Judge Roy Bean became a legend within his lifetime as fact and fiction intertwined around his career dispensing what he called the Law West of the Pecos. In this building, and often on its porch before spectators on horseback, he held court while also interrupting proceedings to serve customers of the other businesses he operated there. His law library consisted of a single 1879 copy of the revised statutes of Texas, which he seldom consulted, relying instead on his own ideas of justice backed by bluff and bluster. Because Langtry had no jail, offenses were treated as punishable by fines, which Bean pocketed, and drunken prisoners were sometimes chained to mesquite trees in front of the building until they were sober enough for trial. He reached a height of notoriety on February 21, 1896, when he staged the banned Fitzsimmons-Maher heavyweight title fight on a sand bar in the Rio Grande on Mexican territory near his front porch, outwitting Texas Rangers sent to stop it and making a handsome profit. The building was named the Jersey Lilly for the English actress Lillie Langtry, whom Bean admired and for whom he claimed to have named the town; although he often wrote letters to her late into the night, he never saw her, because her only visit to Langtry came in 1904, less than a year after his death.