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After leaving college, he taught private pupils and a school at Yarmouth for about a year, and then was commissioned a lieutenant in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment on June 28, 1864.
Returning to Boston at the close of the war, his regiment was discharged. Having studied law while teaching before entering the army, he entered the office of Judge Josiah G. Abbott and was admitted to the bar on the twelfth of April, 1866. After beginning practice, he also began to write. His book on subrogation, still in use, was published in 1882. For many years he was associated with the late General Blackmar, and they practised law together until 1894, when Sheldon was appointed a judge of the Superior Court.
Upon his retirement from the Supreme Judicial Court, at the age of seventy-two, there still remained for him some memorable years of service and effectiveness. He was chosen president of the Massachusetts Bar Association in 1915, and it was largely due to his fostering care that the Massachusetts Law Quarterly was launched and began its successful work. He declined a nomination as president but served as vice-president for the Bar Association of the City of Boston, and was at the head of a committee of three, before whom were brought, in the first instance, the complaints against a prosecuting officer which afterwards reached a sensational ending. In 1919, he became the chairman of the Judicature Commission, appointed by Calvin Coolidge -- then Governor of the Commonwealth -- to " investigate the judicature of the commonwealth" and consider and report upon the proposed reforms in judicial procedure. Prior to that time, in 1898, he had been chairman of a commission on "Simplification of Criminal Pleading," which framed the statute of criminal procedure, so that his work in the Judicature Commission was merely a continuation -- upon a larger and broader field -- of his prior labors. To the work of the Judicature Commission he brought an effective combination of theory and practice, of appreciation of old methods with willingness to look forward to the new.
At the conclusion of his labors upon the Judicature Commission in 1921, his active work ended, and in the succeeding years he endured with fortitude the advances of old age, cheered, we trust, with the knowledge of the affection and respect of his colleagues and of the Bar, and of the appreciation of the standing to which his services had brought him in the community.
Sheldon died on January 14, 1926.
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