Herman Oliphant was born on August 31, 1884, on a farm near Forest, Clinton County, Indiana, the second son and third of seven children of Albert G. and Martha Jane (Richardson) Oliphant. He had three older half-brothers. His father, a farmer and livestock trader of Scotch-Irish ancestry, had come originally from North Carolina.
Education
After grade school and a year of work on the family farm and as a member of a bridge gang, young Oliphant entered Danville Normal School, from which he transferred to the Marion Normal College, graduating in 1907. He then went to Indiana University, where he received the A. B. degree in 1909 and remained for two additional years (1909-1911) studying philology, Greek, and philosophy. During this period he supported himself by selling books, running a teachers' agency, and teaching English for four years at the Marion Normal College. In 1911, deciding to study law, Oliphant entered the University of Chicago Law School. He was graduated with honors, receiving the J. D. degree in 1914.
Career
After Chicago Law School Herman Oliphant was immediately appointed instructor in law at Chicago. He advanced rapidly, teaching various commercial subjects, and became full professor in 1919. In 1920 he participated in founding the American Bar Association Journal. In 1921 Oliphant was called to Columbia University as professor of law. Here, as at Chicago, he specialized in commercial law, succeeding Charles Thaddeus Terry in the course on contracts and organizing the field of trade regulation; his Cases on Trade Regulation was published in 1923. He was painstaking with his teaching technique, employing ingenious hypothetical cases to vivify the discussion and stimulating his students to think for themselves. Impressed by the extent to which legal instruction was detached from life, Oliphant advocated a "functional approach, " based upon intensive studies of the law in action. He developed his ideas in numerous articles and addresses, notably in his presidential address in 1927 to the Association of American Law Schools, "A Return to Stare Decisis" (1928), in which he urged that law students be given a comprehensive knowledge of the social environment in which law operates and proposed that study of judicial decisions be centered not on "the vocal behavior of judges" but on "what the judges actually do when stimulated by the facts of the case before them. "
As early as 1923 Oliphant initiated a movement within the faculty of the Columbia University Law School to reform the curriculum in accordance with these ideas. In 1926-28, on his suggestion, the faculty undertook an intensive survey of the legal curriculum; the results were reported in the Summary of Studies, published in 1928, that he prepared. While Oliphant's plan to study law in its economic and social context found substantial support among his colleagues, it was also opposed by an influential group. When in 1928 President Nicholas Murray Butler turned to this group to fill a vacancy in the deanship of the law school, Oliphant and several of his colleagues resigned. Oliphant went to the Johns Hopkins University, which offered a fresh opportunity to realize his ideas; there, in conjunction with Walter Wheeler Cook, Leon Carroll Marshall, and Hessel E. Yntema, he organized the Institute for the Study of Law, a pioneering research center, where for three years he directed a series of studies, notably a detailed analysis of the administration of justice in New York City. When financial difficulties foreshadowed the suspension of the Institute in 1932, Oliphant, with the aid of an influential group of New York lawyers, formed the New York Law Society to continue these studies, thus anticipating the later state Judicial Council.
Oliphant is most widely known, however, for his part in shaping the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. He had rejected earlier pleas by Roosevelt's advisers to join the "brain trust, " but in March 1933 he relinquished his research duties to become general counsel, under Henry Morgenthau, Jr. , of the Farm Credit Administration. Even in that position Oliphant served as a top fiscal adviser; it was he, for example, who found the legal precedent enabling the administration to devalue the dollar and who helped to devise the exchange stabilization fund provision of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. The transfer of Oliphant and Morgenthau to the Treasury Department in November 1933 signified the administration's full acceptance of monetary inflation as a basic recovery policy. As general counsel to Morgenthau, Oliphant was the Secretary's close adviser on the most intricate departmental matters. Early in 1935 he suggested to President Roosevelt a tax on undistributed corporate profits, and this controversial measure - an outstanding example of the use of taxation as an instrument of broad social policy - was passed in 1936. Oliphant opposed on principle the concentration of economic power; it was therefore fitting that Roosevelt appointed him, in 1938, as a member of the Temporary National Economic Committee, a joint legislative-executive body charged with investigating the extent of such concentration with a view to strengthening federal antitrust policies. Within a year, however, Oliphant died, at the age of fifty-four, in the Naval Hospital at Washington, D. C. , a few weeks after suffering a coronary thrombosis.