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Published as Chapter 18 in Wesley Hohfeld A Century Later: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries, Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman & Henry Smith, eds.
Wesley Hohfeld (1879 - 1918) is well known to legal philosophers and to property teachers for his table of fundamental conceptions, a terminological framework for understanding legal doctrine and reasoning. This work was also substantively important for some members of the American Legal Realist movement and Critical Legal Studies. More personally he was part of the generation of law teachers who had to figure out how to become a professional academic in the years after completion of the job of reordering of the corpus juris in the wake of the demise of the writ system. A Harvard Law School educated westerner who ambivalently wanted to move east from his post at the then decidedly non-elite Stanford Law School, Hohfeld eventually made it to the then decidedly non-elite Yale Law School. His relatively brief career sheds light on both how in the years before World War I legal academics built a professional identity and how they navigated the nascent law school network. It also raises a question of how an analytical legal scholar might have responded to later developments in jurisprudence.
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Publication Date
7-14-2022
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
City
New York
ISBN
9781107192881
First Page
494
Last Page
517
Disciplines
Law | Legal Education | Legal History
Recommended Citation
John Henry Schlegel, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: On the Difficulty of Becoming a Law Professor in Wesley Hohfeld A Century Later: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries (Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman & Henry Smith, eds., Cambridge University Press 2022).