[1][2] One evaluation of his service on the state supreme court said: A strong and sagacious man, with the authority which the position of chief justice always gives, would have been able to achieve a most enviable standing, laying the foundation of her jurisprudence broad and deep.

Studying law in a clerk's office, his attention had been directed to the forms of pleas and entries, not to the broad principles of justice.

For him a lawsuit was rather a means of settling nice points of special pleading than of adjusting the rights of parties.

During his whole official career his object was to seek out new refinements of pleading, and he impressed upon our jurisprudence a degree of technicality which it was never able to cast off until the adoption of the Code.

He resumed private practice in Little Rock from 1865 to 1873,[1] though "[i]n his later years he did little, for the adoption of the civil code had deprived him of his principal engine of legal warfare, the common-law pleading".