Atrocious Judges: Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression

Published originally in 1856, it might seem at first glance that this book is out of date, but the goal of this book was never to serve as a guide to legal practice or a source of judicial precedent (although it doesn’t do such a bad job of that latter function), but rather to provide examples of what can only be described as an inherent problem with the entire concept of a judicial system: bad judges.  The sixteen examples are all English judges, but throughout the book the author sprinkles in similar examples by American judges—sometimes even an American judge will use an atrocious decision from England as an excuse and blueprint for making his own atrocious ruling on the same basic issue!

After all, even if every law was composed by the most brilliant scholars and most accomplished writers, all with the wisdom of Solomon, what good would it do civilization if the judges ruling on the application of those laws are corrupt, stupid... or both?  Especially at the current moment in history, when partisan U. S. District Judges are attempting to prevent an elected president of the United States from promulgating the agenda citizens elected him to promulgate, and only a few years removed from Chief Justice Roberts’s inexplicably silly decision on Obamacare, the problem of bad judges has never been more salient.

The author, Richard Hildreth (1807–1865), was a well-respected journalist, author, and historian, and also a strong abolitionist. His six-volume History of the United States of America, skewed toward an anti-slavery position, arguably forms the foundation for all books about the history of early America, and his profoundly exposing novel The White Slave was so realistic, well-written, and troubling that to this day many people think it is non-fiction.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.