Writing the Legal Record: Law Reporters in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky by Kurt X. Metzmeier (review)

Before state agencies and national commercial publishers assumed responsibility for producing case reports, judges and lawyers relied on individual reporters to compile, organize, and publish judicial opinions. These published opinions served as the building blocks of the country's common-law legal rules. In Writing the Legal Record, Kurt X. Metzmeier profiles the thirteen nominative reporters who prepared Kentucky's reports between 1785 and 1880. His study proceeds chronologically, using thorough research in local, state, and family histories supplemented by archival research to tell the stories of the reporters whose work would later be incorporated as the first seventy-seven volumes of the Kentucky Reports.

During the nineteenth century, Kentucky gradually formalized its relationship with the men who compiled its reports. John Hughes, Kentucky's first reporter, privately published a volume of case reports in 1803. His attempt to generate revenue from sales failed and discouraged others from following his path. In an effort to encourage the publication of reports, Kentucky experimented with various arrangements with publishers, settling in 1815 on the creation of an official state office of the reporter charged with publishing reports of the decisions of the Kentucky Court of Appeals (the state's highest court at that time). This arrangement lasted until 1880, when the legislature placed responsibility for publishing reports in the hands of the state's public printer.

Metzmeier's research reveals that Kentucky's reporters were almost all active and successful lawyers, many appearing as representatives of the litigants in the reports they published. George M. Bibb, who argued numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, was the most renown. Kentucky's reporters also served in a variety of local, state, and federal offices as judges, representatives, attorneys, and cabinet members. This work placed them at the center of political controversies before, during, and after their time as reporters. Metzmeier documents the important roles that they played in the Spanish Conspiracy of the 1780s, in the Old Court–New Court controversy of the 1820s, and in disputes over slavery and unionism.

Writing the Legal Record has more to say about the reporters than the reports, and it provides little analysis of how (or whether) the reporters' legal and political views affected the way that they compiled their reports. Metzmeier notes that an 1865 fire in the Kentucky Court of Appeals destroyed many records that would have allowed for deeper analysis of the process through which reporters selected cases to include in their compilations. The book also devotes limited space to discussion of the substance of the reports and their use by the Kentucky legal profession. For those interested in nineteenth-century American lawyers, however, Writing the Legal Record provides detailed and useful portraits of thirteen of the Kentucky bar's influential members.