The court in which his judicial ability was first made known, had but a short existence. In a year after its enactment, the law which erected this court was repealed; and the judges, who had received their commissions during good behaviour, were deprived. of their offices without the imputation of a fault.
After the abolition of the circuit court, Mr. Tilghman resumed the practice of his profession, and continued it until the 31st July 1805, when he was appointed president of the courts of common pleas in the first district.
He remained but a few months in the common pleas. In the beginning of the year 1806, Mr. Ship pen, the chief justice of the supreme court, yielded to the claims of a venerable old age by retiring from the office, and on the 25th of February, Mr. Tilgh man was commissioned in his place by Governor McKean, himself a great lawyer and judge, and interested as a father in the court which he had led on to distinguished reputation in the United States.
From the time that he took his seat on the bench, at March term 1806, for the space of more than ten years, he delivered an opinion in every case but five, the arguments in four of which he was prevented from hearing by sickness, and in one by domestic affliction; and in more than two hundred and fifty cases, he either pronounced the judgment of the court, or his brethren concurred in his opinion and reasons without a comment.
His attention, from the beginning to the end of the twenty-one years that he presided in the su preme court, was undeviatingly given to every case; and he prepared himself for all that required con sideration at his chamber, by taking an accurate note of the authorities cited by counsel, and of the principal heads and illustrations of their argument.
This labour was not performed to accumulate the evidences of his devotion to business, nor under subjection to an inveterate habit. He was far above all this. He did it under a sense of conscientious duty to retain such minutes as would enable him to examine the authorities, and to review the observa tions of counsel, after the illusion, and perhaps the excitement of the public discussion had gone by. The contents of twenty volumes of reports, and up wards of two thousand judgments, most of them elaborate, all of them sufficiently reasoned, very few upon matters of practice, or on points of fugi tive interest, attest the devotion of his judicial life; and although it is not meant to deprive of their share of the merit of these labours, the eminent men who survive him on the bench, and who remain to continue, and I hope to exalt the fame of our juris prudence, I may say, and they will cheerfully ad mit, that he was the presiding spirit of their con sultations, as he was of their court.
In addition to these strictly official duties, the legislature of Pennsylvania committed to the judges of the supreme court, in the year 1807, the critical duty of reporting the English statutes in force with in this commonwealth. The duty is called critical, for so undoubtedly it was considered by the chief justice. The service exacted an unlimited know ledge of our colonial legislation, and of the prac tice and administration of the law in the province, through a period of nearly a century, in which there was not the light of a reported case. It required' also an intimate familiarity with the written law of England, its history, both political and legal, and a knowledge of the impressions which it had given to and received from the common law, during the course of many centuries. The selection, moreover, was to be made in the chambers of the judges, without the aid of that best of all devices for elicit ing the truth, an ardent, free, and ingenuous dis cussion by counsel. I need not say to the profes sional hearer, that the task was Herculean. In the course, however, of less than two years, it was per formed; and the profession and the public are in debted to it for an invaluable standard of reference in a province of the law before that time without path or guide. It is not perfect. It has not the obligation of judicial authority. I speak the senti ments of its principal author. Some statutes are perhaps omitted. Still the original work will re main as a monument to those by whom it was erect ed, and who may now be said to rest beneath it. If it shall increase at all, it will be by the contribu tions which the hand of respect and affection shall bring to swell the tribute to the venerable dead.