Early Life and Career
In 1824, Thomas Cooley was born in Attica, New York, to farmers Thomas Cooley and Rachel Hubbard. He attended Attica Academy and took an interest in the law and literary pursuits. In 1842, he studied law under Theron Strong, who had just completed a term as representative for New York to the Congress. The next year, he moved to Adrian, Michigan and continued to study law. By 1846, he was admitted to the Michigan bar and married Mary Horton.
In addition to his small legal practice, Cooley was active in other intellectual and political pursuits. He wrote poems criticizing slavery and celebrating the European revolutions of 1848, edited pro-Democratic newspapers, and founded the Michigan branch of the Free Soil Party in 1848. By 1856, he became a Republican. In the 1850s, he slowly built his professional reputation. He was compiler of Michigan statutes and a reporter for the Michigan Supreme Court. In 1859 he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and became one of the University of Michigan Law School's first professors. He would go on to play a major role in the development of the University and the Law School, serving on faculty until 1884, including a long stint as the law school's dean from 1871 until 1883.
in 1864, Cooley was elected to the Supreme Court of Michigan, and served as the chief justice for 20 years. Politically, he remained a Republican, and even considered running for Congress in 1872. However, he maintained a certain independence politically, and bolted from the Republican party as a mugwump to support Grover Cleveland in 1884, and later in 1894. This independence may have cost him an appointment to the US Supreme Court. However, he was rewarded politically when in 1887 when President Cleveland nominated him to the Interstate Commerce Commission, one of the first independent agencies of the federal government.
With Mary Horton he had six children, including Charles Cooley, a distinguished American sociologist, and Thomas Benton Cooley, a noted pediatrician.
Read more about this topic: Thomas M. Cooley
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)