Their posts have been rather lightweight recently but this is a great read.
David Hoffman: Early America’s Dark Horse Law Professor and the Natural Law
The Declaration of Independence famously justified the American colonies’ decision to reject British rule with a statement of rights, namely, that all men are created equal; that they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments are instituted to protect these rights. The rights that it points to are not something that the people receive from a state or a government. The Declaration speaks about rights as though they are a natural part of us, that they, in effect, arise from our nature as human beings. Many authors, including Thomas Jefferson, styled these rights as ‘the laws of nature.’
Rights have certainly remained a cornerstone of the law and politics of the United States since that time. Theories of the laws of nature (also known as natural law), on the other hand, did not remain as influential in early American jurisprudence. On the contrary, while some lawyers and judges throughout the 19th century made appeals in court to natural law, the overall trend was to look elsewhere for a winning line of argument. (Banner, especially pp. 119-136.) Nevertheless, there were important voices who tried to make the case that natural law theory should be seen as both the basis of our legal system and as an important component of legal education. (See generally Banner.) In this post, I want to talk about David Hoffman (1784-1854), the Baltimore lawyer and law professor who argued for just that cause.
Until the end of the 19th century, most lawyers in America learned their profession by “reading law,” that is, by apprenticing in the office of a practicing lawyer, reading books, and preparing cases alongside professionals. Early in the 19th century, however, experiments were already underway to provide formal instruction in post-graduate institutions dedicated to law. The private law institute of the prominent Baltimore judge Walter Dorsey (1771-1823) is an important example of these. Dorsey’s school was successful, and it likely outperformed, while it lasted, another attempt at building a law school that was taking place in the same city. (Shaffer, p. 129.) In 1814, the new University of Maryland (precursor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore) contracted with a local attorney to create a law institute to complement the university’s faculties of medicine and divinity. That attorney was David Hoffman, an unusually bookish man, even for a lawyer, who came from a wealthy Lutheran family in Baltimore. Hoffman’s father had emigrated from Germany, and the family’s fortunes grew along with the city’s prosperity in the early years after independence. Hoffman was educated at St. Johns College in Annapolis, where he received a classical education (and where you can still receive a classical education today). It is not known where he read law, but by the second decade of the 19th century, he was outearning, by his own account, nearly every lawyer working in Baltimore. (Bloomfield, p. 678.) Between his birth in 1784 and the time he was contacted by the new university, the population of the city may have as much as quadrupled to 50,000 souls. The number of attorneys working in Baltimore rose as well, from 16 in 1779 to 43 in 1810. (Bloomfield, p. 667.) Opportunities for enterprising young lawyers were expanding in the bustling port city, and many people sought entrance to the legal profession, but perhaps not enough to fill the roster of both of these law schools. Hoffman’s courses, though commissioned in 1814 and supported by the university, did not begin to see meaningful enrollment until just before Dorsey died in 1823. (Shaffer, p. 124.)
This slow start may have had something to do with market saturation, but it might also have been due to Hoffman’s particular vision for legal education. It was a vision that, despite the initial unpopularity of his program, was already becoming well-known among leading American lawyers. Important voices of the day, such as Joseph Story and James Kent, wrote praise about its ingenuity, and in many ways, it was one of a kind. (Bloomfield, p. 679.)
Hoffman first explored his views in a work he published in 1817, which he titled A Course of Legal Study: respectfully addressed to the students of law in the United States. The course that he outlined in that book was a course of directed reading, which he presents in a series of chapters, each of which covers a broad topic in the law, along with notes that explain the major point he hopes that the student will draw from an encounter with the assigned readings.
What distinguished Hoffman’s course from other methods of legal education in its time was its emphasis on the integration of the law with the other liberal arts. Many legal instructors focused on supplying students only with what they would find immediately useful in legal practice. Hoffman, by contrast, believed that the law – as a profession – holds a critical place in public life. He thought its practitioners ought to have a broad understanding of their vocation as something like the guardians of the republican form of government. (Hoffman, 1817, pp. [iii]-xxx.) To achieve this, he wanted to show how moral philosophy, political philosophy, natural theology, and metaphysics inform the law, and how these fields should guide its interpreters to achieve that end. His book, A course of legal study, introduced students to the areas of law that they would eventually need in practice, but also included a broader scope of legal subjects than was the norm, covering even maritime and Roman law. It did all this by way of an engagement with first principles. (Shaffer, p. 132.)
The syllabus was very ambitious (perhaps delusionally grandiose). A conscientious reader of the books that he recommended, Hoffman estimated, could complete the course of instruction in about six years. This was double the typical length of legal training in that era. So, why was it so important to create such a comprehensive reading list? Method, Hoffman says. Nothing important can be achieved without diligent application of method, and when it comes to reading, method is all the more important. (Hoffman, 1817, p. iv.) He explains why:
“If a man should calculate on living to the age of sixty years and should appropriate, with great industry, forty of these years to the study of books, the most that could be accomplished in this time, would be the perusal of about sixteen hundred octavo volumes, of five hundred pages each. What is this number, compared with the millions of volumes out of which he has to select! How important it is, therefore, that the choice should be judicious… .” (Hoffman, 1817, p. v.)
The choice of books for a prospective lawyer will make the decisive difference, he said, both for the man and the republic. Of course, no North American library, public or private, could offer “millions of volumes” in 1817.
Hoffman taught at the University of Maryland’s law institute actively from 1822 until 1833, when a conflict with the university led to his decision to step away from teaching. During those years, in addition to lectures, Hoffman offered a practice court that was run by the school’s community with the assistance of some local professionals. (Shaffer, p. 137.) He worked hard to improve his pedagogy and his ideas about legal education as time went on. He published a statement of his current program in 1821, titled Syllabus of a course of lectures on law; proposed to be delivered in the University of Maryland; addressed to the students of law in the United States. In 1823, he published A lecture, introductory to a course of lectures, now delivering in the University of Maryland, which he supplemented with the publication of additional lectures through 1832. Though readings remained central to the course, he developed a series of more than 300 lectures to introduce students to the law. A fuller description of these lectures appears in his 1829 publication, Legal outlines, being the substance of a course of lectures now delivering in the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, the book, which came out in a single volume of more than 630 pages, contains the text of only a handful of the lectures from his course.
It is in this book, however, that Hoffman makes fully explicit his commitment to moral and political philosophy and their relation to a lawyer’s work. The first eight lectures of the course are fully devoted to discussions of natural law. The first focuses on the foundations of natural law, which he finds in “the origin and nature of man, his physical and moral constitution.” The second addresses the idea of “the state of nature,” running through the myths of human origins that authors such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau used to illustrate their points about how natural rights relate to the political order. The third discusses Hoffman’s analysis of the rights that people have by nature, which he draws from Hugo Grotius, Samuel Rutherford, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Richard Cumberland, among many others. The fourth argues that society arises from humankind’s instinct to live in community, an instinct that calls forth the need for some kind of government to manage disputes among its members. The remaining lectures move the reader toward an understanding of the relationship between natural law and the (positive) laws of the state, and then specifically, American law. The law is, he explains, a changing and contingent set of practices that, only at its best, meets the requirements of natural law; well-trained practitioners never lose sight of the gaps that abuses open up between positive law and the natural law.
Hoffman published a second edition of his A Course of Legal Study in two volumes in 1836, which can be found in the Law Library’s rare books collection. That edition, like the first, contains Hoffman’s code of ethics for attorneys (he calls it ‘professional deportment’), which was a first for the American legal community. For more on his life, see:
- Ariens, Michael, “Lost and found: David Hoffman and the History of American Legal Ethics.” Ark. Law Rev. v. 67, no. 3 (2014), pp. 571-625.
- Bloomfield, Maxwell, David Hoffman and the Shaping of a Republican Legal Culture, 38 Md. L. Rev. 673 (1979) Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol38/iss4/6
- Shaffer, Thomas, L. “David Hoffman’s Law School Lectures, 1822-1833.” Journal of Legal Education, April 1982, Vol. 32, No. 1 (April 1982), pp. 127-138.
- Sleeman, William. David Hoffman: Life, Letters and Lectures at the University of Maryland 1821-1837 / edited by Bill Sleeman. Lawbook Exchange, Clark, NJ, c2011.
Other Sources:
July 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Keep an eye out for more posts like this one that celebrate the Declaration, the lives of its signers, and the world in which they lived.
