He was born in
Boston in the
Province of Massachusetts Bay, the son of Daniel Parker, a goldsmith, and Margaret (née Jarvis) Parker. He was descended from John Parker, of
Bideford,
Devon, who emigrated to America in 1629 and whose children settled in
Charlestown. After preparation at the
Latin Grammar School, he entered
Harvard at the age of fourteen and graduated in 1786 with high honors. For a short time he taught at the Latin School. Then, after studying law and being admitted to the
bar, he moved to
Castine, in what was later the state of
Maine. There he set up his law practice, later moving to
Portland and holding several local offices. On June 17, 1794, he married Rebecca Hall, daughter of Joseph Hall of
Medford, a descendant of John Hall who settled in
Concord in 1658. They had eight children. He was a member of the
Brattle Street Church. In 1796, when he was twenty-eight, Parker was elected as a
Federalist to the
5th Congress, but after one term of which little record of activity is available, he retired voluntarily to become
United States Marshal for the Maine district (serving from March 5, 1799, to December 21, 1803). He was displaced upon
Thomas Jefferson's accession to the presidency and returned to his law practice. He had made his impression, however, and on January 28, 1806, Governor
Caleb Strong, upon the death of Justice
Simeon Strong, appointed him an associate justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Parker was inclined to refuse the honor, but upon his friends' urgent solicitations accepted and moved to Boston. He was shortly called upon to sit in the trial of T. O. Selfridge, charged with shooting the son of
Benjamin Austin in a political quarrel. Feelings ran high and Parker won a great reputation for impartiality. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1811. In 1814 he was elevated to the chief justiceship. In 1816 he was inaugurated as first Royall Professor of Law at Harvard. It was not a teaching chair, and in May 1817 he laid before the Corporation a plan for a law school. The plan was adopted and
Harvard Law School was established, with Asahel Stearns as first instructor. Parker continued to lecture until 1827. He was a twenty-year overseer of Harvard and for eleven years a trustee of
Bowdoin; he also served as president of the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820, taking part in the debate when he was relieved from the duties of presiding officer. His published works were confined to his judicial decisions and to a few orations, revealing a somewhat less florid style than that which characterized the times. He remained Chief Justice until his death in Boston, after which he was buried on
Copp's Hill. Parker was elected a member of the
American Antiquarian Society in 1819. Among his more controversial rulings was in
Baker v. Fales, an 1820 case involving the
First Church and Parish in Dedham, the majority of whose regular churchgoers, more conservative
Congregationalists, had left the parish when a liberal
Unitarian pastor was appointed by the town, and claimed the property as their own. It was a time when equity was more important than law. Parker rendered this kind of service, and many of his decisions came to be recognized as authoritative generally through the state and federal courts. "He felt that the rules, not of evidence merely, but of all substantial law must widen with the wants of society". In addition he rendered no small service by consolidating the reforms in the Massachusetts judicial system, instituted in the early years of the century. His character was eminently suited to his role. Above the petinesses of party strife, free from affectation, at the same time both patient and gay, he carried into his public life the rectitude of an active and sincere religious conviction. He would die 3 days after he had said he never felt better and in his career he never missed a day on the bench. He dies July 27 on the day he was to hear the trial of Frank Knapp for the murder of Joseph Story's brother-in-law's uncle Joseph White. ==Publications==