Hohfeld devotees rejoice: Wesley Hohfeld: A Century Later: Edited Work, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries, edited by Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Columbia Law School; Ted M. Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law; and Henry E. Smith, Harvard Law School (Cambridge University Press) is now available online.
Wesley Hohfeld is known the world over as the legal theorist who famously developed a taxonomy of legal concepts. His contributions to legal thinking have stood the test of time, remaining relevant nearly a century after they were first published. Yet, little systematic attention has been devoted to exploring the full significance of his work. Beginning with a lucid, annotated version of Hohfeld's most important article, this volume is the first to offer a comprehensive look at the scope, significance, reach, intricacies, and shortcomings of Hohfeld's work. Featuring insights from leading legal thinkers, the book also contains many of Hohfeld's previously unseen personal papers, shedding new light on the complex motivations behind Hohfeld's projects. Together, these selected papers and original essays reveal a portrait of a multifaceted and ambitious intellectual who did not live long enough to see the impact of his ideas on the study of law.
Among its eighteen chapter’s is John Henry Schlegel’s Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: On the Difficulty of Becoming a Law Professor, describe in the introduction of the volume as follows:
John Schlegel gives Hohfeld's work a distinctively human dimension. Schlegel's contribution traces Hohfeld's difficulties in acculturating to the life of a law professor, first at Stanford and then at Yale. Using Hohfeld's correspondence with Roscoe Pound as its focus, the chapter reveals Hohfeld's own insecurities about his role in the academy and the ways in which he constructed a narrative around them over the course of his career. Constantly worried about the inadequacy of his salary - both objectively and in comparison to his peers at other schools - Hohfeld is portrayed as a thinker, distinctly unsure of his place in the legal academy butunwilling to abandon his pretensions about his intellectual abilities. Schlegel portrays Hohfeld's friendship with Pound as driven by elements of sycophancy, self-interest, and genuine scholarly regard for the latter's contributions to legal thinking. In so doing, Schlegel reveals Hohfeld to have been significantly less confident about the value of his work during his own lifetime, something that a bare reading of his foundational papers does not reveal. A particularly intriguing theme in Schlegel's chapter, which captures some of the controversy around Hohfeld's character as part-formalist and part-Realist, is the extent to which Hohfeld saw himself doing something fundamentally different from attempting to develop a legal science of juridical ideas, in the vein of Christopher Columbus Langdell. Schlegel documents how Hohfeld - despite being a graduate of Harvard Law School - never fully embraced the ideas of Ames, Langdell, and Beale but situated himself more in thevein of a scholar attempting to engage the world of lawyers and judges more directly. Schlegel's narrative captures these ambiguities in Hohfeld's professional life, best summarized by his characterization of Hohfeld as a "Westerner" attempting to assimilate within the world of the East Coast legal academy.
--Dan Ernst
