Akhil Amar Appointed Sterling Professor of Law

Akhil Amar Appointed Sterling Professor of Law

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet (3 March 1829 - 11 March 1894) was an English lawyer ,judge and anti-libertarian writer, created 1st Baronet Stephen by Queen Victoria.

Evidence Act

The Evidence Act of the same year（1972年） was entirely Stephen's own. It consolidated the rules of judicial proof, and endeavoured to connect them by legislative authority with a logical theory of probability set forth in the act itself. This part of the act has been criticized, but it is characteristic of Stephen's anxiety never to shirk a difficulty. To some extent the Contract Act may be charged with similar over-ambition; but its more practical defects are evidently due to the acceptance by the original framers of unsatisfactory statements which, coming to India with a show of authority, naturally escaped minute criticism amid the varied business of the legislative department. Besides the special work of legislation, Stephen had to attend to the current administrative business of his department, often heavy enough to occupy the whole of an ordinary able man's attention, and he took his full share in the general deliberations of the viceroy's council. His last official act was the publication of a minute on the administration of justice which pointed the way to reforms not yet fully realized, and is still most valuable for every one who wishes to understand the judicial system of British India. Stephen, mainly for family reasons, came home in the spring of 1872. During the voyage he made a pastime of meditating and writing a series of articles which took the form of his book entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)--a protest against John Stuart Mill's neoutilitarianism. Most famously he attacked the thesis of J S Mill's essay On Liberty and argued for legal compulsion, coercion and restraint in the interests of morality and religion.

Application of Indian laws

Indian experience had supplied Stephen with the motive for his next line of activity, which future historians of the common law may well regard as his most eminent title to remembrance. The government of India had been driven by the conditions of the Indian judicial system to recast a considerable part of the English law which had been informally imported. Criminal law procedure, and a good deal of commercial law, had been or were being put in a shape intelligible to civilian magistrates, and fairly within the comprehension of any intelligent man who would give a moderate amount of pains to mastering the text of the new codes. The rational substance of the law had been preserved, while the disorder and the excessive technicalities were removed. Why should not the same procedure be as practicable and profitable in England? It was Jeremy Bentham's ideal of codification, to be put in practice with the knowledge of actual business and legal habits, and the lack of which had made Bentham's plans unworkable. For the next half-dozen years Fitzjames Stephen was an ardent missionary in this cause. The mission failed for the time as to the specific undertakings in which Stephen made his experiments, but it had a large indirect success which has not yet been adequately recognized. Stephen published, by way of private exposition, digests in code form of the law of evidence and the criminal law.

著作

• General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863)
• Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)
• History of the Criminal Law of England (1883)
• The story of Nuncomar and the impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
  

An eleven-volume set of his collected writings is currently being prepared for Oxford University Press by the Editorial Institute at Boston University.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fitzjames_Stephen

John Henry Wigmore

John Henry Wigmore (4 March 1863 – 20 April 1943) was an American jurist and expert in the law of evidence.

Born in San Francisco, son of John and Harriet Joyner Wigmore, he attended Harvard University and earned the degrees AB in 1883, AM in 1884, and LLB in 1887. He subsequently taught law in Tokyo for several years and then later at Northwestern University. He was the dean of Northwestern Law School from 1901 to 1929. In 1904 he published his most famous work, Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law (usually known as Wigmore on Evidence or just Wigmore), an encyclopedic survey of the development of the law of evidence.

Wigmore's evidence rules are still used by many U.S. courts, including the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Among other things, these rules hold that evidence inadvertently disclosed is fair game in court, even if that evidence should have been protected by attorney-client privilege. The Wigmore rules might conflict with the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which endorse so called "claw-back" agreements, under which a producing party can assert privilege over evidence after it has been produced.

In the 1880s Wigmore was also a leader for election law reform issues such as the secret voting method, and fair ballot access laws.

He also developed a graphical method for analysis of evidence known as the Wigmore chart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Wigmore

James Bradley Thayer

James Bradley Thayer (January 15, 1831 – February 14, 1902) American legal writer and educationist.

Born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, he graduated at Harvard College in 1852, and at the Harvard Law School in 1856, in which year he was admitted to the bar of Suffolk county and began to practice in Boston. In 1873-83 he was Royall professor of law at Harvard; in 1883 he was transferred to the professorship which after 1893 was known as the Weld professorship and which he held until his death on February 14, 1902! He took an especial interest in the historical evolution of law.

He wrote: The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law (1893); Cases on Evidence (1892); Cases on Constitutional Law (1895); The Development of Trial by Jury (1896); A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898), and a short life of John Marshall (1901); and edited the twelfth edition of Kent's Commentaries and the Letters of Chauncey Wright (1877), and A Westward Journey with Mr. Emerson (1884).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley_Thayer

Simon Greenleaf

Simon Greenleaf (December 5, 1783 – October 6, 1853), American jurist, was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

证据法学著作
Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists Examined by The Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice, reprint of the 1874 edition, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984). ISBN 0-8010-3803-0

生平
Greenleaf's family traces its ancestry back to Edmund Greenleaf who lived in Ipswich, Suffolk in England and then emigrated and settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The Greenleaf family flourished in this part of Massachusetts for almost one hundred fifty years prior to Simon's birth in 1783. His father was Moses Greenleaf and he married Lydia Parsons the daughter of Rev. Jonathan Parsons of Newburyport. His older brother, Moses Greenleaf (1777-1834), became a distinguished surveyor and map-maker in the state of Maine.

In 1790 Simon's parents moved to New Gloucester in Maine but left him in the care of his grandfather, the Hon. Jonathan Greenleaf, in Newburyport where he was educated at the Latin school and studied the Greco-Roman classics. When he turned sixteen years old he then rejoined his parents in New Gloucester. In 1801 he joined the law office of Ezekiel Whitman (the later Chief Justice of Maine) and in 1806 was admitted to the Cumberland County bar as a legal practitioner. On September 18, 1806 he married Hannah Kingman.

He then opened a legal practice at Standish, but six months afterwards relocated to Gray, where he practised for twelve years, and in 1818 removed to Portland. Greenleaf's political preferences were aligned with the Federalist party, and in 1816 he was an unsuccessful candidate for that party in Cumberland County for the Senate. He was reporter of the Supreme Court of Maine from 1820 to 1832, and published nine volumes of Reports of Cases in the Supreme Court of Maine (1820-1832).

He was awarded the honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Harvard in 1834, received the same honor from Amherst in 1845, and again from the University of Alabama in 1852.

法学著作

Greenleaf's principal work of legal scholarship is a Treatise on the Law of Evidence (3 vols., 1842-1853), and which remained a standard textbook in American law throughout the Nineteenth century. He also published A Full Collection of Cases Overruled, Denied, Doubted, or Limited in their Application, taken from American and English Reports (1821). He prepared and published Reports of Cases Argued and Determined by the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Maine in nine volumes (1820-1832). He revised for the American courts William Cruise's Digest of Laws respecting Real Property (3 vols., 1849-1850). Greenleaf was also the author of A Brief Inquiry into the Origin and Principles of Free Masonry (1820), and wrote a memoir of the life of his colleague Joseph Story - A Discourse Commemorative of the Life and Character of the Hon. Joseph Story (1845).

Mentioned by actor Corbin Bernsen, playing Mitch Kendrick, in Judgment (a.k.a. Apocalypse IV)(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257408/).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Greenleaf

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bentham has a complicated publishing history. Most of his writing was never published in his own lifetime; much of that which was published (see this list of published works) was prepared for publication by others.

Works published in Bentham's lifetime included:

• Fragment on Government (1776). This was an unsparing criticism of some introductory passages relating to political theory in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The book, published anonymously, was well-received and credited to some of the greatest minds of the time. Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law. Bentham's "Fragment" was only a small part of a "Commentary on the Commentaries", which remained unpublished until the twentieth century.
• Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed for publication 1780, published 1789)
• Defence of Usury (1787)
• Panopticon (1787, 1791).
• Emancipate your Colonies (1793)
• Traité de Législation Civile et Penale (1802, edited by Étienne Dumont. 3 vols)
• Punishments and Rewards (1811)
• A Table of the Springs of Action (1815)
• Parliamentary Reform Catechism (1817)
• Church-of-Englandism (printed 1817, published 1818)
• Elements of the Art of Packing (1821)
• The Influence of Natural Religion upon the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822, written with George Grote and published under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp)
• Not Paul But Jesus (1823, published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith)
• Book of Fallacies (1824)
• A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825)

Several of Bentham's works appeared first in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont. Some made their first appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from Dumont's 1802 collection (and redaction) of Bentham's writing on civil and penal legislation.

John Bowring, a British politician who had been Bentham's trusted friend, was appointed his literary executor and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1838-1843: Bowring based his edition on previously published editions (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and did not reprint Bentham's works on religion at all. Bowring's work has been criticized, although it includes such interesting writings on international relations as Bentham's A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace written 1786-89, which forms part IV of the Principles of International Law.

In 1952-54 Wilhelm Stark published a three-volume set, "Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings," in which he attempted to bring together all of Bentham's writings on economic matters, including both published and unpublished material. Not trusting Bowring's edition, he painstakingly reviewed thousands of Bentham's original manuscripts and notes, a task made monumentally more difficult due to the manner in which they had been left by Bentham and organized by Bowring.

Bentham left manuscripts amounting to some 5,000,000 words. Since 1968, the Bentham Project at University College London have been busy working on an edition of his collected work. So far, 25 volumes have appeared; there may be as many still to come before the project is completed.

Barack Obama Wins the Presidency （11:05 p.m. ET Tuesday, November 4, 2008）

Barack Obama defeats John McCain to become first African American to win the White House.

Washingtonpost's editorials, Wednesday, November 5, 2008; Page A22

President Obama
A new direction in challenging times, a new dawn in the nation's long struggle to bridge its racial divide.

BARACK OBAMA, 44th president of the United States: Like so many millions of Americans, we savor the phrase, and congratulate the winner, and celebrate the momentousness of the occasion. It is momentous for the generational change it heralds, the geographic realignment it reflects and the racial progress it both acknowledges and promises. Most of all, Mr. Obama's victory is momentous for the opportunity it presents to put the country on a new and better path.

No one can minimize the challenges Mr. Obama will face, including that of reaching out to the Americans who voted for his opponent. He owes his victories in previously red states such as Ohio and Virginia -- which last voted for a Democrat for president 44 years ago -- in part to the nation's deep unhappiness with George W. Bush and its anxiety about the economy. But his victories in states in every region of the country also demonstrate voters' willingness to give the new president a chance to put into practice a more responsible economic program than that practiced by Mr. Bush or preached by John McCain. The excitement that Mr. Obama generated among his supporters suggests a capacity to inspire and reassure a worried and divided nation. His efficient, disciplined and, at times, ruthless campaign suggests a capacity to manage a government beset by problems of unimaginable complexity. And his combination of intelligence and eloquence, along with his evident instincts for consensus, offers hope that he can provide the leadership the nation so badly needs.

Mr. Obama cannot erase Mr. Bush's legacy, but he has a chance to improve America's standing in the world, ending such noxious practices as torture and indefinite detention with minimal review that have diminished this country in the eyes of its allies. He has the opportunity finally to set the country on a path to help reduce global warming. He has far-reaching plans on energy, health care and education, but also a realistic understanding that the state of the economy will delimit his ambitions.
When we endorsed Mr. Obama for president, we did not mention race, for the simple reason that race played no role in our decision; Mr. Obama was just the better of two good nominees. But race is hugely relevant to this moment. The stain of slavery and discrimination can never be obliterated, and no single day can mark a nation's progress into some mythical "post-racial" era. Yet how could Americans not be moved by the reality of an African American president? Mr. Obama was born at a time when numerous states would have prohibited the marriage of his white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father, before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had outlawed the worst of Jim Crow, when the Supreme Court's order to desegregate schools was being fought at every turn. Hardly anyone then -- in truth, hardly anyone even a few years ago -- would have predicted this day.
The losing candidate last night is one of the political leaders for whom we have the deepest respect. Mr. McCain has spent his life in the service of a country he deeply loves, and we hope that service will continue. His life story is a testament to his resilience; as he often said on the campaign trail, he has endured far worse than losing the presidency. The Senate to which Mr. McCain returns will play a critical role in determining the shape and success of the Obama administration. There are important areas of agreement between the two men, including on torture and climate change, and Mr. McCain has a demonstrated willingness to reach across the aisle to achieve legislative solutions. We trust Mr. Obama will reach out to him; it would be a fitting grace note to a tough campaign.