On this Easter Day, it is only fitting that we law prawfs pause to remember Simon Greenleaf’s Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, by the Rules of Evidence. Greenleaf was, along with Joseph Story, a founder of Harvard Law School, antebellum America’s most renowned scholar of the law of evidence, and a pious evangelical Christian. Not being an evidence expert, I’ll leave it to others to assess Greenleaf’s argument that the written testimony of the gospels would be admissible in an American court of law as reliable and unrebutted evidence of Jesus’s resurrection. Instead, I offer the work as evidence that one can never tell which of one’s writings will survive into posterity: Greenleaf’s treatise on evidence is, I believe, forgotten by all but a few legal historians, but his essay on the gospel remains read to this day.
Posted by Rick Hills on April 4, 2010 at 12:06 PM
Comments
Greenleaf was also the first compiler of an index of legal citations. He published his index in in 1821, creating the genre that Frank Shepard would perfect five decades later.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Apr 5, 2010 6:39:17 AM