Traveling the beaten trail
Subtitle: Charles Tait's charges to federal grand juries, 1822-1825
By: Paul M. Pruitt, Jr., David I. Durham and Salley E. Hadden
Contributors: Durham, David I.; Hadden, Sally E.; Bounds Law Library
Series: Occasional publications of the Bounds Law Library -- number eight; Occasional publications of the Bounds Law Library -- no. 8
Publisher: University of Alabama School of Law
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Language: eng
Number of pages: 120
Subjects: Judges; Biography; Legislators; Instructions to juries; Jury instructions
Other titles: Charles Tait's charges to federal grand juries, 1822-1825
Description: "Charles Tait is one of those fascinating figures of the Old Southwest. Like Harry Toulmin, his most distinguished predecessor in dispensing frontier justice, Tait came to Alabama as a Jeffersonian Democrat of long-standing and excellent connections. The world such men came to know was that of plantation socety in embryo. Its leading inhabitants were slaveowners, self-consciously so, but not yet caught up irrevocably in the centrifugal forces that would disrupt the Union. In 1820s Alabama, the federal government spoke to citizens with several voices, perhaps most distinctly through the grand jury addresses of Judge Charles Tait. A very old device of common law tradition, the grand jury insured routine citizen participation in law enforcement. Yet grand jurors during Tait's years on the bench were asked to consider matters far from routine: suppression of the international slave trade, piracy in the Caribbean, security of the U.S. mail and of government records. Traveling the Beaten Trail, the eight of the Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library, will examine Tait's career with particular emphasis upon his delivery of grand jury speeches in 1822, 1824, and 1825, followed by edited transcripts of those speeches. The author/editors conclude with a list of Tait's law library in 1818, just prior to his migration to Alabama". -- PREFACE.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface and acknowledgments; title: Charles Tait : a biographical sketch / Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. and David I. Durham; title: Exhibition, exhortation, example : Judge Tait's antebellum grand jury charges and legal problems on the frontier / Sally E. Hadden; title: 1822 grand jury charge / transcribed by Sarah Elizabeth Kelly; title: 1824 grand jury charge / transcribed by Samantha Chandler; title: 1825 grand jury charge / transcribed by Paul M. Pruitt, Jr.; title: Appendix 1: Facsimile of 1825 grand jury charge; title: Appendix 2: Charles Tait's lawbooks; title: Index