MARTIN, FRANCOIS XAVIER (1762-1846)

This article appears in Volume V17, Page 794 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MAR-MEC

MARTIN, FRANCOIS XAVIER (1762-1846) , American jurist and author, was born in Marseilles, France, on the 17th of March 1762, of Provencal descent. In 1780 he went to Martinique, and before the close of the American war of Independence went to North Carolina, where (in New Bern) he taught French and learnt English, and set up as a printer. He studied law, and was admitted to the North Carolina ,bar. in 1789. He published various legal books, and edited Acts of the North Carolina Assembly from 1715 to r8o3 (2nd ed., 1809). He was a member of the lower

house

HOUSE
HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
Gothic
- GOTHIC
it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)

of the General Assembly in 1806-1807. In 1809 he was commissioned a judge of the superior court of the territory of Mississippi, and in March 1810 became judge of the superior court of the territory of Orleans. Here the law was in a chaotic condition, what with French law before O'Reilly's

rule

RULE

, then a Spanish code, and in 1808 the Digest of the Civil Laws, an adaptation by James Brown and Moreau Lislet of the code of

Napoleon

NAPOLEON

, which repealed the Spanish fueros, partidas, recopilationes and laws of the Indies only as they conflicted with its provisions. Martin published in 1811 and 1813 reports of cases decided by the superior court of the territory of Orleans. For two years from February 1813 Martin was attorney-general of the newly established state of Louisiana, and then until March 1846 was a judge and (from 1836 to 1846) presiding judge of the supreme court of the state. For the period until 183o he published reports of the decisions of the supreme court; and in 1816 he published two volumes, one French and one English, of A General Digest of tke Acts of Legislatures of the

Late

LATE

Territory of Orleans and of the State of Louisiana. He won the name of the " father of Louisiana jurisprudence " and his

work

WORK

was of

great

GREAT

assistance to Edward Livingston, Pierre Derbigny and Moreau Lislet in the Louisiana codification of 1821-1826. Martin's eyesight had begun to fail when he was seventy, and after 1836 he could no longer write opinions with his own hand.l He died in New Orleans on the 11th of December 1846.
Martin translated Robert J. Pothier On Obligations (1802), and wrote The History of Louisiana from the Earliest Period (2 vols. 18271829) and The History of North Carolina (2 vols., 1829). There
His holographic will in favour of his brother (written in 1844 and devising property worth nearly $400,000) was unsuccessfully contested by the statevof Louisiana on the ground that the will was void as being a legal and physical impossibility, or as being an attempted fraud on the state, as under it the state would not receive a to % tax if the property went to the heirs of Martin (as intestate) in France.is a memoir by

Henry

A. Bullard in part ii. of B. F. French's Historical Collections of Louisiana (Philadelphia, 1850), and one by W. W. Howe in John F. Condon's edition of Martin's History of Louisiana (New Orleans, 1882).

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