Metzger on Abraham Lincoln Brings Roman Law To Illinois

Ernest Metzger, University of Glasgow School of Law, has published Abraham Lincoln Brings Roman Law to Illinois in Die unverzichtbare Wissenschaft. The Indispensable Science. Festschrift für Wolfgang Ernst zum 70. Geburtstag. Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Ernst on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (B. Gsell, T. Rüfner & U. Babusiaux, eds.,Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2026) at 603-614.

Abraham Lincoln’s legal practice is now studied a good deal thanks to the publication of his legal papers in 2000. Lincoln's practice was in the common law, but students of other traditions naturally wonder if there could be any Civil law i.e. Roman law traces. If there were, it might say something about Lincoln's intellectual reach, as well as the power of Roman law to do justice in an unlikely place: Illinois, only recently frontier. Happily there's one instance where Lincoln used Roman law and even won with it: an 1846 appeal to the Supreme Court of Illinois. He relied on a single proposition dealing with contract conditions, a proposition derived from Roman law and formulated some forty years earlier by the learned Kentucky judge and advocate George Bibb (1776–1859). We can't really credit Lincoln with knowledge of the Roman roots, but we can certainly credit him for recognising a powerful Roman rule that could effectively dispatch his opponent's case, in a way the common law authorities could not. Risinger v. Cheney, 7 Ill. 84 (1846). In this narrative there is also a (notional) thread linking Lincoln's Roman law to Thomas Jefferson, and to a book still residing in the Jefferson Library. Lincoln wouldn't have known this, but it would have pleased him.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.