(Source: Cornell University Press)
Cornell University Press is publishing a
book on public pronouncements by British North American lawyers in the years
preceding the American Revolution.
ABOUT
THE BOOK
The Clamor of Lawyers explores a series of extended public pronouncements that
British North American colonial lawyers crafted between 1761 and 1776. Most,
though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from
on-going litigation. While they have been studied as political theory, these
writings and speeches are rarely viewed as the work of active lawyers, despite
the fact that key protagonists in the story of American independence were
members of the bar with extensive practices. The American Revolution was, in fact, a lawyers’ revolution.
Peter Charles Hoffer and Williamjames Hull
Hoffer broaden our understanding of the role that lawyers played in framing and
resolving the British imperial crisis. The revolutionary lawyers, including
John Adams’s idol James Otis, Jr., Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, and
Virginians Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, along with Adams and others,
deployed the skills of their profession to further the public welfare in
challenging times. They were the framers of the American Revolution and the
governments that followed. Loyalist lawyers and lawyers for the crown also
participated in this public discourse, but because they lost out in the end,
their arguments are often slighted or ignored in popular accounts. This
division within the colonial legal profession is central to understanding the
American Republic that resulted from the Revolution.
ABOUT
THE AUTHORS
Peter Charles Hoffer has taught early
American history at Ohio State University, the University of Notre Dame, and
Georgia, the latter since 1978. He is the author of John Quincy Adams
and the Gag Rule, 1835–1850.
Williamjames Hull Hoffer was a Henry
Rutgers scholar at Rutgers University in New Brunswick before he entered law
school, receiving both his J.D. and Ph.D. He now teaches at Seton Hall
University. He is co-author of The Federal Courts: An Essential History.
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