Edward Fox

Edward Fox (June 10, 1815 – December 14, 1881) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maine.

Education and career

Born in Portland, Massachusetts (in the area that bevame Maine in 1820), Fox graduated from Harvard University in 1834, and from Harvard Law School in 1837. He practiced in Portland, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was city solicitor for Portland. He was the county attorney of Cumberland County, Maine. He worked with Neal Dow to draft a prohibition law, which became known as the Maine Law after the state legislature approved it in 1851. Dow claimed credit for authoring the law, but his cousin John Neal revealed Fox's contribution in the press. That contribution was the search and seizure provision, which created a new legal standard for obtaining search warrants and contributed toward to the modern probable cause standard. A decade later he was an associate justice of the Maine Supreme Court from 1862 to 1863.