Facts, Things, and the Orphans of Girard College: Francis Lieber, Protopragmatist

Rufus Choate, the dominant and domineering Boston lawyer and orator, once described Francis Lieber as "the most fertile, indomitable, unsleeping, combative and propagandizing person of his race." Lieber was indeed always scrambling, always proposing projects and looking for work, always reading and thinking and investigating. The proud inventor of words such as "penology," "bureaucracy," and "jural," Lieber delighted in terming himself a "publicist," yet another of his English neologisms. From his arrival in the United States in 1827 to his death in 1872, Lieber was a restless initiator who managed to be influential in myriad ways in his adopted land, in international and comparative law, and in the world of ideas. Historians have credited Lieber for "the most influential formulation of political science before the Civil War," and for repeatedly being a pioneer in "consolidating nationalism in America." His reform efforts ranged from penology, empiricism, and statistics through the first American military code and the first sustained exploration of interpretation and construction in legal analysis.

Yet Lieber's legacy is far from common chatter around law school faculty rooms.