FEARNE, fern, CHARLES ( 1742-94 ) . An Eng lish legal author, born in London. Ile was the son of Charles Fearne, well known as judge-advocate of the Admiralty. The younger Fearne was edu cated at Westminster School. and made his way to the bar through the Inner Temple. He was a man of many gifts and of more varied attainments than are often found in the masters of the legal profession, and was especially addicted to classical studies and to the making of mechanical inven tions, in which he was an adept. Notwithstand ing these distractions and a certain love of ease which often paralyzed his energies, his extraor dinary legal talents, and especially his capacity for refined analytical reasoning, speedily made him a leader of the English bar. He was only thirty years old when lie produced the remarkable Essay on the Learning of Contingent Remainders and Executory De•ises, on which his fame mainly rests.
It was characteristic of Fearne that he should have devoted himself to the elucidation of the most technical and abstruse doctrine of the law of real property. It was as a piece of artificial mechanism, ingeniously calculated to produce cer tain practical results, that it attracted him, and he did nothing to furnish it with a philosophical or rational basis—perhaps an impossible task. But his analysis of the doctrine, his arrangement of its parts, and his description of its complicated operation gave it a foremost place in the arti ficial system of which it formed a part. The
essay at once became a standard text-book of real property lawyers, taking its place with Little ton's Tenures, and Coke upon Littleton, and, in the decade after its publication, went through several editions. It has retained its place as a legal authority, and has had much learning ex pended upon it by subsequent editors. The best editions are those of Butler (1809-24), and the tenth, by J. W. Smith (18:11).
Fcarne's success at the bar was equally con spicuous. He was said to have been 'more con sulted than any man of his time,' and for a time he enjoyed a great professional income. But he soon wearied of the exclusive devotion to legal pursuits which his position in the profession called for, and allowed his practice to slip away from him, and fell into straitened circum stances. Ile died at Chelmsford, February 25, 1794, broken in mind and body, at the compara tively early age of fifty-two. His published works include an historical sketch of land tenures in England. an "Impartial Answer" to a letter of "Junius" (published in 1770). and a volume of posthumous legal essays (1797).