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'From Savigny Through Sir Henry Maine': Roscoe Pound’S Flawed Portrait Of James Coolidge Carter’S Historical Jurisprudence, Lewis A. Grossman

Working Papers

In Roscoe Pound's scathing 1909 review of Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function, American jurist James Coolidge Carter's magnum opus, Pound asserted that Carter's conception of law "comes from Savigny through Sir Henry Maine." Frederich Karl von Savigny and Sir Henry Maine were the most prominent representatives of the German and English historical schools of jurisprudence, respectively. For his part, Carter was the leading representative of historical jurisprudence in the United States.

Other scholars, following Pound, have similarly linked Carter to Savigny and Maine, especially to the former. Moreover, various authors have noted the great effect these European jurists had …

James Coolidge Carter And Mugwump Jurisprudence, Lewis Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article examines the thought of James Coolidge Carter, a leading legal theorist, practicing attorney, and political reformer of the Gilded Age, most famous for his resistance to codification. Carter, like many elite legal figures in the late nineteenth century, belonged to the genteel urban political culture known as the Mugwumps. I show how Carter's suspicion of legislators, his faith in courts, his equation of the common law with custom, and his condemnation of legislation inconsistent with custom, reflected his Mugwump world view. I also explore how Carter, like other Mugwumps, struggled to accommodate traditional modes of thought to the …