David Dudley Field

• David Field
• Born: February 13, 1805
• Died: April 13, 1894

“The father of American legal reform,” was born in Haddam, Connecticut to Submit Dickinson and David Dudley Field. Both his grandfathers were Revolutionary War veterans; his father, a graduate of Yale University, was a Congregational minister and local historian. Field was the eldest of eight sons and two daughters; among his brothers, Jonathan revised the Massachusetts statutes and Stephen became a Supreme Court Justice, while Matthew built the longest suspension bridge of the time, and Cyrus laid the Atlantic cable.

Field’s elementary education was complemented with private instruction from his father; after the family moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1819, he attended the well-known academy of Jared Curtis and then entered Williams College with the class of 1825. For reasons that remain unclear, he left Williams the year before graduation; according to his brother Henry’s biographical account, “he was believed to have given some offence to the president, Dr. Griffin.” Nonetheless, he was later awarded an honorary masters degree and elected president of the alumni association, and he left the school forty thousand dollars upon his death.

Through a lawyer friend in Stockbridge, Theodore Sedgwick, he began to read law with Harmanus Bleecker, Sedgwick’s former partner, in Albany and then moved to New York City to continue his preparation with Sedgwick’s brothers, Henry and Robert. Admitted to the bar in 1828, he soon became a partner in the firm when Henry Sedgwick was forced to retire because of illness. In 1829 he married Jane Lucinda Hopkins, the cousin of a close friend; their son, David Dudley, was born in 1830, and their daughter, Jeanie Lucinda, in 1833. Three years later his wife died, followed by a second daughter still in infancy. He remarried in 1841, to a wealthy widow, Harriet Davidson, and two years after her death in 1864, he married another widow, Mary E. Carr, who died in 1876.

After the death of his first wife and his daughter, Field left the country to spend fourteen months in England and Europe. During this trip he began to study comparative legal systems and to establish contacts abroad, and soon after his return, he embarked on what was to become a lifelong campaign for legal reforms that would facilitate simple, swift, and inexpensive litigation. In 1839 he published a “Letter on the Reform of the Judiciary System,” and this was followed by open letters, newspaper articles, and speeches before the state legislature and lawyers’ associations. Seven years later, the judiciary report of the New York State Constitutional Convention, in response to his urging, called for the establishment of two commissions to codify both the procedural law and the substantive law of the state. After the enactment of the constitution in 1847, the legislature appointed three commissioners for the revision of the procedural codes; Field was not originally among them because he was considered too radical, but he was soon enlisted to fill a vacancy. The new code of civil procedure went into effect in July 1848, with additions and amendments instituted the following year. Owing to opposition within the legal profession, the code of criminal procedure, proposed in 1850, was not adopted for another thirty-two years, and an expanded civil procedures code (totaling 1,885 sections), also submitted in 1850, was never enacted.

Work on the substantive codes for political (administrative), penal, and civil law went even more slowly. The commission appointed in 1847 took three years to report back with only a partial revision and an expression of serious reservations about completing the project. In 1857 Field succeeded in constituting a new commission under his own leadership, and the three draft codes were issued between 1860 and 1865. In addition to preparing large portions of the civil and political codes and directing an extensive process of review and revision, Field personally covered the cost of employing large numbers of assistants when state funding ceased after two years. These codes also met with tremendous opposition from the New York bar; between 1865 and 1887 Field appeared before the senate and assembly committees every session, but in the end, only the penal code was adopted (1881). Writing to his brother Stephen he recalled, “My life was a continual warfare. Not only was every obstacle thrown in the way of my work, but I was attacked personally as an agitator and a visionary, in seeking to disturb long settled usage and thinking to reform the law, in which was embodied the wisdom of ages.” Nonetheless, Field’s reforms had lasting effects elsewhere: the procedural codes of 1848-1849 were adopted in whole or part in twenty-three other states, in England and in sixteen British colonies and dependencies, while the ill-fated civil code was accepted in Dakota and Montana, and all five codes were enacted in California.

During the half century that Field worked on the New York codes, he maintained his own practice, said to be the largest in New York City, and engaged in political activity. According to Henry Field, “he divided the hours of the day with military precision,” spending free mornings in his library with the codes, the afternoons in court, and the evenings at home with the codes again. In hopes of advancing the cause of legal reform in the legislature, Field made one unsuccessful bid for election to the state assembly as a Democrat in 1841, but he soon broke ranks with the party over the issue of slavery. As a delegate to the 1846 Democratic convention in Syracuse, he introduced the “Corner-Stone resolution” that opposed the extension of slavery into any territory currently free or subsequently acquired. He then threw his support behind the Free Soil movement and the emerging Republican party. In an 1856 letter to the Albany Atlas he wrote, “My sympathies are of course with the friends of freedom, wherever they may be found.” He became an early backer of Abraham Lincoln, and his influence with Horace Greeley and others was considered to be largely responsible for Lincoln’s nomination in 1860. He headed the New York contingent to the Peace Conference held in Washington as a last-ditch effort at reconciliation before Lincoln took office, and during the war, he wrote, spoke, and contributed money on behalf of the Union cause.

During Reconstruction, Field argued major constitutional issues before the Supreme Court, but paradoxically, his commitment to protecting the civil rights of Southern whites sometimes compromised those of newly freed blacks, as in the Cruikshank case (1875), where he successfully argued against Cruikshank’s conviction for conspiring to prevent blacks from exercising their voting rights. During the same period he was charged with unprofessional conduct for his role as counsel to the notorious “robber barons” Jim Fisk and Jay Gould in the Erie Railroad litigation of 1869. The issue was not simply that Field had defended unscrupulous clients, but that he engaged in illegal practices on their behalf, an investigation by the grievances committee of the New York bar was eventually dropped, although their report, never voted on, was quite critical of his actions. The public furor was compounded when Field took on the defense of the robber barons’ politically, William (Boss) Tweed, between 1873 and 1878. Field had initially declined to represent the corrupt Tammany Hall politican and in fact assisted the Committee of Seventy in preparing the prosecution but he was then released by the Committee and successfully took on Tweed’s appeal. In the midst of this controversy, he served as counsel to Democratic presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden in the dispute over the election of 1876 (Field had voted for Rutherford B. Hayes but believed Tilden had won), and because of his support for Tilden, he was nominated and elected to fill a two-month congressional vacancy when Representative Smith Ely became mayor of New York.

By this time, and for the last two decades of his life, Field was mainly concerned with issues of international law. In 1866, the year after the completion of the New York codes, he had traveled to the British Association for the Promotion of Social Science to propose a codification of international law; when the international committee they established was unable to complete its work because of geographical separation, Field took on the research himself. Seven years later he appeared before the Social Science Congress with his Draft Outlines of an International Code, the main thrust of which was the maintenance of peace through arbitration; a second edition, Outlines of an International Code (1876) also included a section on war. Although the code was never adopted, it greatly aided the peace movement. In 1873 Field also helped to found the International Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations and served as its first president. He continued to make frequent visits to Europe for meetings of this and other international organizations until the very end of his life. He died in his eighty-ninth year after returning to New York from an extended stay in England and Italy.

Field’s writings are published in Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers, ed. A. P. Sprague, 3 vols. (1884-1890). H. Field’s Life of David Dudley Field (1898) forms the basis for H. K. Hoy’s biographical essay in Great American Lawyers, ed. W. D. Lewis, vol. 5 (1908). Shorter sketches appear in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 4 (1897), the Encyclopedia of Biography, vol. 1 (1916), the Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 6 (1933), and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, vol. 4 (1973). A. Reppy, ed., David Dudley Field, Centenary Essays Celebrating One Hundred Years of Legal Reform (1949), addresses the modern legacy of Field’s work but includes a detailed bibliography of works by and about him.