York Lawyer Research Articles

The Origins of Armenian Lobbying in the United States: A Geopolitical Conceptualization of Restorative Justice

This paper focuses on the origins of Armenian lobbying the U.S. government for favourable policies toward the Armenian cause in the homeland — that is, Ottoman Armenia and the Republic of Armenia (1918-1921). Vahan Cardashian, a New York lawyer, organized a lobbying campaign during and after the Young Turk genocide against the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire (1915–1923). He and his associates formulated a geopolitical conceptualization of restorative justice. While Cardashian’s lobbying campaign eventually failed to exert the desired influence on U.S. policy during the Wilson administration, his strategy nevertheless established the foundations for Armenian lobbying in the United States for successive generations. This article seeks to contribute to the literature on ethnicity and ethnic lobbying a host state — in this case the United States — diasporan community and politics, and restorative justice.

Using Civil Rights Law to Undermine Profitability of Ongoing Racial Segregation in Health Care

In 2008, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed a civil rights complaint with the New York State Office of the Attorney General on behalf of its client, Bronx Health REACH. This complaint asserts that 3 prestigious New York City (NYC) health care organizations' outpatient clinics maintain systems of care that are separate, unequal, and segregated by race. This article considers health care segregation's past, present, and future; specifically examines 1990s and 2000s-era civil rights complaints in NYC; and offers strategies to improve equity and outcomes in NYC that can be applied in health networks nationwide.

Trauma, Diasporic Consciousness, and Ethics in Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark

Dislocation, expatriation, and the attendant loss of homeland are concerns at the heart of Jewish literature. The dialectical relationship between identity and the sense of homeland informing the Jewish diasporic consciousness, in particular, has often culminated in nostalgic depictions of Israel in post-war American Jewish literature. In focusing on such a literary representation, this essay unravels the multidimensionality of diasporic Jewish identity. Critically analyzing Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017), it evaluates the trauma of exile and the psychic dilemma of third-generation American Jewish writers. The novelist brings about a confluence of nostos and nostalgia in Forest Dark. In evoking the visceral sense of loss, dislocation, and a painful yearning for the lost homeland, the author succeeds in tracing the lives of two protagonists, Jules Epstein, a retired New York lawyer, and Nicole, a Jewish American novelist struggling with a deep marital crisis. The text foregrounds the theme of self-discovery exemplified in the homecoming of its two central characters. Following his parents’ death and haunted by the anguish and horror of the Shoah, Jules unmoors himself from his current life and flies to Tel Aviv on a whim. Nicole, who suffers from creative blockage on account of her failing marriage, undertakes the trip to Tel Aviv hoping to recover from her soul-sickness, as it were. If Jules and Nicole do not cross paths, it still remains that their Jewish identities stem from the originary tragedy of the Holocaust. Although removed from the horrific sights and scenes of the tragic event, intergenerational trauma resonates with certain aspects of the diasporic Jewish existence. Using theoretical interventions of memory studies and the Freudian concept of Unheimlich or the uncanny, this essay explores the ethical implications that undergird Nicole Krauss’s diasporic depiction of Israel.

Art and Violence in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced: Reading Western Domination over Muslim Representation in Amir and Emily’s Relationship

Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, <em>Disgraced</em>,<em> </em>grapples with Islamophobia, post-9/11 racialization of South Asians, and the possibilities of Muslim identity. The play recounts the tragic descent of Amir, a New York Lawyer and South Asian Muslim, from his precarious belonging in upper-class New York society to the devastating fulfillment of violent racial stereotypes about Muslim men. This paper considers Amir’s relationship with his wife Emily, a white artist, as a location of multifaceted and mutually inflicted violence that invites audiences to interrogate stereotypes about Muslim men and confront the harm of white domination over Muslim representation. Emily’s well-intentioned yet problematic control over her husband’s identity and appropriation of Islamic art traditions reflect Western domination over Muslim representation. By highlighting these tensions within Amir and Emily’s marriage, Akhtar deftly locates the impact of Islamophobia and post-9/11 racialization of South Asians in the realm of the personal, confronting audiences with their devastating consequences.

Send a Girl!: The True Story of How Women Joined the FDNY by Jessica M. Rinker

Reviewed by: Send a Girl!: The True Story of How Women Joined the FDNY by Jessica M. Rinker Elizabeth Bush Rinker, Jessica M. Send a Girl!: The True Story of How Women Joined the FDNY; illus. by Meg Hunt. Bloomsbury, 2021 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781547601745 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781547601752 $12.59 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad 5-8 yrs For Brenda Berkman, a New York lawyer, her relatively tame desk job lost its shine, so the 1977 announcement that the Fire Department was opening its testing to women for the first time inspired a new goal of undertaking a more active career that would let her directly serve her community. Berkman and other women applicants passed the written test only to be stonewalled at the next level, a physical fitness test that blatantly ignored the tasks actually required on the job. A test that eliminated every female aspirant seemed evidence of bad faith, and Berkman put her lawyering skill to work, filing a lawsuit. It took a few years to wind through the system, but the test was revised, women were admitted to the department, [End Page 273] and then a new chapter in discrimination opened as some members of the public insisted they only trusted men to rescue them, and some male firefighters took collegial pranking to the level of dangerous harassment. In streamlining the story for a young audience, Rinker's narrative and Hunt's digitally colored artwork glide over several specifics (it never makes how initial fitness testing advantaged men), leaving listeners dependent on adult assistance to wrestle information from endnotes not fully up to the task. Still, Berkman's story offers a refreshing twist for "community helpers" units and a tacit invitation to explore Berkman's post-retirement work in advocacy and the arts. A bibliography and website resources are also included. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

Forced Excursion: Walking as Disability in Joshua Ferris’s &lt;em&gt;The Unnamed&lt;/em&gt;

Forced Excursion: Walking as Disability in Joshua Ferris’s &lt;em&gt;The Unnamed&lt;/em&gt;

“The Surest Support of Their Enormous and Iniquitous Claims”: Legal Expertise and Land Acquisition in Late Colonial New York

ABSTRACT While the close ties between colonial New York's lawyers and great proprietors has been oft-noted, how exactly provincial lawyers supported monopolistic land acquisition has yet to be fully examined. New York's abundance of unsettled land, combined with economic and demographic growth in the eighteenth century, created vast opportunities for speculative ventures. Legal expertise was crucial in making each step of such ventures work. New York lawyers were proficient in using land documents, surveys, and formal court procedures to their clients' advantage. Further, by evaluating and enhancing the value and security of property, facilitating the profitable selling and leasing of land, and suppressing challenges from rebellious tenants and squatters, lawyers allowed speculators to take controlled risks while maximizing profit. By helping wealthy land grabbers gain competitive advantage over rival claimants and settlers both in and out of courts, lawyers greatly contributed to the continued concentration of land-based wealth in New York.

The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level — across many codes and jurisdictions — and at a micro level — regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.

James DeWitt Andrews: Classifying the Law in the Early 20th Century

ABSTRACTThis article examines the efforts of New York lawyer James DeWitt Andrews and others to create a new classification system for American law in the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by fragments left by founding father James Wilson, Andrews worked though the American Bar Association and organized independent projects to classify the law. A controversial figure whose motives were often questioned, Andrews engaged the support and at times the antagonism of prominent legal figures such as John H. Wigmore, Roscoe Pound, and William Howard Taft before his plans ended with the founding of the American Law Institute in 1923.

James DeWitt Andrews: Classifying the Law in the Early Twentieth Century

This paper examines the efforts of New York lawyer James DeWitt Andrews and others to create a new classification system for American law in the early years of the twentieth century. Inspired by fragments left by founding father James Wilson, Andrews worked though the American Bar Association and organized independent projects to classify the law. A controversial figure, whose motives were often questioned, Andrews engaged the support and at times the antagonism of prominent legal figures such as John H. Wigmore, Roscoe Pound, and William Howard Taft before his plans ended with the founding of the American Law Institute in 1923.

The Moot: A Colonial New York Lawyers’ Club in the Early 1770s

This article concerns “The Moot,” a colonial New York lawyers' club in the early 1770s. The Moot's membership included a number of notable lawyers, including John Jay, Benjamin Kissam, William Livingston, Richard Morris, John Tabor Kempe, James Duane, John Morin Scott, and Robert R. Livingston, Jr. The Moot held meetings from November 1770 to April 1775, and apparently disbanded after political events of the day overtook the more mundane business of a private bar group. The existence and activities of the Moot have appeared sporadically over the years in various pieces of scholarship and in different contexts. Yet none of these pieces has delved comprehensively into the subject. Relying principally on original sources where available, this article seeks to do just that, by building on that earlier work and exploring in depth the workings of the Moot, including its organization, noteworthy membership, and actual legal discussions.

Making the Best of a Bad Beginning: Young New York Lawyers Confronting the Great Recession

In this article, we utilize both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the impact of the 2007-2009 recession on lawyers that were admitted to the New York State bar in 2008. This research examines the experiences of lawyers from a wide range of practice settings: large law firms; midsize firms; in-house corporate counsel; federal, state and local government and public interest organizations. This variation allowed us to capture differences in experiences. We found that overwhelmingly, the recession created financial and career insecurity for most lawyers in all of the practice settings, albeit in different ways. Particularly, while some large law firm lawyers experienced layoffs and deferrals, government lawyers experienced budget cuts that impacted their practice, and some public interest lawyers could not launch their careers altogether. In addition, the new lawyers in this study challenged the belief that a law degree is flexible and broadly applicable beyond conventional law settings. Further, in addition to feelings of job and income insecurity, lawyers who were admitted to the New York State bar during the financial crisis reported experiencing variable health consequences, including concerns about weight gain, depression and alcohol dependence. In addition, young lawyers working in law firms reported that their health was poorer than lawyers working in other settings, while young lawyers who indicated that they had chosen alternative professional career paths reported comparatively better health.

The Ethical Compass: Two for the Price of One is a Costly Choice: The Ethical Issues for Lawyer-Mediators Who Consider Drafting Agreements

Should a lawyer who serves as a mediator for two unrepresented parties also draft the resulting agreement if both mediating parties request the lawyer to do so? On June 30, 2010, the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Committee on Mediator Ethical Guidance (hereinafter "The Committee") issued Ethics Opinion SODR-2010-1 "Mediator's Duty of Care When Drafting Agreements." This ethics opinion calls into question the blurry ethical contours between lawyering and mediation when mediating with pro se parties. In this column, I will review the Committee's ethics opinion and then, applying the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, discuss the potential ethical minefields and workable alternatives for those New York lawyers who serve as mediators and also contemplate drafting the resulting agreement.

Lawyer Registration in New York: 2015

This essay finds shortcomings in some York court rules. 1. A court rule which permits temporary retirement by York lawyers who are York judges and justices, and who are United States justices and judges, but prohibits temporary retirement by rank-and-file York lawyers. 2. A court rule which limits artificially the legal work permitted to permanently-retired York lawyers. 3. A court rule which requires excessive disclosures by York lawyers on biennial-registration forms. 4. A court rule which sets a restrictive pro-bono-work requirement for admission to the York Bar. 5. A court rule which exhorts York lawyers to donate time and money for the benefit of poor people. 6. A court rule which impermissibly collects social-security numbers from York lawyers.See also New York Judicial Compensation: 2015, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2591311

Editors’ Introduction

New York History Spring 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 164 Editors’ Introduction Thomas D. Beal, William S. Walker Looking back over a long career of teaching, researching, and writing about New York State, Milton M. Klein recalled that one of his greatest joys was bringing “history to a wider audience.”1 Klein was a regular contributor to New York History; it published some of his most significant works on the eighteenth century, including “New York Lawyers and the Coming of the American Revolution,” which won the New York State Historical Association’s Kerr Prize.2 The Editors share Klein’s passion for expanding the public’s interest in the past, and they publish only scholarly essays that are accessible to anyone (from high school students to professional historians) with an interest in New York State’s history. New York History does not publish brief, uninformed and easily forgotten blog posts. Rather, it offers well-researched, scholarly essays that are accessible to anyone and that will, like Klein’s essays which appeared in its pages beginning in the late 1950s, withstand scholarly scrutiny and the test of time. This issue of the journal offers readers four essays exploring unique aspects of New York State’s rich history. In the lead essay, “Roscoe Conkling’s Cotton Speculation,” Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer uncovers a group of New York politicians, manufacturers, and merchants who made a 1. Milton M. Klein, “The Pleasures of Teaching and Writing History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 52:3 (1995): 483–487. 2. See, Milton M. Klein, “New York Lawyers and the Coming of the American Revolution,” New York History 55 (1974): 383–408. The New York State Historical Association Awards the Kerr Prize to the best essay published in each volume of New York History. See also, Milton M. Klein, “John Jay and the Revolution,” New York History 81 (January 2000): 19–30; Milton M. Klein, “An Experiment that Failed: General James Robertson and Civil Government in British New York, 1779–1783,” New York History 61 (July 1980): 229–254; Milton M. Klein, “Origins of the Bill of Rights in Colonial New York,” New York History 72 (October 1991): 388–405. Milton M. Klein, “Why did the British Fail to Win the Hearts and Minds of New Yorkers,” New York History 64 (October 1983): 357–375; Milton M. Klein, “Clio Ascendant: The Writing of American History in the Eighteenth Century,” New York History 68 (January 1987): 4–26; Milton M. Klein, “New York in the American Colonies: A New Look,” New York History 53 (April 1972): 132–146; Milton M. Klein, “From Community to Status: The Development of the Legal Profession in Colonial New York,” New York History 60 (1979): 133–156; Milton M. Klein, “Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York,” New York History 40 (July 1959): 221–246. Editors’ Introduction 165 good deal of money in the cotton market during the American Civil War. Before 1860, the American South produced over seventy-five percent of the world’s cotton supply, but the war disrupted production, leaving merchants and manufacturers, from New York to England, desperate for new suppliers . At the heart of Broxmeyer’s essay is an examination of newly discovered evidence—primarily tax records—that details how much money clever and well-connected politicians, with the blessing of President Abraham Lincoln, made during the war. Jeffrey A. Marx’s essay, “Philadelphia Comes to New York,” explores the history of cream cheese. In the nineteenth century, New York became a leader in the dairy industry, and this journal has published a number of articles on the history of milk and dairy products. But Marx’s essay is the first to examine the development of the cream cheese market and the methods manufacturers used to promote this product. Both essays enhance our understanding of New York’s place in America’s burgeoning economy in the late nineteenth century. In “The Heiress Victoria Gone with Her Father’s Coachman,” Carolee Klimchock narrates the captivating tale of Victoria Morosini, the Gilded Age heiress who scandalized the country when she eloped with her family’s coachman. Klimchock does not simply spin a good yarn. She illustrates the...

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky We have a particularly appetizing buffet for our readers in this issue, and as I often say, they illustratetherich varietyofSupreme Court history. Althoughthetraditional cases are atthe heartoftwo ofthearticles, the storiestoldby the authors go far beyond the four comers of the opinions. This well reflects what one is finding in many recent books about the Court, the Justices, and their work, attention not only to thewritten opinion, butwhatLouis D. Brandeis used to call “all the facts that surround.” Williamjames Hoffer’s article on the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is not the first, nor will it be the last, historical word on that subject. ButPlessy, decided more than a century ago, continues to fascinate scholars as we leam more about the people involvedinthecase. Hoffertakes a close lookat the lawyering involved, and the strategy that brought the case to the high court. Since the Court does not issue advisory opinions, there mustbe a real case orcontroversy involved, and the people who objected to the Louisiana law segregating railroad cars chose carefully, not just Homer Plessy, but the lawyers and the tactics they would follow. Thomas Healy, a colleague of Hoffer’s at Seton Hall University, also revisits another landmark decision, Abrams r. United States (1919). The article is adopted from Healy’s recent book, and focuses on why Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., changed his mind regard­ ing the meaning ofthe FirstAmendment Speech Clause from his decision only a few months earlier in Schenck v. UnitedStates. Again, much has been written on the Holmes dissent, but Healy unearths new information that led Holmes to write what has been considered one of the great defenses of free speech. There is much debate over the process by which men and women are nominated to the federal judiciary. One school ofthought takes a rather purist view that if the person is qualified (and what that means is the subject of another book), then the Senate ought to confirm. History, however, teaches us that as great—perhaps even a greater—a consideration is politics, not only the political debates over hot button issues, but also old-fashioned party politics. This was as true in the days ofthe early Republic as it is now. Lest anyone think that some ofthe recent fights over nominations are something new, v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Albert Lawrence ofNew York’s Empire State College examines the politics involving an open seat on the high court, President Grover Cleveland, and two New York lawyers who happened to be brothers—Wheeler and Rufus Peckham. While the political goals may have changed since Tammany tried to manipulate the process, political reasons still play a large role in who gets on the Bench. When writing about the Court, historians always note that, in times of stress, especially when national security issues seem to be involved, the Court has often backed away from its role as protector ofindividual liberties. This is not surprising. The men, and more recently women, who have sat on the bench are subject to the same emotions as their fellow citizens when there is a perceived threat to the country. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., observed in 1987 that the Court and the country “has a long history of failing to preserve civil liberties when it perceived its national security threatened.” One of the worst episodes of this failure occurred after the Second World War, in the nearly decade-long McCarthy era. Robert Lichtman, a San Francisco attorney and author, looks at the Court during these years, tracing how the Justices, like the countiy, engaged in the witch hunt, and eventually came out of its madness. One of the continuing debates among scholars as well as politicians and judicial observers in general is that of “judicial activism” versus “judicial restraint.” There are some who consider this at best a fallacious argument, since what constitutes “activism” and “restraint” are relative values very much in the eye of the beholder. Without the activism ofthe Warren Court, for example, it is hard to believe that the southern states would have voluntarily dismantled segregation. On the other hand, a too rigid adherence to the “idol of restraint,” as Zachary...

Society of United Irishmen Revolutionary and New-York Manumission Society Lawyer: Thomas Addis Emmet and the Irish Contributions to the Antislavery Movement in New York

New York History Spring 2014© 2014 by The New York State Historical Association 193 Society of United Irishmen Revolutionary and NewYork Manumission Society Lawyer: Thomas Addis Emmet and the Irish Contributions to the Antislavery Movement in New York Craig A. Landy, Independent Scholar The year 2014 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Addis Emmet, a leader of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen and a prominent New York lawyer following his forced exile from Ireland. Although there may have been more celebrated leaders of the movement behind the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Thomas Emmet’s unselfish desire to obtain a radical parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation earned him the recognition by Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky as, “one of the few really interesting figures connected with the rebellion.”1 In New York, Emmet devoted himself to his legal career and family, rising to the top among lawyers in the state and proving the equal of those lions of the national bar who argued before the United States Supreme Court such as William Pickney and Daniel Webster. Emmet’s reputation as an Irish patriot and his willingness to champion the cause of the newly-arrived Irish in New York endeared him to his fellow immigrants, who often turned to him for counsel and leadership. This essay explores the first case that Emmet received in New York in 1805, which involved the prosecution of the captain of a Newport, Rhode Island slave ship and traces the origins of Emmet’s antislavery beliefs in Ireland and his subsequent efforts involving slavery and the slave trade in the United States, especially his work with and for the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated, commonly known as the New-York Manumission Society (N‑YMS). Through this first case, Emmet began the arc of his legal career in America, eventually achieving a level of success 1. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 4:253. 194 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY undreamed of when he first arrived. The case also frames an aspect of the radicalism spawned in the United Irish movement in Ireland and transplanted across the Atlantic in the Age of Revolution. The United Irishmen gave rise to one of the more radical movements advocating the rights of man in the Anglo-Irish world at the end of the eighteenth century. These men were radicals who, by either reform or revolution, were proponents of parliamentary change and religious equality in Ireland. In New York, the more visible former United Irishmen continued to pursue a radical path in the political arena, but on social issues, in particular, some modified their views towards slavery and race, while others held fast to their previous beliefs. This study, therefore, departs from previous examinations of the Americanization of the United Irish radical tradition in one significant way: it emphasizes a less studied segment of those American United Irishmen who arrived in New York between 1802 and 1806, including Thomas Addis Emmet, William James Macneven, and William Sampson. Their antislavery attitudes, forged in revolutionary Ireland and transplanted to America, waivered less than their fellow émigr és. This article explores why this later group’s opposition to slavery was less influenced by the process of American accommodation that affected some of the earlier-arriving former United Irishmen.2 Few historians have examined the first case Emmet received in America, which is hardly surprising given the general paucity of court records dating back to the early nineteenth century in New York. However, a fresh look at archived records, now available online, reveals that Emmet’s first case likely involved a prosecution in New York City under the federal laws against the slave trade that resulted in an unprecedented victory for the antislavery movement, a prolonged prison confinement for a young New England captain and not one, but two presidential pardons. Emmet’s first case has been hailed as the most dramatic and most difficult case prosecuted by the leading New York antislavery society in its sixty-five year history. 2. For discussion of the...

The Brothers Peckham and the Politics of Judicial Nomination

The Brothers Peckham and the Politics of Judicial Nomination ALBERT B. LAWRENCE In 1894, President Grover Cleveland nominated Wheeler H. Peckham, a New York lawyer, for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. The Senate rejected the nomination. The defeat was orchestrated by New York Senator David B. Hill, a Tamma­ ny-Hall Democrat who opposed Cleveland’s reform style of “Bourbon” Democratic politics. Strangely, Hill proclaimed that he would support as a substitute nominee Peckham’s brother, New York Court of Appeals Judge Rufus W. Peckham, whose politics were rooted in the same reform tradition as that of his brother. Why the brother but not the nominee? There are circumstances to suggest that Hill wanted to move Rufus out of the way to make room on New York’s high court for a political crony of Hill’s, a lawyer who had been involved in a notorious “vote-stealing” scandal. Cleve­ land did not accede to Hill, and stubbornly put forward Wheeler’s nomination, which failed. He did nominate Rufus Peckham for another seat the following year, however, and won his confirmation. Cleveland, Hill, and the Peckhams were all New York Democrats. In fact, Hill had been Cleveland’s lieutenant governor when he served as governor from 1883 until he moved to the White House in March 1885.' But in the 1870s and 1880s the New York Democratic party was divided between what was known as the Tammany Hall machine in New York City and upstate reformers, led by one-time presi­ dential candidate Samuel J. Tilden and his chief lieutenant, Daniel Manning, an Albany banker and newspaper owner.2 The reformers became known as “Bourbon” Democrats.3 When the reformers allied with Republicans, they were collectively called “Mugwumps.”4 Cleveland had made his name as a reformer as mayor of Buffalo in 1882? Hill, on the other hand, had been “in league” for years with Tammany Hall and its leader, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed,6 but he supported Cleveland for governor because he wanted to become lieutenant governor.7 Once in Albany, Governor Cleve­ land angered Tammany by nominating some­ one from a rival Brooklyn machine as immigration commissioner. When Tammany THE PECKHAM BROTHERS 23 objected, he submitted a long list of nominees to state jobs, none of whom were favorites for Tammany patronage.8 He also battled with Tammany over fares on New York City’s elevated railroad.9 As President, Cleveland refused to partici­ pate in New York politics, and he would not endorse Hill, his successor as governor, when Hill ran for re-election in 1888.1(1 This was the final straw between Cleveland and Tammany. Hill, as governor, became the leader ofthe anti­ reformers and promptly declared war on Cleveland’s attempts to stem government patronage and reform the civil service. As President Cleveland’s biographer Alyn Brodsky described it: “A faction [of the New York party] dancing ominously to Hill’s piping and committed to perpetuating the spoils system was tightening its grip on the party.”11 Likewise, the President’s failure to win a second consecutive term in 1888 was attributed to Tammany’s refusal to give him strong support.12 Wheeler Hazard Peckham (left) and Rufus Peckham, Jr. (middle) read law under their father, Rufus Peckham Sr., and became successful lawyers in Albany. A middle brother, Joseph Henry (right), died at age seventeen. (Their mother, Isabella, died when young Rufus was nine.) Rufus followed in his father’s footsteps by serving as the district attorney for Albany, on the New York Supreme Court, and on the Court of Appeals. 24 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY The Peckham brothers were lawyers from Albany whose father had been a Court of Appeals judge. All of the Peckhams were long-time acolytes of Tilden and their fellow Albanian, Manning. Tilden had run in opposition to Tammany corruption since his first campaign for New York Assembly in 1845.L’ Tweed then controlled the nomina­ tion and election of state, county, and city officials—particularly judges—in New York. “Judges were nominated partly with a view to the amount they could ‘put up,’ and partly with a view to their future decisions...

The Innocence Project at Twenty: An Interview with Barry Scheck

The late 1980s witnessed the debut of DNA on the stages of the world's judiciaries. In the United Kingdom, DNA “minisatellites” (discovered by Sir Alec Jeffreys and chronicled previously in this series of PLOS Genetics interviews) made their breathtaking appearance in two compelling stories: an immigration case and a double rape-murder case in which a village's entire male population offered up its blood for testing. Meanwhile in the United States, the plodding search for “RFLPs” (restriction fragment length polymorphisms) ultimately gave rise to a set of DNA markers that wended their way into the American courtroom. Directing, producing, and starring in the saga of this transformational technology were a pair of New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, whose relentless efforts and strict adherence to scientific principles have reshaped the landscape of criminal justice far beyond the application of DNA testing.