David Dudley Field II (February 13, 1805April 13, 1894) was an American lawyer and law reformer who made major contributions to the development of American civil procedure. His greatest accomplishment was engineering the move away from common law pleading towards code pleading, which culminated in the enactment of the Field Code in 1850 by the state of New York.
In 1877, he also served briefly as a U.S. representative from New York's 7th congressional district.
Early life and education
Field was born in Haddam, Connecticut on February 13, 1805. He was the oldest of the eight sons and two daughters of the Rev. David Dudley Field I, a Congregational minister and local historian, and Submit Dickenson Field. His brothers included Stephen Johnson Field, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Cyrus Field, a prominent businessman and creator of the Atlantic Cable, and Rev. Henry Martyn Field, a prominent clergyman and travel writer. He was also the uncle of U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer.
He graduated from Williams College in 1825, studied law with Harmanus Bleecker in Albany, and settled in New York City. After his admission to the bar in 1828, he rapidly won a high position in his profession. He joined the law office of Henry and Robert Sedgwick, of the prominent Sedgwick family, and became a partner in the firm after Robert died.
In 1829, Field married Jane Lucinda Hopkins, with whom he had three children: Dudley, Jeanie Lucinda, and Isabella. After his wife's death in 1836, Field remarried twice, first to Harriet Davidson (d. 1864) and second to Mary E. Carr (d. 1874). The eldest child, Dudley Field, followed in his father's footsteps and studied law. He was made a partner in his father's practice in 1854. Jeanie Lucinda married an Antigua-born British imperial civil servant, Anthony Musgrave, and became a promoter of charitable projects in British colonies.
Dedication to codification
After having practiced law for several years, Field became convinced that the common law in America, and particularly in New York state, needed radical changes to unify and simplify its procedure. 1836 was particularly devastating for Field: his first wife, youngest child, and one of his brothers all died in the same year. The Louisiana code was drafted by jurists including Edward Livingston, Louis Lislet (1762–1832), and Pierre Derbigny.
Livingston helped to prepare criminal and civil codes for Louisiana, and Field's personal papers at Duke University Libraries reveal that he had read Livingston's 1825 report on the Louisiana Civil Code. He began by outlining his proposed reforms in pamphlets, professional journal articles, and legislative testimony, but met with a discouraging lack of interest. In 1846, Field's ideas gained wider notice with publication of a pamphlet, "The Reorganization of the Judiciary", which influenced that year's New York State Constitutional Convention to report in favor of a codification of the laws. In 1847 he finally had a chance to put his ideas into official form when he was appointed head of a state commission to revise court procedure and practice. The first part of the commission's work, a portion of the code of civil procedure, was reported and enacted by the legislature in 1848. By January 1, 1850, the New York state legislature had enacted the complete Code of Civil Procedure, subsequently known as the Field Code since it was almost entirely Field's work. It also influenced later procedural reforms in England and several of her colonies (specifically, the Judicature Acts).
However, according to Amalia Kessler, the more important aspect of Field's "code of civil procedure" was not so much the "code" part, but the "civil procedure" part. Before Field, the idea of "procedure" as a unified body of law simply did not exist in common law jurisdictions. Joseph Story's treatises a generation earlier are a typical example, in that Story, like his contemporaries, treated "pleading" and "practice" as two clearly distinct bodies of law and never used the word "procedure". The Field Code joined together "pleading" and "practice" for the first time under the heading of "procedure" and marked the "invention of procedure as a distinct, coherent category, defined in antithesis to the substantive law". The Field Code allowed any person "having organs of sense" to testify as a witness in a court of law in New York, except "the insane and very young children".
The codification, which was completed in February 1865, was adopted only in small part by the state of New York, but it served as a model upon which many statutory codes throughout the United States were constructed. it was later adopted in large part by the states of California, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as the territory of Guam many years later. (Notably, Idaho largely enacted the contract sections of Field's civil code but declined to enact the tort sections.
Later career
After 1876, Field returned to the Democratic Party, and from January to March 1877 served in the United States House of Representatives to complete the unexpired term of Smith Ely, who had been elected Mayor of New York City. During his brief Congressional career he delivered six speeches (all of which attracted attention), introduced a bill in regard to the presidential succession, and appeared before the Electoral Commission in Samuel J. Tilden's interest during the highly controversial presidential election of 1876. He died in New York City in 1894.