David Dudley Field II
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David Dudley Field II | |
---|---|
Smith Ely, Jr. | |
Succeeded by | Gerhard Anton (Anthony) Eickhoff |
Personal details | |
Born | New York City, New York | February 13, 1805
Political party | Democratic |
Spouses | Jane Lucinda Hopkins
(m. 1829; died 1836)Harriet Davidson (until 1864)Mary E. Carr (until 1874) |
Education | Williams College (AB) |
Signature | |
David Dudley Field II (February 13, 1805 – April 13, 1894) was an American lawyer and law reformer who made major contributions to the development of American civil procedure. His greatest accomplishment was engineering the move away from common law pleading towards code pleading, which culminated in the enactment of the Field Code in 1850 by the state of New York.
Early life and education
Field was born in Haddam, Connecticut on February 13, 1805.
He graduated from
In 1829, Field married Jane Lucinda Hopkins, with whom he had three children: Dudley,
Dedication to codification
After having practiced law for several years, Field became convinced that the
Much of Field's ideas on codification and the civil procedure rules were based on the 1825 Louisiana Code of Procedure.[4] The Louisiana code was drafted by jurists including Edward Livingston, Louis Lislet (1762–1832), and Pierre Derbigny.[4] In turn, the Louisiana code was inspired by French (including the French Code of Civil Procedure of 1806), Spanish, and Roman law, the common law tradition, and Livingston's Louisiana Practice Act of 1805.[4] European civil law thus influenced American civil procedure, partially through the intermediary of Louisiana.[4][5]
Livingston helped to prepare criminal and civil codes for Louisiana, and Field's personal papers at Duke University Libraries reveal that he had read Livingston's 1825 report on the Louisiana Civil Code.[3] Field was also influenced by criticism of the common law by his law partner Henry Sedgwick, as well as lawyer William Sampson.[3]
Field devoted more than 40 years to this codification project. He began by outlining his proposed reforms in pamphlets, professional journal articles, and legislative testimony, but met with a discouraging lack of interest. In 1846, Field's ideas gained wider notice with publication of a pamphlet, "The Reorganization of the Judiciary", which influenced that year's
The new system abolished the distinction in forms of procedure between an action at law (a civil case demanding monetary damages) and a suit in equity (a civil case demanding non-monetary damages). Under the new procedure, rather than having to file separate actions, a plaintiff needed to file only one civil action (or as it is often called today, a lawsuit). Eventually Field's civil procedure code was, with some changes, adopted in 27 states.[6] It also influenced later procedural reforms in England and several of her colonies (specifically, the Judicature Acts).[7]
However, according to Amalia Kessler, the more important aspect of Field's "code of civil procedure" was not so much the "code" part, but the "civil procedure" part. Before Field, the idea of "procedure" as a unified body of law simply did not exist in common law jurisdictions.[8] Joseph Story's treatises a generation earlier are a typical example, in that Story, like his contemporaries, treated "pleading" and "practice" as two clearly distinct bodies of law and never used the word "procedure".[9] The Field Code joined together "pleading" and "practice" for the first time under the heading of "procedure" and marked the "invention of procedure as a distinct, coherent category, defined in antithesis to the substantive law".[8]
In 1857, Field became chair of another state commission, this time for the systematic codification of all of New York state law except for those portions already reported upon by the Commissioner of Practice and Pleadings. In this work he personally prepared almost the whole of the political and civil codes.[2] The commission's penal code is often misattributed to Field but it was actually drafted by William Curtis Noyes, another member of the code commission who was a former prosecutor.[10]
The codification, which was completed in February 1865, was adopted only in small part by the state of New York, but it served as a model upon which many statutory codes throughout the United States were constructed.[2] For example, although Field's civil code was repeatedly rejected by his home state of New York, it was later adopted in large part by California, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as the territory of Guam many years later.[11] (Notably, Idaho largely enacted the contract sections of Field's civil code but declined to enact the tort sections.[11]) 18 states ultimately enacted part or all of what was widely (though incorrectly) called Field's penal code, including his home state of New York in 1881. Thanks to Field's brother, Stephen (who served in the California State Assembly and as California's fifth Chief Justice before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court), California bought into Field's codification project more than any other state. California first enacted a Practice Act in 1851 influenced by the Field Code, then in 1872 enacted Field's civil procedure, criminal procedure, civil, penal, and political codes as the first four California Codes (California merged Field's penal and criminal procedure codes into a single code).
Meanwhile, in 1866, Field proposed to the British National Association for the Promotion of Social Science a revision and codification of the laws of all nations. For an international commission of lawyers he prepared Draft Outlines of an International Code (1872), the submission of which resulted in the organization of the international Association for the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations, of which he became president.[2]
Politics
Field was originally an anti-slavery
Defense of William M. Tweed
Field was part of the team of defense counsel that William M. Tweed assembled to defend himself during the first criminal prosecution of Tweed in 1873. Other members of the defense team included John Graham and Elihu Root. This first trial ended when the jury could not agree on a verdict. In a second trial in November 1873, Tweed received a sentence of twelve years in prison and a $12,750 fine from judge Noah Davis.[12]
Later career
After 1876, Field returned to the Democratic Party, and from January to March 1877 served out in the
Works
- Some of his numerous pamphlets and addresses were collected in his Speeches, Arguments and Miscellaneous Papers (3 vols., 1884–1890).
- See also the Life of David Dudley Field (New York, 1898), by Rev. Henry Martyn Field.
- Gabor Hamza, Le développement du droit privé européen (Budapest, 2005) 178 ss. pp.
- Gabor Hamza, Entstehung und Entwicklung der modernen Privatrechtsordnungen und die römischrechtliche Tradition (Budapest 2009) 619 sq. pp.
See also
References
- ^ Johnson, Rossiter; Brown, John Howard, eds. (1906). The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans. Vol. IV. Boston: American Biographical Society. Retrieved March 21, 2022 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ a b c d e f g public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Field, David Dudley". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 321. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ S2CID 145512997.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-881023-0, retrieved May 17, 2020
- ^ David S. Clark, "The Civil Law Influence on David Dudley Field's Code of Civil Procedure", in Mathias Reimann (ed), The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World: 1820–1920 (1993) 63–87.
- ^ Hepburn, Charles McGuffey (1897). The Historical Development of Code Pleading in America and England. Cincinnati: W.H. Anderson & Co. p. 15. Retrieved November 18, 2023.
- ISBN 9780300222258. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ^ ISBN 9780300222258. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ISBN 9780300222258. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ^ Kadish, Sanford H. (1987). "The Model Penal Code's Historical Antecedents". Rutgers Law Journal. 19: 521–538. Archived from the original on July 25, 2017.
- ^ JSTOR 845410.
- ISBN 0-201-62463-X.
Sources
- United States Congress. "David Dudley Field II (id: F000104)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
External links
- Field Family Letters at Syracuse University
- Mr. Lincoln and New York: David Dudley Field
- Guide to the Sir Anthony Musgrave Papers, 1739-1966 — Archive of the personal papers of Musgrave, his wife Jeanie Lucinda, and her father David Dudley Field II, at Duke University Libraries
- Works by David Dudley Field at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about David Dudley Field at Internet Archive