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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Lost And Found - David Hoffman And The History Of American Legal Ethics, Michael S. Ariens
Lost And Found - David Hoffman And The History Of American Legal Ethics, Michael S. Ariens
Faculty CLE
David Hoffman was a successful Baltimore lawyer who wrote the first study of American law in 1817 and authored the first maxims of American legal ethics. Yet for more than a century after his death, Hoffman was a forgotten figure to American lawyers. Beginning in the late 1970s, Hoffman was re-discovered, and his writings on legal ethics have been favorably cited.
How and why was Hoffman “lost” to American law for over a century, and why he was “found”? Hoffman was lost to history because his view of ethics was premised on republican virtue, specifically the concept of honor. A …
The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986 (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens
The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986 (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens
Faculty Articles
The historical material and resources available for American legal historians is both too much and too little. Hundreds of published case opinions became thousands of opinions by the end of the 1820s, leading lawyers to conclude that no one could know the entirety of the law. Yet this cascade of information is also too little, because the work of treatise writers and magazine editors of the time was ruthlessly focused on then-existing legal concerns.
For these reasons, James L. Haley works within difficult strictures in his book, The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986. Because his story is about …