Charles W. Pierson

The thoughtful and genial presence of Charles Wheeler Pierson added interest to the luncheon-table group, where he always engaged quietly in the noon-day conversation. Pierson’s professional career was determined by membership during nearly forty years in one well-known New York law firm. Efficient and successful in practice, he was perhaps more deeply interested in the philosophy and history of the law than in court procedure. Never pedantic or contentious, at all times giving reflective consideration to the ideas of others, he was regarded with personal liking by whoever talked with him, in or out of his profession, and his own quiet judgment on controverted questions carried weight.

Pierson’s thorough acquaintance with the history of the law, his conservative instincts regarding present tendencies, were embodied in his published booklet on “Our Changing Constitution.” Turning the pages of that careful narrative, the reader seems to himself to be listening to Pierson’s quiet conversation. He does not protest against all change in judicial view-point. “In a way,” he writes, change in interpretation of the Constitution “is inevitable to adapt it to the conditions of a new age.” “The frame of mind of the people who compose states and nation has changed.” But this very fact has created for the court new and grave responsibilities. Whereas, “a century ago, the United States Supreme Court was the bulwark of national power against the assaults and pretensions of the states,” today the course of events calls upon it, in Pierson’s judgment, to stand as “the defender of the states against the encroachments of national power.” Writing in 1922, his conclusion was that “the present tendency towards centralization cannot go on forever.” How much further his moral might have been pointed by events had he written in 1934, it is easy to imagine.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook