Stephen J. Field: Is That a Pistol in Your Robe or Do You Just Want to Flog Me?

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal,California
• Citation: Vol. 32 No. 2
• Publication year: 2019
• Author: By James Attridge
• topic: Constitutional Law,Civil Procedure,Real Estate

Stephen J. Field: Is That a Pistol in Your Robe or Do You Just Want to Flog Me?

By James Attridge

James Attridge is a transportation lawyer and mediator who splits time between San Francisco and Denver.

If you are reading this, chances are very good that for at least 24 hours you loathed Justice Stephen J. Field. He's the guy who had you pondering whether to stop that first law school tuition check. Mr. Justice Field was the no good, low-down dirty dog who wrote Pennoyer v. Neff: 17 pages of dreary Victorian prose that amount to this: "If you want to sue somebody and make it stick, it's a good idea to let them know about it first." Two days later, you learned that cases about mail-order shoes and far-flung Volkswagen dealers rendered Pennoyer old news, but at least you learned a valuable legal lesson: keeping the cast of characters straight is half the battle. Anybody who knew him no doubt chuckles learning the legacy of the first Californian on the U.S. Supreme Court is complex, perplexing, still influential, still required reading, and still annoying. Field spent an entire bilious lifetime annoying his fellow man, albeit in creative ways.

Field came from a distinguished New England family and set up shop in New York with his brother David Dudley Field, who drafted New York's Field Code of Civil Procedure. He migrated to Marysville as a forty-niner and was elected town alcalde three days after his arrival. Experience was a key issue. His opponent had arrived only the day before. The town didn't have a jail yet, which made floggings his sentence of choice. In 1850, he was elected to the California Assembly and at the state Democratic convention the next year he flashed his judicial temperament by attempting to defenestrate another delegate. By 1857, he was a wealthy man, having mastered the intricacies of California land titles as well as mineral and water claims, a jumble of conflicting rules dating back to the Siete Partidas of King Alfonso El Sabio.

He was elected to the State Supreme Court in 1857 and became Chief Justice in 1859 after his predecessor, David Terry killed Senator David Broderick in a duel on the shores of San Francisco's Lake Merced, in a wood now tucked away at the confluence of swanky country clubs. Field, like Broderick, was anti-slavery and a Unionist, and was mindful that disagreements in the west could get nasty. So, he had his judicial robe custom-tailored with two pistol pockets just in case litigants got too high-spirited. "I found that a knowledge that they were worn generally created a wholesome courtesy of language and manner."

In the aftermath of the Mexican War, fights over the proper title to the "outside lands" south and east of Presidio San Francisco and west of Van Ness Avenue seemed never-ending. In 1854, the City of San Francisco and the United States girded for battle in federal district court, but the only sitting Judge, Ogden Hoffman, never set the case for trial because he had an interest in a chunk of the disputed land. In the meanwhile, Field had ruled in Wolf v. Baldwin...