John Milton Goodenow (ca. 1782–1838), attorney, public official, and judge, was born in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He taught school, studied law in several northeastern states, and operated a mercantile business in Maine before moving around 1812 to Ohio, where he was admitted to the bar, established a legal practice, settled in Steubenville, and was appointed a federal tax collector by James Monroe in 1817. Goodenow sat in the Ohio legislature in 1823, became a prominent Freemason, and served as a Jacksonian in the United States House of Representatives, 1829–30. Following a brief stint on the Ohio supreme court, he relocated to Cincinnati, where he was presiding judge of the local circuit court of common pleas, 1833–34. Goodenow moved with his family to Texas in 1837 and died the following year, during or shortly after his return to Cincinnati (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, repr. 1968, 20 vols. in 10 description ends ; Hartford Connecticut Mirror, 28 Feb. 1814; Steubenville Western Herald, 6 July 1815; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States description ends , 3:97, 98 [12, 15 Dec. 1817]; Chillicothe Supporter, and Scioto Gazette, 25 Jan. 1827; Ohio State Journal, and Columbus Gazette, 9 Jan., 29 June 1833; Columbus Ohio State Journal and Register, 25 July 1838; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 28 July 1838; gravestone inscription in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati).

The volume of american jurisprudence was Goodenow’s Historical Sketches of the Principles and Maxims of American Jurisprudence, in Contrast with the Doctrines of the English Common Law on the Subject of Crimes and Punishments (Steubenville, 1819; Poor, Jefferson’s Library description begins Nathaniel P. Poor, Catalogue. President Jefferson’s Library, 1829 description ends , 10 [no. 598]), which argued against the use of English common-law precedents in criminal cases either in Ohio or in federal courts.

In his lengthy report on the alien and sedition laws, which he completed early in January 1800, James Madison argued strongly against the notion that the common law of England “makes a part of the law of these states; in their united and national capacity” (Madison, Papers, Congress. Ser., 17:303–51, quote on p. 326).

The suit of United States v. Hudson and Goodwin, which originated in the us. district court of connecticut, arose when a newspaper in that state published an allegation in 1806 that TJ and Congress had “in secret voted two millions of dollars as a present to Bonaparte for leave to make a treaty with Spain.” The United States Supreme Court ruled on the case in February 1812 that federal courts “have no common law jurisdiction in cases of libel against the government of the United States” (U.S. Reports description begins Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, 1790–  (title varies; originally issued in distinct editions of separately numbered volumes with U.S. Reports volume numbers retroactively assigned; original volume numbers here given parenthetically) description ends [7 Cranch], 11:32–4, quotes on p. 32).