James Creed Meredith

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This article relates to James Creed Meredith, Irish judge. For James Meredith, first African-American student at the University of Mississippi see James Meredith

The Hon. Mr Justice James Creed Meredith (28 November 1875 - 14 August 1942) K.C., Chief Judicial Commissioner of Ireland, philosopher, and scholar of Kant.

James Creed Meredith was the son of Sir James Creed Meredith (1842-1912), Deputy Grand Master of the Freemasons of Ireland, by his third wife (and first cousin), Ellen Graves Meredith (1848-1919), daughter of The Rev. Richard Graves Meredith (1810-1871), Rector of Timoleague and Knockavilly, Co. Cork (son of Thomas Meredith, his father's uncle). He was named after James Creed of Uregare, Co. Limerick, his grandmother's (Adelaide Meredith's) father.

James was unusual amongst Protestants and graduates of Trinity College Dublin of his era, in that he was an active supporter of Sinn Féin and the revolutionary Dáil government between 1919 and 1922. He served as the President of the Dáil Supreme Court from 1920-22. James was appointed to be Chief Judicial Commissioner of Ireland August 14, 1923. He served on the High Court from 1924 to 1937 and then on the Supreme Court until his death. He was Vice-President of the Supreme Saar Plebiscite Tribunal 1934-1935.

In 1914, James Creed Meredith had approached Sir Thomas Myles to use his yacht, the Chotah, to land guns for the Irish Volunteers at Kilcoole. Meredith himself helped out aboard the Chotah during the operation.

When the War of Independence was over, and Ireland won its independence, some Dáil deputies argued that the philosophical approach of the Brehon law system should be updated to a new legal system in the new state. Meredith was among those who supported this view. In 1919 he was appointed by the Dáil as President of the Supreme Court, in which position he actually gave a judgement on women's rights under the Brehon law in 1920. However, Laurence Ginnell, and most of those who supported this idea, took the republican side in the subsequent Civil War (1922-23) and the idea came to nothing. The new Irish State simply accepted English Statute and Common Law as its legal system.

In 1896, Jemmy (as he was familiarly known) was the British quarter mile champion runner. In 1908 he married (Amy) Lorraine Seymour (1881-), a noted artist in her own right, daughter of Charles Percy of Weredale Park, Montreal, by his wife Annie (one of his mother's first cousins), the daughter of (Ralph) Henry Howard Meredith (1815-1892) of Port Hope, Upper Canada. They left two daughters, Moira and Brenda. Moira's son Rowan Gillespie, is the Irish bronze casting sculpture, whose latest work Proclamation is a memorial to the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and, according to his biographer Roger Kohn, to his Grandfather's dream of a Utopian society. Meredith's Dublin house, Hopeton, was a centre for well known poets, writers and artists of the time. They also kept a country residence, Albert House, at Dalkey.

There is no doubt that Meredith was an activist. An intelligent and philosophical man himself, he wrote five books, most notable of which was his 1911 translation of 'Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement', which is still widely used today by English speaking scholars of Immanuel Kant. In the analytical index of his famous translation, Meredith asked a pertinent question concerning Irish history and society, "What do you call a pretty girl in Ireland?", furnishing his own characteristic response: "A tourist.""

Meredith became a Quaker in later life and is buried at Temple Hill Cemetery, Dublin.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Kant's Critique of aesthetic judgement / translated with seven introductory essays, notes, and analytical index (Oxford, 1911)
  • Proportional representation in Ireland (Dublin and London, 1913)
  • (with Hector Hughes) The Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (Restrictions) Act, 1920 (Dublin, 1920)
  • The rainbow in the valley (Dublin, 1939) (science fiction)
  • Nell Nelligan: a romance of the Irish volunteers (Dublin, 1940) (novel)

[edit] References

  • Ferguson, Kenneth (ed) King's Inns Barristers 1868-2004 (Dublin, 2005) 253-54
  • Kotsonouris, Mary Retreat from Revolution: The Dáil Courts, 1920-24 (Dublin, 1994)
  • Kotsonouris, Mary The Winding-up of the Dáil Courts, 1922-1925: an obvious duty (Dublin, 2004)

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