he read law at night moving fast (too fast, he later thought) through Wood’s four-volume Institute of the Laws of England, Hawkins’s Abridgment of Coke’s Institutes, Salkeld’s hefty Reports, Coke’s Entries, and Hawkins’s massive two-volume Pleas of the Crown in a single volume that weighed fully eight pounds. “Can you imagine any drier reading?” he would one day write to Benjamin Rush, heavily underscoring the question.
