He aligned with the state's industrial leaders against public health advocates, and banned discrimination in the issuance of life insurance policies.

The son of farmers, he attended Lexington Academy and Hopkins Classical School in Cambridge, and graduated from Harvard University in 1856.

[4] While serving in Congress, Robinson was nominated to run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1883, against the colorful incumbent Democrat Benjamin Butler.

It required even laborers hired by state and municipal governments to have minimal certification from a civil service commission established for the purpose.

This effectively reduced certain types of patronage dispensed by elected officials, and may have been a Republican move to curtail the growing power of predominantly Democratic Irish-American urban party bosses.

The state's textile and manufacturing interests, hostile to the board's calls for more significant pollution control legislation, prevailed on Robinson to replace the chairman with a more business-friendly choice.

He was able to get Borden's inconsistent inquest testimony excluded from the criminal trial (on the grounds that she had not been represented in those hearings), and was also able to cast significant doubt on the reliability of several witnesses to the events surrounding the murders.

Borden was ultimately acquitted of the criminal charges, and Robinson was a highly visible presence in the media circus that attended the trial.

[5] Another well-known client that Robinson took on was the Order of the Iron Hall, nominally a fraternal benefit society founded in Indiana in 1881.

[12] Tontines were illegal under Massachusetts insurance regulations, and the Iron Hall was threatened in 1887 with an injunction to stop doing business in the state.

[13] It hired Robinson to appear before the legislature, and he was able to secure legislative alteration to the statute governing fraternal societies that would permit continued operation.

[15] (The Iron Hall was one of the more high-profile of a large number of similar investment schemes, in which the operators of the organization also frequently siphoned funds away in the guise of salaries and expenses.