Born: Wednesday, July 12th, 1848
Died: Sunday, October 11th, 1925
Birthplace: Medway, Ohio
Education: Amherst College, B.A. (1871)
Columbia College Department of Law, LL.B. (1872)
Career: Washington Constitutional Convention (1889)
President, Washington State Bar Association (1899)
Tacoma City Attorney (1908-1916)
Served: Monday, November 11th, 1889 to Monday, January 14th, 1895
Political Party: Republican
Theodore Lamme Stiles, one of the first five judges on the Washington Supreme Court, was the only child of Daniel J. and Maria S. (Lamme) Stiles. Born in 1848 in the small farming village of Medway, Ohio, he remained there until his mother’s death in 1865. He and his father moved to Indianapolis where he assisted his father in mercantile business. His father insisted that Theodore have a liberal education, so the younger Stiles spent two years doing preparatory work at Ohio University in Athens. He then enrolled in Amherst College, Massachusetts, taking a classics course, graduating in 1871. He immediately entered Columbia College Department of Law in New York and, by taking an overload of courses, graduated in June 1872. That same year the Indiana bar admitted him and he began practice in Indianapolis.Stiles returned to New York City in 1873 to associate in practice with Edward Jordan, former solicitor for the U. S. treasury department, and Daniel G. Thompson. He remained with the partnership until 1878 when he traveled by Union Pacific Railroad to San Francisco, then proceeded to Los Angeles and to Yuma, Arizona. There he boarded a stage coach and, after a 300 mile ordeal, arrived at Tucson, Arizona, on November 21. He practiced law in Tucson for nine years, but the opportunities of lawyering attracted him to the Pacific Northwest, where Washington statehood seemed imminent.
Judge Stiles moved to Tacoma, arriving on July 4, 1887, and established a legal practice. He married Mary Louise Duff Barbour in 1889. They had one daughter.
That same year, having displayed some interest in Republican politics, he won election as a delegate to the Washington state constitutional convention. He played a leading role at the convention, chairing the Committee on County, Township, and Municipal Organizations and serving on the Rules, Judiciary, and Public Lands committees.
At the close of the convention, Stiles returned to Tacoma and promptly became one of the Pierce County delegates to the Republican state convention, where he served as chairman. The convention delegates felt that Tacoma, as the third largest town in Washington, ought to have one of its residents on the state’s court of last resort. Accordingly, they nominated Stiles for the supreme court. He and his four other Republican brethren thrashed the Democratic opposition in the October balloting for the state’s high court. In drawing lots for terms on the supreme court, Stiles selected the five-year term. He might have served another term, but to assure the renomination of fellow Tacoman, Congressman W. H. Doolittle, Stiles withdrew his name at the 1894 Republican convention. After his term ended, Stiles returned to an active law practice in Tacoma.
While on the bench Stiles authored 335 of the court’s majority opinions, nearly one-fourth of the court’s total of 1,187 opinions. He missed only twenty cases, dissented only sixty-seven times, and often provided the swing vote in closely divided cases. The American Law Reports referenced 188 of his opinions, an indication of the respect in which the profession held him. The figures alone suggest he was a leader on that first court.
Judge Stiles was an activist by the standards of the time. He proved willing to give a close scrutiny to the constitutionality of legislative enactments and, if necessary, to declare them void. In an address to the Washington State Bar Association in 1897 he expressed his view of court power:
The courts are, and in the nature of things, must be the appellate body, and their power to review extends over the entire domain of public and private right. Once it is conceded, as it is now, universally, that a statute may be declared void as unconstitutional, there is no denying the position of judicial supremacy. Whenever the legislature enacts a law it thereby assumes and asserts it is constitutional; and whenever the court declares the contrary, the judgment of the court prevails, and there is no power except that of the people in constitutional convention that can reverse it.
In 1908 voters elected him Tacoma City Attorney and he served until 1916. In that capacity he played a decisive role in the development of the Nisqually power plant and the Green River water system, both milestones in Tacoma’s growth. Throughout the time Stiles practiced law he remained active in professional organizations, serving as president of the Washington State Bar Association in 1899.
Judge Stiles developed a reputation as a scholar and as the state’s leading authority on the Washington Constitution. He often presented provocative and scholarly papers at the state bar’s annual conventions. One commentator noted:
During his term of office he wrote many opinions, all of them characterized by an unusual elegance and clarity of diction. He was a sound lawyer, a facile writer, an able judge. When a member of the bar reads one of his opinions he is at once impressed with the fact that he has come across the work of one of those rare beings, a lawyer with style. The literary quality of his work is unsurpassed.
Stiles belonged to the Masons and the Union Club in Tacoma. An old friend, Judge Overton Ellis, remembered his colleague:
Judge Stiles had an active, incisive mind which was never impaired to the day of his death. Just a few days before his death [I] chanced to meet him on the street. We stood for some time discussing a legal problem in which he was much interested. I was much impressed, as always, by the clearness of his thought and the ease of his expression, and when he walked on, the thought obtruded itself: How noble a thing is a ripe old age when occupied with a keen mind and a clear heart. Both of these he possessed in a superlative degree.
Selected References
C. S. Reinhart, History of the Supreme Court of the Territory and State of Washington (n.d.), pp. 101-103; Seattle Daily Times, 17 Sept. 1889 and 21 Sept. 1889; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 18 Sept. 1889; Charles Sheldon and Michael Stohr-Gillmore, “In the Beginning: The Washington Supreme Court a Century Ago,” University of Puget Sound Law Review, vol. 12 (1989), pp. 247-282; W. C. Wolfe, Sketches of Washingtonians (1906), p. 286.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
