For the two years following his graduation from college he studied law at Yale, at Harvard, and in his father's office. In 1863 he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law. His seventeen years of service as an associate justice and chief justice of the supreme court of his state and his four years as governor, coming as they did in the latter part of his life, may have had a tendency to obscure for his later contemporaries the fact that he was at least as much as anything else an eminently successful lawyer. In the practice of the law he won distinction both in his own state and outside, and with it the financial emoluments that usually accompany success at the bar. He was keenly alive to the practical side of the lawyer's work and never lost his zest for it. Till almost the very end of his life he maintained a law office, which he visited daily as long as his health would permit, and kept adding to his law library. As late as 1919 his book "The Young Man and the Law" revealed him still at heart a lawyer. In 1878, he was one of the founders of the American Bar Association and served as President of the American Bar Association from 1890–1891. For twelve years (1907–1919) he was the director of the American Bar Association's Comparative Law Bureau (as well as its "Annual Bulletin"'s editor for general jurisprudence).