Shaw, Lemuel, 1781–1861, American jurist, b. Barnstable, Mass. After a career in the Massachusetts state legislature, Shaw served as chief justice for the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts (1830–60). In Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), Shaw provided an important precedent in labor relations by arguing that members of labor unions were not engaging in criminal conspiracies against their employers. In Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), a forerunner of Plessy v. Ferguson Plessy v. Ferguson, case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The court upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating racially segregated but equal railroad carriages, ruling that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth amendment to the U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. (1896), he ruled that the segregation of black schoolchildren was not a violation of the Massachusetts state constitution. His decision in Commonwealth v. Alger (1851) was an early and influential attempt to define the limits of state police power police power, in law, right of a government to make laws necessary for the health, morals, and welfare of the populace. The term has greatest currency in the United States, where it has been defined by the Supreme Court as the power of the states to enact laws of
..... Click the link for more information. . In Brown v. Kendall (1850), Shaw established negligence as the dominant standard of tort law, and ruled that injured plaintiffs have the burden of proving that the defendant was negligent.

Shaw, Lemuel

(born Jan. 9, 1781, Barnstable, Mass., U.S.—died March 30, 1861, Boston, Mass.) U.S. jurist. He was educated at Harvard University. In 1822 he drafted the first municipal charter for Boston virtually without precedents to guide him; it remained in effect until 1913. In 1830 he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, where he served for 30 years. His rulings were formative in the development of both Massachusetts and national jurisprudence. In particular, his ruling in favour of a striking labour union (1842) provided the first major precedent for removing unions from the province of the law of conspiracy, and his decision upholding the city's segregated schools (1849) was later reflected in the “separate but equal” doctrine propounded by the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), though it also led Massachusetts to pass the only 19th-century American desegregation law. His daughter married Herman Melville.

Shaw, Lemuel (1781–1861) judge; born in Barnstable, Mass. The son of a Congregational minister, he was educated at home and worked as a journalist while he read law. Admitted to the bar in 1804, he established a lucrative practice in Boston. As chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1830 to 1860, his rulings on railroad, utility, and other commercial cases had a major impact on the development of the nation's commercial and constitutional law. In 1850 he presided over the sensational trial of Harvard professor John W. Webster, convicted of murdering Dr. George Parkman. His daughter married the novelist Herman Melville.