BBOTT, BENJAMIN VAUGHN (bom in Boston, June 4,
1830; died in Brooklyn, February 17, 1890), was a son of
Jacob Abbott, author of the Rollo books. He was graduated
at the New York University in 1850, studied for a year at the
Cambridge Law School, and was admitted to the bar in New York City
in 1852. He entered upon the practice of the law in partnership with
his younger brother, Austin.' After several years of practice he began
to devote himself chiefiy to legal writing. Alone or in collaboration
with his brother he was the author or compiler of nearly one hundred
law volumes.

As secretary of the New York code commission he personally
drafted the report of a penal code, which was submitted to the legisla¬
ture in 1865, and became the basis of the present code. In June, 1870,
he was appointed by President Grant one of three commissioners to
revise the statutes of the United States. This work, prosecuted for
three years, resulted in the consolidation of sixteen volumes of federal
laws into one large octavo volume. In continuation of his labors in
this field he devoted six years to the preparation of a new edition of the
"United States Digest" (1879), reducing the original digest to thirteen
volumes, to which he added nine annual supplements. He also com¬
piled a " National Digest" in five volumes, containing all the important
acts of congress, decisions of the United States Supreme Court, Circuit
and District Courts, Court of Claims, etc., from the foundation of the
government to December, 1888.

Among his other important works are " A Digest of Decisions on
Corporations from 1860 to 1870" (1872), "A Treatise on the Courts of
the United States and their Practice" (1877), a "Dictionary of Terms
in American and English Jurisprudence" (1879), and " Judge and
Jury " (1880), a collection of miscellaneous articles. He was a frequent
writer for the press and the periodicals, contributed many articles to
the " Medical Reference Handbook," and served as editor for the
Lawyers' Co-operative Publishing Company of Rochester,

His contributions to legal literature belong in the first rank of
such works. His digests and compilations are uniformly distinguished
by a methodical arrangement and a system of analysis which have
done much to simplify federal and state law.