Cases and Other Authorities on Legal Ethics (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Cases and Other Authorities on Legal Ethics
...)
Excerpt from Cases and Other Authorities on Legal Ethics
Contracts. Corporations. Constitutional Law. Criminal Law. Criminal Procedure. Common - Law Pleading. Conflict of Laws. Code Pleading. Damages.
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The Performance Of Contracts: A Summary Of Conditions In Contracts And Impossibility Of Performance (1911)
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George Purcell Costigan was an American professor of law.
Background
George Purcell Costigan was born on July 19, 1870 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the first child of George Purcell Costigan, of Irish and Dutch heritage, whose earliest American ancestor came with Lord Baltimore to Maryland, and Emilie Sigur, of French and Spanish heritage. He spent his childhood in San Miguel County, Colorado, where his father was the county judge, and in this pioneer community he learned responsibility early. When he was fifteen years old he journeyed on horseback to mines some miles distant, in which his parents had an interest, and brought home the gold ore that had proved too dangerous a cargo for adults.
Education
In the absence of schools he received his first instruction from a minister. Later he attended Notre Dame preparatory school in Indiana, and Denver high school. He then entered Harvard College. Following graduation in 1892, he entered the law school, in the era of Ames, Gray, Langdell, and Thayer, and received the degrees of A. M. and LL. B. in 1894.
Career
In 1894 Costigan began his career in Salt Lake City with the firm of Zane & Zane and remained there until 1899, when he left to practise in New York City. Ill health compelled him a year later to return to the West, and this time he settled in Denver, where he continued to practise for another five years. At the same time he taught in the University of Denver law school.
Meanwhile his interest in definitions in the law, recurring in his later writing, led him to submit, in 1903, "A Plea for a Modern Definition and Classification of Real Property". With a record of eleven years of successful practice Costigan now turned to the responsibilities he considered most challenging.
In 1905 he accepted a professorship at the University of Nebraska College of Law, and in 1907 he succeeded Roscoe Pound as its dean.
In the next few years he wrote his first book, Handbook on American Mining Law (1908), served as secretary of the Nebraska State Bar Association, and as a member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools. In his teaching and writing he approached legal problems with a searching, original mind that conveyed somewhat of its quality to others. His belief that law could be more realistic, more intelligible, and more humane found expression in a series of articles: "The Conveyance of Lands by One Whose Lands Are in the Adverse Possession of Another"; "The Doctrine of Boston Ice Company v. Potter"; "Conditions in Contracts"; "Constructive Contracts"; "The Classification of Trusts".
In 1909 Costigan joined the law-school faculty at Northwestern University, where he remained until 1922. During that period he wrote The Performance of Contracts, acted as secretary of the Association of American Law Schools from 1910 to 1912, and as editor-in-chief of the Illinois Law Review from 1909 to 1916.
In 1922 he accepted a professorship at the University of California School of Jurisprudence, a post that he occupied until his death.
He was deeply impressed by the contribution of Langdell and Ames in partially recasting equity and law as developed by the English courts.
Early in his career he set forth "The Proposed American Code of Legal Ethics" and "Canons of Legal Ethics", the latter being reprinted in the English Law Times.
Departing from traditional methods he published his first casebook, Cases on Wills, Descent, and Administration. There followed Cases on the American Law of Mining; Cases and Other Authorities on Legal Ethics; Cases
on the Law of Contracts; and Select Cases on the Law of Trusts (1925).
In the conviction that law should adapt itself to the needs of justice, he set forth measured criticisms in such articles as "Constructive Trusts Based on Promises Made to Secure Bequests, Devises, or Intestate Succession"; "The Theory of Chancery in Protecting against the Cestui que Trust One Who Purchases from a Trustee for Value without Notice"; "Those Protective Trusts Which are Miscalled 'Spendthrift Trusts' Reexamined".
Achievements
His interest in a living, mutable law made him one of the great teachers of the country.
He was a member of the Old South Congregational Church of Boston.
Personality
In the classroom and in his writing he took nothing for granted. He searched out rich and unusual materials, but his main purpose was to train students to search for themselves and to distinguish the good from the bad, the clear from the confused. He made them aware of the quicksands of the law so that they might better understand its essential soundness.
Costigan brought to his teaching and writing a subtle sense of humor, but no man was more sternly schooled in the discipline of the law or a more prodigious worker.
The strong roots of Costigan's emotional and intellectual life, his experience of widely different environments, the warmth of his concern for others, combined to make him a forceful person despite his self-effacement. He inspired his students to look beyond conventional patterns of learning, and to study legal processes in a spirit of ceaseless inquiry that would make of the law not merely a learned profession, but the living substance of civilized relations among men.
Connections
While a student, he met Maud Whittemore of Cambridge, Massachussets, whom he married on March 31, 1896. They had one son, Henry Dunster.
