FIELD, STEPHEN JOHNSON American jurist, was born at Haddam (Conn.), on Nov. 4, 1816. In 1837 he graduated from Williams college. He then studied law, and in 1841 was admitted to the New York bar. He practised in New York until 1849, when he removed to California. In 185o he was chosen a member of the first State legislature of Cali fornia, in which he drew up and secured the enactment of two bodies of law known as the Civil and Criminal Practices Acts. In the former Act he embodied a provision regulating and giving authority to the peculiar customs, usages, and regulations vol untarily adopted by the miners in various districts of the State for the adjudication of disputed mining claims. This Act was the foundation of the jurisprudence respecting mines in the country. In 1857 Field was elected justice of the California supreme court, of which he became chief justice in 1859. In 1863 he was appointed by President Lincoln a justice of the U.S. supreme court. In this capacity he was conspicuous for fearless independence of thought and action in his opinion in the test oath case, and in his dissenting opinions in the legal tender, conscription, and "slaughter house" cases. His anti-slavery sym pathies forced him to accept Lincoln's doctrine of coercion, and led him to act with the Republican party. In 1873 he was a member of the commission which revised the California code, and of the electoral commission in 1877 (q.v.), voting in favour of Tilden. In Aug. 1889, as a result of a ruling in the course of the Sharon-Hill litigation, a notorious conspiracy case, he was assaulted in a California railway station by Judge David S. Terry, who in turn was shot and killed by a United States deputy mar shal appointed to defend Justice Field. Field retired from the supreme court on Dec. 1, 1897 after a service of 34 years and six months, and died in Washington on April 9, His Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, originally privately printed in 1878, was republished in 1893 with George C. Gorham's Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field.