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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
A Secretary's Absence For A Law School Examination, Todd C. Peppers
A Secretary's Absence For A Law School Examination, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
The May 5, 1893 letter from Justice Horace Gray to Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller touches upon several different strands of Supreme Court history. To place the letter in context, we need to briefly discuss the creation of the law clerk position as well as the different functions of this first generation of law clerks. And we need to talk about the untimely death of a young Harvard Law School graduate named Moses Day Kimball.
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Scholarly Articles
Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form of law review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their experiences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contradistinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, …
Judicial Assistants Or Junior Judges: The Hiring, Utilization, And Influence Of Law Clerks, Chad Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Judicial Assistants Or Junior Judges: The Hiring, Utilization, And Influence Of Law Clerks, Chad Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Law clerks have been part of the American judicial system since 1882, when Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray hired a young Harvard Law School graduate named Thomas Russell to serve as his assistant. Justice Gray paid for his law clerks out of his own pocket until Congress authorized funds for the hiring of “stenographic clerks” in 1886. The Gray law clerks, however, were not mere stenographers. Justice Gray assigned them a host of legal and non-legal job duties. His clerks discussed the record and debated the attendant legal issues with Justice Gray prior to oral argument, conducted legal research, and …
The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson
The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson
Scholarly Articles
I teach a pair of two-credit legal history courses: History of Early American Law and History of Modern American Law. I teach a variety of other courses, but none is more fun to teach than legal history.