Hoeflich on Judge Lecompte's Court

M. H. Hoeflich, Kansas Law, has published In Judge Lecompte’s Court, University of Kansas Law Review 62 (2014): 1169-1225.  It commences:

Today, few remember Judge Samuel Dexter Lecompte except as a committed partisan of the proslavery party in territorial Kansas who used his office to further his party’s political goals.  But, in fact, Judge Lecompte, the first chief justice of the Kansas Territorial Supreme Court was a sophisticated jurist instrumental in creating the Kansas legal system.  His court was the first outpost of justice in a frontier settlement beset by sectarian strife. The time has clearly come for a reconsideration of the man and the legal structures he helped create.