Supreme Court of the United States
moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. ALEXANDER J. DALLAS, who had reported some
of the Court’s decisions on an unofficial and
fairly informal basis during its terms in
Philadelphia, left the position after the Court
relocated, and Cranch, while serving on the circuit
court, became reporter of the Supreme
Court’s decisions in 1802. As reporter, Cranch
assembled and published the Court’s decisions
and then sold them to the public and the practicing
bar. Cranch was not appointed to the
position but took it strictly on his own initiative.
Cranch’s first volume of published opinions
contained the Court’s decisions from 1801 to
1804. Before 1804, the Court’s opinions had not
been readily available to the practicing bar and
were known even less by the general public.
In his preface to his first volume, Cranch
stated that he hoped the publication of the
Court’s decisions would eliminate the “uncertainty
of the law” while also ensuring its consistency.
“Every case decided is a check upon the
judge,” he wrote. “He cannot decide a similar
case differently, without strong reasons, which,
for his own justification, he will wish to make
public. The avenues to corruption are thus
obstructed, and the sources of litigation closed.”
Cranch went on to publish nine volumes in all,
which contained many of the important CONSTITUTIONAL
LAW decisions of the Court when
it was headed by Chief Justice JOHN MARSHALL.
As was the practice during the early days of the
Court, the volumes published by Cranch bear
his name on the spine.
In addition to his duties as Supreme Court reporter, Cranch enjoyed a distinguished career as a federal circuit court judge. He decided United States v. Bollman & Swartwout, 1 Cranch 379, later upheld on appeal to the Supreme Court (80 S. (4 Cranch) 75 [1807]). Bollman was a TREASON case tried against Dr. Justus E. Bollman, Samuel Swartwout, and AARON BURR, who were accused of conspiring to create a new nation in the western United States. In Bollman, Cranch found that, despite popular opinion to the contrary, the arrest of Aaron Burr’s accomplices was not justified because of insufficient evidence. Cranch also wrote a number of papers and articles on legal topics, and in 1817, delivered a series of lectures about his uncle, the president, that was later published as Memoir of the Life, Character, and Writings of John Adams (1827).
Cranch continued as reporter through the
WAR OF 1812. By that time, his own judicial
workload as well as the increasing number of
opinions issued by the Marshall Court caused
him to fall steadily behind schedule, so that
opinions often did not appear in print until long
after they had first been issued by the Court.
Furthermore, though Cranch was credited for
providing the text of lawyers’ arguments and
introducing summaries of the principal points
decided in a case, he was also widely criticized by
members of the bar for his inaccurate and sometimes
obscure notes and annotations. Under
pressure from some members of the Court,
Cranch resigned the reporter’s post, which had
not been financially lucrative for him, and was
replaced in 1815 by HENRY WHEATON, the
Court’s first officially appointed reporter and
the first to be paid a yearly salary.
Cranch continued to serve as judge on the
District of Columbia Circuit Court for another
forty years after leaving the Supreme Court. He
remained active in publishing, assembling and
publishing in 1853 the decisions of his own
court in six volumes. He also wrote other scholarly
and political works, sometimes published
under pseudonyms, until his death in 1855 at
the age of eighty-seven.
FURTHER READINGS
White, Edward G. 1988. The Marshall Court and Cultural
Change, 1815–1835. Vols. 3 and 4, History of the
Supreme Court of the United States, 1815–1835. New
York: Macmillan.
Witt, Elder. 1990. Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court. 2d ed.
Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Legal Publishing.
William Cranch 1769–1855
