The American Codification Movement, A Study of Antebellum Legal Reform

Between 1820 and 1850 American legal commentators became obsessed with whether legislatures should codify, either in whole or in part, the common law of the American states. Indeed, [a]lmost every law writer after 1825 felt compelled to include his views [on codification] in his works of whatever sort. The enormous literature that emerged from this period survives today to fascinate modern legal historians, who seem to have developed their own obsession for the codification issue. As Lawrence Friedman has said

Corporate Law Practice as a Public Calling

Law is a service profession; but it is also a public profession. Lawyers are supposed to serve their clients faithfully and zealously; but they also are supposed to work, both on and off the job of representing clients, as counselors, citizens, reformers, community activists, and public servants, to maintain the integrity of the framework of laws, institutions, and procedures that constrain their clients\u27 practices and their own-and not just to maintain that framework, but to help transform it so that it more nearly will approach the conditions ofjustice and civic community. The lawyer is to function, in Talcott Parsons\u27 words, as a kind of buffer between the illegitimate desires of his client and the social interest. He represents the client before the legal system; but he also represents the legal system to the client

In-house experiments in large space structures at the Air Force Wright Aeronautical Laboratories Flight Dynamics Laboratory

The Flight Dynamics Laboratory is committed to an in-house, experimental investigation of several technical areas critical to the dynamic performance of future Air Force large space structures. The advanced beam experiment was successfully completed and provided much experience in the implementation of active control approaches on real hardware. A series of experiments is under way in evaluating ground test methods on the 12 meter trusses with significant passive damping. Ground simulated zero-g response data from the undamped truss will be compared directly with true zero-g flight test data. The performance of several leading active control approaches will be measured and compared on one of the trusses in the presence of significant passive damping. In the future, the PACOSS dynamic test article will be set up as a test bed for the evaluation of system identification and control techniques on a complex, representative structure with high modal density and significant passive damping

The Case for (and Against) Harvard

A Review of Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education by William P. LaPian

Professionalisms Old and New, Good and Bad

I\u27m very happy and honoured to have been invited to speak at this conference. Our subject is an urgent and important one: how can the legal professions develop realistic, maintainable, sets of ethical standards and practices that are adequate to the functional requirements of the lawyer\u27s task, in an intensively competitive and commercialised environment of practice

The Path of the Lawyer

In Louisa May Alcott\u27s Eight Cousins, first published in 1875, a young woman called Rose is being given a conventional girl\u27s upbringing by her aunts in a dark and stuffy old mausoleum of a house. Then Uncle Alec becomes Rose\u27s new guardian. He strides into the house, throws open the curtains and windows, and hustles his ward into the outdoors. He throws out her old confining clothes and buys her new ones, changes her diet, and with his vigorous scientific intellect begins helping her to clear her mind of received opinions. With the very first paragraph of The Path of the Law, we know Uncle Alec has arrived and that the old Victorian mansion will never be the same again

The Devil and Daniel Webster

Professors Konefsky and King have done heroic and intelligent labor in striving to make the records of Daniel Webster\u27s practice accessible and interesting. Since Webster\u27s own law office files have been lost, the editors have had to reconstruct his practice from other sources, in particular the records of the forty-one New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and federal courts in which he appeared. They have also published a good deal of Webster\u27s correspondence on legal matters. For each of Webster\u27s fields or subfields of practice, the editors have selected a representative case or two, presented all the documents they could find relating to the cases (from requests for legal advice through summonses, pleadings, depositions, notes for arguments before judge or jury, to post-trial motions and proceedings), and-most usefully-supplied an introduction providing the social and legal background to each field. In what are probably the most revealing chapters, the Legal Papers pull away from this fairly standard format to offer perspectives on nineteenth-century practice that cut across substantive legal categories. There are sections on legal education; on the general scope of practice in a rural community (Boscawen, N.H.), provincial town (Portsmouth, N.H.), and major city (Boston); on ethics; on attorney\u27s fees; and on the connections between practice and politics. These general sections lie at the heart of the editors\u27 enterprise. Conscientious though they are in the reporting of legal minutiae, Konefsky and King are really most concerned to furnish materials toward a social history of the legal profession. In this ambition they have succeeded splendidly

The Law School, the Profession, and Arthurs\u27 Humane Professionalism

Julian Webb has done us all a service with his sympathetic reconstruction of Harry Arthurs\u27 celebrated 1983 report on legal education, Law and Leaming/Le droit et Ie savoir. Read again today, the report has all the character of its principal author: it is humane, generous, and rational; ambitious in aim though modest in tone; and acerbically direct in its diagnosis of what is wrong with legal education and what needs to be put right. It took aim at what was then the almost exclusive, and remains the dominant, occupation of the law schools, teaching doctrinal black-letter law. Indeed one of its principal and most subversive critiques is that the black-letter curriculum is not very practical, except in the sense it that provides some intellectual discipline; that only in clinics do students confront problems as a whole, as lawyers would confront them; and that if schools were serious about preparing students for practice, they would do it very differently. One can readily see why many law teachers responded to the report with what Constance Backhouse recalls as overwhelming ... negativity, calling it idiocy and poppycock