In 1785 he had the pleasure, as Chief Magistrate of his hative city, to welcome to their session therein, the old Congress under the Presidency of his old friend Richard Henry Lee, and filled with others of his Revolutionary colleagues as members; the same agreeable duty he performed in March, 1789, to the first Congress under the present Constitution, and a few weeks after, he welcomed Wasnixcton himself as President of the Republic, which their joint labors, in diverse but equally essential fields of action, had helped to establish.

As Mayor of the city of New York Mr. Duane not only held civil and criminal courts for the city, but was included in the commission of Oyer and Terminer for the county. AsaJ udge of the latter court, at the request-of Judge Hobart of the Supreme Court, also in the commission, he delivered the charge to the first Grant Jury summoned in that court, in the city, after the war, on the 18th May, 1781--a mark of distention that would only have been paid to one whose eminence in the country and profession were such as to elicit no invidious observations. In the Mayor's Court held by him much business was dispatched, and in that court were the then young lawyers, Hamilton, Burr, Troup, Lewis, Brockholst and Edward Livingston, Hoffman and others, trained up to the eminence they afterwards attained in their profession. Among the cases decided by him in 1784, and which was published, was that of Rutgers' vs. Waddington, involving the validity of what was called.the Trespass Act, passed just before the close of the war to enable the whigs, i had fled from New York to recover damages from those who had occupied it while in possession of the enemy. This case excited great sensation in the: community of that day, and became the subject of Legislative resolutions ; and it isa curious coincidence