lawyer in Ireland and, later, in the United States, a leader of the nationalist Society of United Irishmen, and elder brother of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet.

After studying medicine and law he was called in 1790 to the Irish bar, where he defended the patriot leader James Napper Tandy and other anti-British political prisoners. In 1795 he boldly took the United Irishmen's oath in open court, was elected secretary of the Society in the same year, and in 1797 became a director.

Before Lord Edward Fitzgerald's abortive revolt of 1798 he had tried to induce the rebels to wait for French military aid. Arrested with others on March 12, 1798, he was imprisoned until 1802, when he was exiled to Brussels and later moved to Paris. There he sought Napoleon I's support for an Irish battalion to fight Great Britain, and it was there that he heard of his brother Robert's execution.

In 1804 he went to the U.S., where he soon became a highly successful lawyer. Before the U.S. Supreme Court he eloquently but unsuccessfully argued the major constitutional case of Gibbons (Gibbons v. Ogden) v. Ogden (1824), in which the court, in accepting the arguments of Daniel Webster and William Wirt based on the federal commerce power, struck down state impediments to interstate commerce.