Downs No Title
| Publication year | 2002 |
| Citation | Vol. 2002 No. 06 |
June 2002. Downs No Title
The following profile of the late Sterry Robinson Waterman, who served as judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, is the first of a series to be published in the Journal. Judge Waterman practiced law in St. Johnsbury for twenty-nine years before he became a judge in 1955.
Judge Waterman was one of thirty-eight members of the bench and bar interviewed by freelance writer and oral historian Virginia Downs in 1978 and 1979. The project was proposed at a meeting of an ad hoc committee of the Vermont Bench and Bar in April of 1978 to tie in with planned bicentennial celebrations of the state's legal beginnings in 1779. It was in that year that Stephen Bradley and Noah Smith were sworn in as Vermont's first official lawyers.
It was agreed that the profiles would include biographical material and anecdotes from the interviewees' legal activities. This will be the first time these oral histories have appeared in any publication.
Born in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1901, Sterry Waterman moved with his family to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in 1911. He graduated from St. Johnsbury Academy in 1918, and from Dartmouth College in 1922. He applied for a Rhodes Scholarship after graduation, encouraged by one of his sponsors, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Slack of St. Johnsbury. When asked by the committee what he expected to learn if he went to Oxford, his answer was, "prepare to be an author of fiction or a professor of history." When he did not make the Rhodes finals, the chairman of the committee, John Sherburne, a superior court judge who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, advised him, "That is all very fine, but it seems to me that with your background you would find the law a pleasant occupation"
Waterman entered the class of 1925 at Harvard Law School, leaving before completing one year to accept a position in Washington, D.C., on the invitation of Walter Husband, Commissioner- General of Immigration. Husband had lived for years in St. Johnsbury and knew the Waterman family. Waterman continued his legal education, taking courses at George Washington University Law School. In the summer of 1925, he took the District of Columbia bar exam, and was admitted to practice in February of 1926.
In June of 1926, Waterman returned to Vermont and became affiliated with Rolf Searles and Arthur Graves. He took the Vermont Bar exam and was admitted to the Vermont Supreme Court in 1927. In 1928, Searles and Graves became Searles, Graves & Waterman. He opened his own firm in 1930, supplementing a meager income by running for state's attorney in 1932 and serving two terms. "This was during the Depression, and the fixed salary for...
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