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Thanks to Moleskinerie for linking to All Deliberate Speed.  Here's a little bit of historical background of that shot. 

In New Jersey, during the early history of American law, as in many states, books of cases - what lawyers call reporters - were named after the scribe (the Reporter of Decisions) that edited, formatted, and recorded the decisions of the courts.  Thus, the reporter for the United States Supreme Court was called  Dallas, after Alexander J. Dallas, from 1790 to 1800, from 1801 to 1815, the reporter was named Cranch, after Reporter of Decisions William Cranch, from 1816 to 1827, it was called Wheat. after Reporter of Decisions Henry Wheaton, and so forth until 1874, when the reports were published under the following three titles: The United States Reports (abbreviated as [vol] U.S. [page]), the Supreme Court Reports (abbreviated as [vol.] S.Ct. [page]), and the Law Edition Reporter (abbreviated as [vol] L.Ed. [page]). 

Similarly, New Jersey case law was, for a time, named after the Reporter of Decisions for the Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey.  Peter D. Vroom, Esq., D-NJ (a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1839 to 1841), was a prominent Trenton attorney that served in the 26th Congress of the United States (we're up to the 109th Congress, just for perspective).  After he lost reelection, he returned to his legal practice in what was then the rather bucolic city of Trenton.  He must have had quite a following.  In 1853, he was nominated to take up the mantle as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, but he declined the nomination.  Instead, he served as Minister to Prussia from 1853 to 1857.  Again, after his service ended, he returned to Trenton.  In 1862, Vroom began his decade of scholarly service as the recorder of decisions for the Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey.  Until 1872, that was what Vroom did: wrote the law.  I find that interesting, as if Vroom chose to be like the butler in Remains of the Day.  He was happy to write the law, but he did not accept the nomination to make the law. 

A uniform national reporter system was not developed until 1887 (after 100 years of case law), when the West Publishing Company, which is still one of the two dominant legal publishing companies, developed the Northeast Reporter.  See Syracuse University, Introduction to Judicial Information, Judicial Case Law. 

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I received the gift of two books from a close friend and his family during my recent illness. One of these, a compendium of legal quotations, has been particularly fun to leaf through for aphorisms to use in my upcoming appellate brief. I thought I'd share two with you, just to show the occasional beauty of legal writing:

"There is in many, if not in all men, a constant inward struggle between the principles of good and evil; and because a man has grossly fallen, and at the time of his fall added the guilt of hypocrisy to another sort of immorality, it is not necessary, therefore, to believe that his whole life has been false, or that all the good which he ever professed was insincere or unreal."

Roundell Palmer, Lord Chancellor, First Earl of Selborne, Symington v. Symington, L.R. 2 Sc. & D. 428 (1875).

"Justice is not a cloistered virtue: she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men."

James Richard Atkin, First Baron of Aberdovey, Ambard v. Attorney General for Trinidad, A.C. 322, 335 (1936).

Both cited in Elizabeth Frost-Knappman & David S. Shrager, A Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Quotations (Barnes & Noble, 1998).