Herman Oliphant

Herman Enzla Oliphant fue un jurista estadounidense y profesor en la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Chicago y en la Facultad de Derecho de Columbia . Se le considera una figura destacada del movimiento del realismo jurídico en Estados Unidos.

Oliphant nació en Forest, Indiana , el 31 de agosto de 1884, hijo de Albert G. Oliphant, agricultor y comerciante de ganado, y Martha Jane Richardson. Creció en la granja familiar. En 1903, se graduó de la escuela secundaria de Forest y asistió al Marion College. Regresó a casa en 1905 para casarse con su novia de la infancia, Julia Sims. En 1907, se graduó del Marion College y luego obtuvo una licenciatura en Artes con especializaciones en filología, griego y filosofía de la Universidad de Indiana (1909) y su doctorado en Derecho de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Chicago en 1914. ^{[ 1 ]}

Oliphant comenzó su carrera docente en la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Chicago antes de incorporarse a la facultad de Derecho de Columbia en 1922. Poco después de su llegada a la Universidad de Columbia, escribió al presidente de la universidad, Nicholas Murray Butler , exponiendo algunos planes para reorganizar el currículo de la facultad de Derecho. Su objetivo principal era transformar la facultad en un centro de investigación, haciendo especial hincapié en la interacción entre el Derecho y otras ciencias sociales. Bajo la administración de Huger Jervey , quien se convirtió en decano de la facultad de Derecho en 1924, los planes de Oliphant sirvieron de base para la reorganización de la facultad. En 1932, Oliphant fue coautor, junto con Theodore S. Hope Jr., de "Study of Day Calendars" (Estudio de los calendarios diarios), un análisis exhaustivo de cómo el tiempo influye en los casos judiciales. ^{[ 1 ]}

Oliphant later went on to teach at Johns Hopkins University, and later became the chief counsel of the United States Treasury Department, serving in that capacity from 1934 to 1939. While serving in that position, he was regarded as an economic experimenter, and was the prime advocate of the undistributed profits tax. He was known for shaping many of the policies of the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While at the Treasury Department, Oliphant was lobbied by William Randolph Hearst to make cannabis illegal. Hearst had recently become heavily involved in synthetics based on petroleum hydrocarbons, and wanted to quash efforts from competing companies to make similar products from hemp seed oil. Although that theory has been promoted for Oliphant's push for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, his nephew Dr. Cleon O. Swayzee of Columbia University, in a 1984 interview stated two other reasons that took precedence for Oliphant's efforts. First was the influence of Oliphant's brother, Dr. Homer Oliphant, a physician who practiced in Forest and Frankfort, Indiana, and who was promoting the theory as early as 1919 that smoking was dangerous for the health of mothers and unborn babies. Granted Oliphant didn't do anything about smoking cigarettes. The second reason was that in the midst of the Great Depression with limited employment opportunities this endeavor was a vehicle to discourage immigration particularly from Mexico.^[1]

Oliphant is generally regarded as a representative of American legal realism and is famous for his statement that the principle of stare decisis is no longer applicable. Although the approach could be implemented in a time when society was relatively simply structured, in the present age it should be abandoned. To this effect, Oliphant pleaded a scientific approach. In his opinion, the way a judge deals with a case can be qualified as a stimulus-response situation, in the sense that the judge reacts to the stimulus of the case brought to his attention. In his 1928 inaugural address as President of the American Association of Law Schools, Oliphant said: "Our case material is a gold mine for scientific work. It has not been scientifically exploited ... We should critically examine all the methods now used in any of the social sciences and having any useful degree of objectivity."^[2]

Oliphant died on January 11, 1939, of heart disease at the age of 54. He is buried in Frankfort, Indiana.

• Facultad de Derecho de Columbia: Ampliación del plan de estudios: Parte 2
• CiteSeer: Un modelo computacional de ratio de decisiones
• William Randolph Hearst y Lammont Dupont. Archivado el 3 de marzo de 2008 en Wayback Machine .
• "Otra salida" . Time . 17 de diciembre de 1951. Archivado del original el 23 de noviembre de 2010. Consultado el 10 de agosto de 2008 .
• "Entrada y Salida" . Time . 23 de enero de 1939. Archivado del original el 14 de diciembre de 2008. Consultado el 10 de agosto de 2008 .

• Herman Oliphant, 'Un retorno al stare decisis', en American Bar Association Journal 14 (1928).