John Adams was before anything else a practicing lawyer—a man of
the office, the library, and the courts. Future legal historians
and biographers must describe in comprehensive detail the legal
system of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts in which he studied
and practiced, and the extent to which his legal training and
the habits thereby developed influenced his later public
service. The Legal Papers of John Adams is intended to furnish
some of the raw material for such comprehensive studies. This
Introduction seeks only to help the reader find his way into the
context of 18th-century Massachusetts practice and to describe
briefly Adams' legal career. Practice and Procedure The Courts
of Provincial Massachusetts It is a commentary, either on Adams'
time or our own, that the court system in which he practiced was
as jurisdictionally differentiated as the Massachusetts judicial
system of today. The discussion which follows is not and cannot
be definitive. Only enough detail has been included to permit an
intellige