Law Commons^™

Susan Reynolds, John G. H. Hudson, David L. D'Avray

Book Chapters

Susan Reynolds was elected to the British Academy after she had worked out a new framework for the medieval history of England, France, Germany and northern Italy. The breakthrough book was her Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300 (1984); it brought all levels of society together in a synthesis, and was a stunning achievement. Her subsequent Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994) left a generation reluctant even to use the word ‘feudalism’, and other important contributions continued until not long before she died. In 2001 she was honoured with a Festschrift entitled Law, Laity and Solidarities.

Owen J. Roberts, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

Roberts, Owen Josephus (1875-1955). Lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice. Roberts was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1895 and from its law school in 1898. He taught there part-time beginning almost immediately until 1919, reaching the rank of full professor in 1907. While operating a profitable dairy farm, Roberts practiced law privately, punctuated by a three-year stint beginning in 1901 as first assistant district attorney of Philadelphia County. Tall and robust, he made a striking figure in both classroom and courtroom.

John Henry Wigmore, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

Wigmore, John Henry (1863-1943). Law professor and dean. Wigmore was born and reared in San Francisco. His parents were both immigrants, his mother from England and his father, of English heritage, from Ireland. Harry, as he was known familiarly, was the oldest and most favored of his extraordinarily doting mother's seven children. The family was prosperous - his father had an importing business - and Harry was educated principally in private schools. He then attended Harvard College, prompting the mother to move the family to Massachusetts to be close to him. After graduating in 1883, he spent a brief interlude …

Charles Evans Hughes, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

Hughes, Charles Evans (1862-1948). Lawyer, politician, diplomat, and chief justice of the United States. Hughes was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., the son of a Baptist preacher from the English- Welsh border country who changed congregations from time to time. Young Hughes spent his earliest years in several locations in New York and New Jersey before the family settled in Brooklyn. A precocious child, he was educated both at home and in public school. At age 14, he began college at Madison (now Colgate) University, a Baptist institution. After his sophomore year, he transferred to Brown, which also had a …

Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the …

The Reluctant Justice: Lewis F. Powell Jr. Personifies The 'Quality Of Attentiveness', Christina B. Whitman

Book Chapters

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 reluctantly and at an age when many professionals are anticipating retirement rather than a career change.

But the Court suited him. He grew to love the work, although he often found it agonizing, and he thrived on the role he played in the history of the Constitution.

By the time he retired in 1987, after more than 15 years on the Court, Powell had come to represent a kind of ideal justice -- moderate, flexible, careful. In a sense, his entire life had been preparing him for this …

Charles Evans Hughes As International Lawyer, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

In 1884, Charles Evans Hughes qualified as a member of the New York bar at age 22. After seven years of practice in New York City, in precarious health, he took a respite and became a law professor at Cornell. Two years later, his health restored, he returned to his metropolitan practice. He remained there in relative obscurity until he was 43, in 1905, when he was appointed counsel to a legislative committee investigating local utilities. A far more renowned investigative assignment for the Armstrong Insurance Commission soon followed that catapulted Hughes to national fame. In 1906 he received, unsought, …