Herbert Wechsler

Herbert Wechsler (December 4, 1909 – April 26, 2000) was a legal scholar and former director of the American Law Institute (ALI). He is most widely known for his constitutional law scholarship and for the creation of the Model Penal Code. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Wechsler as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

Education and early career

Wechsler entered City College of New York at the age of 16 and graduated in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in French. He enrolled at Columbia Law School, and served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review at age 20. He graduated in 1931. After graduation he joined the faculty, then took a one-year leave to clerk for Justice Harlan F. Stone of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Career

In 1940, Wechsler went to Washington D.C. to work for the Justice Department. He argued five cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during that period. Among these, he took part in arguing Korematsu v. United States, as Assistant Attorney General, on the side of the United States government in its wartime internment of citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. During World War II, Wechsler served as assistant attorney general in charge of the War Division. During 1945-1946, he was a principal assistant to U.S. Judge Francis Biddle and U.S. Alternate Judge John J. Parker at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (the trial of the principal Nazi war criminals). He then returned to Columbia, where he remained an active professor until 1978 and then took emeritus status.

Law of the United States

The law of the United States comprises many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the most important is the United States Constitution, the foundation of the federal government of the United States. The Constitution sets out the boundaries of federal law, which consists of acts of Congress,treaties ratified by the Senate, regulations promulgated by the executive branch, and case law originating from the federal judiciary. The United States Code is the official compilation and codification of general and permanent federal statutory law.

Federal law and treaties, so long as they are in accordance with the Constitution, preempt conflicting state and territorial laws in the 50 U.S. states and in the territories. However, the scope of federal preemption is limited because the scope of federal power is not universal. In the dual-sovereign system of American federalism (actually tripartite because of the presence of Indian reservations), states are the plenary sovereigns, each with their own constitution, while the federal sovereign possesses only the limited supreme authority enumerated in the Constitution. Indeed, states may grant their citizens broader rights than the federal Constitution as long as they do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights. Thus, most U.S. law (especially the actual "living law" of contract, tort, property, criminal, and family law experienced by the majority of citizens on a day-to-day basis) consists primarily of state law, which can and does vary greatly from one state to the next.

American Law Institute

The American Law Institute (ALI) was established in 1923 to promote the clarification and simplification of United States common law and its adaptation to changing social needs. The ALI drafts, approves, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Principles of the Law, model codes, and other proposals for law reform. The ALI is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

History

The American Law Institute was founded in 1923 on the initiative of William Draper Lewis, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, following a study by a group of prominent American judges, lawyers, and teachers who sought to address the uncertain and complex nature of early 20th century American law. According to the "Committee on the Establishment of a Permanent Organization for the Improvement of the Law," part of the law's uncertainty stemmed from the lack of agreement on fundamental principles of the common-law system, while the law's complexity was attributed to the numerous variations within different jurisdictions. The Committee recommended that a perpetual society be formed to improve the law and the administration of justice in a scholarly and scientific manner.

Supreme court

A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, apex court, and highest court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of a supreme court are not subject to further review by any other court. Supreme courts typically function primarily as appellate courts, hearing appeals from decisions of lower trial courts, or from intermediate-level appellate courts.

However, not all highest courts are named as such. Civil law states do not tend to have singular highest courts. Additionally, the highest court in some jurisdictions is not named the "Supreme Court", for example, the High Court of Australia; this is because decisions by the High Court could formerly be appealed to the Privy Council. On the other hand, in some places the court named the "Supreme Court" is not in fact the highest court; examples include the New York Supreme Court, the Supreme Courts of several Canadian provinces/territories and the former Supreme Court of Judicature of England and Wales, which are all superseded by higher Courts of Appeal.

Charles Fried

Charles Fried (born April 15, 1935) is an American jurist and lawyer. He served as United States Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and has been a visiting professor at Columbia Law School.

Fried is the author of nine books and over 30 journal articles, and his work has appeared in over a dozen collections.

Early life and education

Fried was born in 1935 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where his father was an important industrialist and Czech patriot. The Frieds left Czechoslovakia in 1939 to escape the anticipated Nazi persecution of Jews, lived in England for almost two years and came to the United States in 1941 via Montreal, Canada. He and his parents became United States citizens in 1948, after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. After graduating from the Lawrenceville School in 1952 and receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1956—where he was a member of the Princeton Charter Club—Fried attended the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree in Jurisprudence in 1958 and 1960, respectively, and was awarded the Ordronnaux Prize in Law (1958). In 1960, Fried received his Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a Stone Scholar. Subsequently he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II.