Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Legal History Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst Oct 2009

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …


Facts, Information, And The Newly Discovered Record In Pierson V. Post, James E. Krier Jan 2009

Facts, Information, And The Newly Discovered Record In Pierson V. Post, James E. Krier

Articles

Unlike Professors Fernandez, Banner, and Donahue, I am not a legal historian; like them, however, I am much interested in the comings and goings of the famous old case about the fox. It figures significantly in my course on property and in my co-authored book on the subject. The background of the case is noted in the book and will be updated in the next edition to take account of Fernandez's discovery of the hitherto lost judgment roll in the case.I Her find yields many facts, but, in my judgment, virtually no information. Facts are necessary to information, but not …