Our present Governor of New Jersey, Hon. George T. Werts, was born at Hackettstown, N. J., March 24th, 1846, and was admitted to the bar in 1867. He was Recorder of Morristown from May 1883 to 1885, and was elected Mayor in May 1886, again in 1888 and in 1890. During the session of the State Senate in 1889, he served as President of the Senate, and was re-elected Senator in the same year. During his time as Senator, he served on many of the most important Committees and the new Ballot Reform Law and the new License Law were both drafted by him; laws which embrace, perhaps, the most radical change of any recently enacted.
While Mayor of Morristown some of the most important ordinances of the city were of his drafting; indeed while Mayor, he paid particular attention to every ordinance drafted.
Early in 1892 he was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, resigning the offices of State Senator and Mayor of Morristown to accept this honor, and he resigned the position of Judge to accept that of Governor, to which office he was elected in November, 1892.
Many speeches and addresses of Governor Werts have been published in the metropolitan and State papers, and in pamphlet form. Several are scattered through large volumes containing the speeches and addresses of others. These are mostly political, but some are on other subjects, and have been delivered before juries and at reunions, in the Senate, and on other occasions. Among these published papers are also opinions and decisions while Judge of the Supreme Court.
Joseph Fitz Randolph.
Mr. Randolph has issued a valuable work, known to us as "Jarman on Wills", 1881 and 1882, being the fifth American edition by Mr. Randolph and Mr. William Talcott. This work adds a third volume to a famous two-volume English book.
In 1888, was issued "Randolph on Commercial Paper", which work is of three volumes and contains 3,300 pages on bills, notes, &c., and is considered by the legal profession to be quite exhaustive of the subject. "These", says the author, "are legal monsters into which lawyers dig and delve and which settle knotty questions no doubt, but which probably will not be thoroughly investigated by women, until Fashion or Famine shall drive them into the legal profession".
Again we may quote the author's words, when he says in his usual happy vein of humor, about all his important legal productions, that "they are a necessary nuisance to the maker's friends and the unwilling buyers, that there is no end of making many such, and that they might be written down in line, on a heavy page with some of his brother writers on other abstruse subjects and set in a minor key".
Edward Q. Keasbey.
In one of the large New York dailies of August 1892, we read the following: "Mr. Keasbey, the well known New Jersey lawyer, has some hundred pages on 'Electric Wires in Streets and Highways,' a new subject of growing importance." This refers to a law book published by Mr. Keasbey entitled "The Law of Electric Wires in streets and Highways", Callaghan and Co., Chicago. Mr. Keasbey has also edited The New Jersey Law Journal since 1879 and The Hospital Review since 1888.