Thomas M. Cooley

In 1824, Thomas Cooley was born in Attica, New York, to farmers Thomas Cooley and Rachel Hubbard. He attended Attica Academy and took an interest in the law and literary pursuits. In 1842, he studied law under Theron Strong, who had just completed a term as a U.S. Representative for New York to the House of Representatives of the United States Congress. The next year, he moved to Adrian, Michigan, and continued to study law. By 1846, he was admitted to the Michigan bar and married Mary Horton.

In addition to his small legal practice, Cooley was active in other intellectual and political pursuits. He wrote poems criticizing slavery and celebrating the European revolutions of 1848, edited pro-Democratic newspapers, and founded the Michigan branch of the Free Soil Party in 1848. By 1856, he became a Republican. In the 1850s, he slowly built his professional reputation. He was compiler of Michigan statutes and a reporter for the Michigan Supreme Court. In 1859 he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and became one of the University of Michigan Law School's first professors. He would go on to play a major role in the development of the university and the Law School, serving on faculty until 1884, including a long stint as the law school's dean from 1871 until 1883."[http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Deans/Pages/default.aspx List of Law School Deans]" www.law.umich.edu Retrieved January 8, 2012.

in 1864, Cooley was elected to the Supreme Court of Michigan, and served as the chief justice for 20 years. Politically, he remained a Republican, and even considered running for Congress in 1872. However, he maintained a certain independence politically, and bolted from the Republican party as a mugwump to support Grover Cleveland in 1884, and later in 1894. This independence may have cost him an appointment to the US Supreme Court."[http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Faculty_Lists/Alpha_Faculty/Pages/Cooley_ThomasM.aspx History and Traditions: Thomas M Cooley]" www.law.umich.edu Retrieved January 8, 2012. However, he was rewarded politically when in 1887 when President Cleveland nominated him to the Interstate Commerce Commission, one of the first independent agencies of the federal government.

With Mary Horton he had six children, including Charles Cooley, a distinguished American sociologist, and Thomas Benton Cooley, a noted pediatrician. he died in Ann Arbor Michigan in September 1898.

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|footer = The title pages of Cooley's Treatise on the Law of Torts (1907){{citation|author=Thomas M[cIntyre] Cooley|author-link=Thomas M. Cooley|title=A Treatise on the Law of Torts or the Wrongs which Arise Independently of Contract|edition=students'|location=Chicago, Ill.|publisher=Callaghan & Co.|year=1907|oclc=1595776}}. and General Principles of Constitutional Law (1st ed., 1880){{citation|author=Thomas M[cIntyre] Cooley|title=The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America|edition=1st|location=Boston, Mass.|publisher=Little, Brown and Company|year=1880|oclc=14448549}}.

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Many of the original tomes memorializing and comprising Cooley's scholarly works are preserved and on display in the Thomas M. Cooley Law School Strosacker Law Library.{{Cite web |url=http://www.cooley.edu/library/index.htm |title=Thomas e. Brennan Law Library - Thomas M. Cooley Law School |access-date=July 18, 2010 |archive-date=December 15, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101215162855/http://cooley.edu/library/index.htm |url-status=dead }}{{cite web |title=Lansing Campus Unveils Library Expansion |url=http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/2010/052510_library_expand_unveil.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100527140736/http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/2010/052510_library_expand_unveil.html |archive-date=2010-05-27 |website=Cooley Law School}}

File:A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations.jpg

In 1868 Cooley published A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union, in which he analyzed the creation of state constitutions and the enactment of laws.{{cite news|title=Revisiting Cooley |first=Michael J.|last=Pallamary|date= August 15, 2015|work=The American Surveyor|location=Frederick, Maryland|url=http://www.amerisurv.com/content/view/14124/153/}}{{Cite journal |last=Weeks |first=O. Douglas |date=1925 |title=Some Political Ideas of Thomas McIntyre Cooley |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/42880501 |journal=The Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=30–39 |issn=2374-1309}} By 1890, the sixth edition was printed.

In 1876, Cooley published A Treatise on the Law of Taxation Including the Law of Local Assessments, which considered the government's power and motives to institute taxes. The book discusses the particulars of taxes assessed against property and businesses, as well as legal remedies against illegal and unjust taxation.{{Cite book |last=Cooley |first=Thomas M. |url=https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=books |title=A Treatise on the Law of Taxation Including the Law of Local Assessments |date=1876 |publisher=Callaghan and Company |location=Chicago}}

In 1878, Cooley completed and published his work A Treatise on the Law of Torts or the Wrongs Which Arise Independently of Contract. One edition of Cooley's treatise on the subject matter of tort law was published in Chicago by Callaghan and Company in 1907. A Students' Edition was edited by John Lewis, a legal scholar and contemporary of Cooley. Lewis also wrote A Treatise on the Law of Eminent Domain. As a collegial work, Cooley's treatise on torts made extensive use of citations to case law.

While Dean of the University of Michigan, Cooley had published his treatise The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America in March 1880. One edition was published in Boston by Little, Brown and Company in 1891. A second edition was prepared by legal scholar Alexis C. Angell in August 1891. A third edition was published in Boston by Little, Brown and Company in 1898.

Renowned constitutional law scholar Edward S. Corwin wrote of the extranational judicial recognition (and, of course, that under the United States) of the implementation of, or concurrence with, Article IV, within which is the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution: "[i]n accordance with what is variously known as Conflict of Laws, Comity, or Private International Law, rights acquired under the laws or through the courts of one country may often receive recognition...in the courts of another country,This is a process of law described in the concept of letters rogatory. and it is the purpose of [U.S. Const., Art. IV, Sec. 1] to guarantee that this shall be the case among the States in certain instances." Corwin, or the editors of the 1978 Princeton University Press edition of The Constitution and What it Means Today thereinafter cited the Third Edition of Cooley's Principles of Constitutional Law.Edward S. Corwin, The Constitution and What it Means Today, 14th Ed., 1978, Harold W. Chase and Craig R. Ducat, Eds., at p. 286. citing Thomas M. Cooley, The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America

Corwin wrote, as to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (a clause contained within Amendment I), "[i]t [that Justice Story believed the United States Congress was still free to prefer the Christian religion over other religions, in contrast to modern Constitutional law and interpretation] is also supported by Cooley in his Principles of Constitutional Law, where it is said that the clause forbids 'the setting up of recognition of a state church of special favors and advantages which are denied to others.'"Edward S. Corwin, The Constitution and What it Means Today, 14th Ed., 1978, Harold W. Chase and Craig R. Ducat, Eds., at p. 246, n.1.

"This assumption," Robert G. McCloskey wrote as to the legal essentiality of the concept due process of law in The American Supreme Court, "was a product[,] no doubt[,] of many converging factors: the multiplication of 'welfare state' threats, the Macedonian cries of the business community and its legal and academic defenders, a growing awareness that an interpretation of due process[,] which seemed impossibly novel[—]and probably unnecessary a decade before[—]could be made acceptable by slow accretion[,] and might prove very useful in the cause of righteousness. As Waite wrote, the voices of two great contemporaries[,] Thomas M. Cooley and Stephen J. Field, must have been echoing in his mind. Cooley′s classic treatise[,] Constitutional Limitations, first published in 1868, had become a canonical text for jurists, and [Cooley's] support of due process in its emerging form gave the stamp of scholarly approval to an interpretation that seemed ethically more and more imperative."Robert G. McCloskey, The American Supreme Court, 3d Ed., in The Chicago History of American Civilization, Daniel J. Boorstin, Ed., University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Corwin, or the editors of the 1978 Princeton University Press edition of The Constitution and What it Means Today, also cited Cooley in Constitutional Limitations.Thomas M. Cooley, Constitutional Limitations, Chapt. 12. As to Amendment I, as to Freedom of the Press in the United States, Corwin writes: [i]n about half of the State constitutions, our State courts ... [in reference to prevailing attitudes prior to the [American] Civil War, gradually wrote into the common law of the States the principle of "qualified privilege," which is a notification to plaintiffs in libel [law]suits that if they are unlucky enough to be office holders or office seekers, they must be prepared to shoulder the almost impossible burden of showing defendant's "special malice". Students of Constitutional law and Tort law will note this additional aspect of modern libel law as applied to legal issues intersecting the comments and comportment of public figures.

Within his treatise The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America, on the subject of municipal corporations, Cooley wrote:

{{blockquote|It is axiomatic that the management of purely local affairs belongs to the people concerned, not only because of being their own affairs, but because they will best understand, and be most competent to manage them. The continued and permanent existence of local government is, therefore, assumed in all the state constitutions, and is a matter of constitutional right, even when not in terms expressly provided for. It would not be competent to dispense with it by statute.People v. Lynch, 51 Cal. 15 (emphasis added).}}

• Sir William Blackstone [https://books.google.com/books?id=Mvs8AAAAIAAJ Commentaries on the laws of England: in four books, Volume 1], Callaghan and Company, Chicago, 1872, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Jf48AAAAIAAJ Volume 2], Callaghan and Company, Chicago, 1884.
• {{cite book |last1=Story |first1=Joseph |last2=Cooley |first2=Thomas M. |title=Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States Volume 1 |year=1873 |publisher=Little, Brown |url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Commentaries_on_the_Constitution_of_the/s-DLU01LmMoC?hl=en}}; [https://www.google.com/books/edition/Commentaries_on_the_Constitution_of_the/xuzkAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 Volume 2]
• [https://books.google.com/books?id=_zo1Gg3fStYC&q=Thomas+M.+Cooley Cooley, Thomas M. (1878) A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union, 4th Ed. Boston:] Little, Brown and Company

In a contrasting legal theorem to that of Dillon's Rule (which posits that towns and cities have no independent authority except as explicitly or implicitly granted by a state legislature) the Cooley Doctrine proposed a legal theory of an inherent but constitutionally-permitted right to local self-determination.This doctrine should not be confused with the now-abrogated "Cooley Doctrine" arising from Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia, 53 U.S. 299 (1851). In a concurring opinion, Cooley, J., wrote "local government is [a] matter of absolute right; and the state cannot [as to the case referenced in the main opinion, People v. Hurlbut] take it away."People v. Hurlbut, 24 Mich. 44, 108 (1871).

• The People ex rel the Detroit and Howell R.R. Co. v. the Township Board of Salem

• Bibliography of the United States Constitution

{{wikisource|Author:Thomas McIntyre Cooley|Thomas M. Cooley}}

{{Reflist|30em}}

• [http://www.micourthistory.org/bios.php?id=35 Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society: Thomas McIntyre Cooley]
• [http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Faculty_Lists/Alpha_Faculty/Pages/Cooley_ThomasM.aspx University of Michigan Law School: History and Traditions: Thomas M. Cooley]
• [http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Faculty_Lists/Alpha_Faculty/Documents/Thomas_Cooley/constitutional_law_scholarship_of_thomas_mcintyre_cooley_by_carrington.pdf Carrington, Paul D. "The Constitutional Law Scholarship of Thomas McIntyre Cooley" 41 Am. J. Legal Hist. 368 (1997).]
• [http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Faculty_Lists/Alpha_Faculty/Documents/Thomas_Cooley/thomas_m_cooley_and_the_michigan_supreme_court_by_jones.pdf Jones, Alan. "Thomas M. Cooley and the Michigan Supreme Court: 1865–1885", 10 Am. J. Legal Hist. 97 (1966).]
• [http://www.law.umich.edu/historyandtraditions/faculty/Faculty_Lists/Alpha_Faculty/Documents/Thomas_Cooley/thomas_m_cooley_by_knowlton.pdf Knowlton, Jerome C. "Thomas McInture Cooley", 5 Mich. L. Rev. 309 (1906–1907).]

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