Joseph Rockwell Swan

Joseph Rockwell Swan (December 28, 1802 – December 18, 1884) was a Republican politician in the U.S. State of Ohio who was a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court 1855–1860.

Biography Joseph Rockwell Swan was born at Westernville, Oneida County, New York. He studied at an academy in Aurora, New York, where he began the study of law. He moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1824, and studied law at the office of his uncle, Judge Gustavus Swan, where he was soon admitted to the bar.

Swan's first office was prosecuting attorney of Franklin County, to which he was appointed in 1830 by the judges of the Common Pleas. In 1833, a statute was passed which made the office elective, and in October of that year, the voters of Franklin County chose Swan. Within a year, the legislature chose him for judge of the Common Pleas Court, with a grueling circuit of Franklin, Madison, Clark, Champaign, Logan, Union, and Delaware counties, with the legislature electing him in 1834 and again in 1841.

Swan resigned from the court in 1845, and formed the partnership of Swan and Andrews in Columbus, with John W. Andrews as junior partner, until 1854. In 1850, the General Assembly passed an act calling a convention to revise or amend the constitution of the state of Ohio, and Judge Swan was elected as a delegate from Franklin County. His most important decision came in 1859, and cost him re-nomination by the Republicans. In closing, Swan contrasted his personal views with his need to adhere to the Constitution: As a citizen I would not deliberately violate the Constitution or the law by interference with fugitives from service; but if a weary, frightened slave should appeal to me to protect him from his pursuers, it is possible I might momentarily forget my allegiance to the law and the Constitution, and give him a covert from those who were upon his track. There are, no doubt, many slaveholders who would follow the impulses of human sympathy; and if I did, and were prosecuted, condemned and imprisoned, and brought by my council before this tribunal on a habeas corpus, and were there permitted to pronounce judgment in my own case, I trust I should have the moral courage to say, before God and country, as I am now compelled to say, under the solemn duties of a judge, bound by my official oath to sustain the supremacy of the Constitution and the law, "the prisoner must be remanded".|Joseph Rockwell Swan|1859 He never again sought public office or practiced law.

After Swan's death, the Franklin County Bar Association prepared a memorial, written by Richard A. Harrison, Allen G. Thurman, Chauncey N. Olds, and others. It read, in part:

Writings According to the Ohio Supreme Court web site, Swan's legal guidebooks were "perhaps [his] most important contribution to Ohio jurisprudence". These were: A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Powers and Duties of Justices of the Peace (1836), called "the most useful book ever published in Ohio". There were twelve editions. Randall 1912: 138 Statutes of 1841, made into an easy-to-use volume. Updates were published in 1854–55, 1860, and 1868. A Guide to Executors and Administrators (1843). Swan's Pleadings and Precedents, in two volumes (1845 and 1850). Swan's Pleadings and Precedents under the Code (1860).