Funk and Mullen on The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U. S. Legal Practice @kellenfunk @lincolnmullen

Kellen R. Funk, Princeton University (Students), and Lincoln A. Mullen, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, are publishing The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice in the American Historical Review (February 2018). Here is the abstract.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fielding a Story: Tracking Down an Anecdote About David Dudley Field

Ross E. Davies, George Mason School of Law, has published The Judiciary Funded: The Generosity of David Dudley Field at 14 The Green Bag 2d 433 (Summer 2011). Here is the abstract.

In mid-1894, shortly after the death of David Dudley Field (one of the most powerful and famous, and least-loved, American lawyers of the 19th century), lawyer-journalist Irving Browne published an implausibly laudatory anecdote about Field, based on a letter in which Field claimed to have engaged in a longstanding act of secret philanthropy that was wholly out of character. An experienced observer of public affairs in 1894, or in 2011, surely could be forgiven for doubting the veracity of such a self-serving, out-of-character story, told only posthumously by a friendly journalist, and with no evidence to back it up. The Gilded Age was, after all, a time when politicians and power-mongers like Field could rely on select reporters and editors to serve as virtual publicists – mixing innuendo with truths, half-truths, and non-truths (often supplied by unidentified sources) in news stories that boosted their favorites. Neither Browne nor anyone else seems to have made any effort to verify Field’s story, even though there were seemingly easy ways to do so. It is perhaps for those reasons that Browne’s parable of the secretly saintly David Dudley Field, revealed only post-mortem in all the glory of his selfless kindness and generosity, was largely ignored at the time and has been ever since. But the story is true, or true at least as to Field’s initial generosity. And there is evidence to back it up.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.