Francis Wharton


Francis Wharton was an American legal writer, theologian, and educator.

Life

Wharton was descended from an accomplished Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, although his father had become an Episcopalian in 1812. Born in 1820, Wharton graduated from Yale in 1839, read law in his father's office, and was admitted to the bar in 1843. He became prominent in Pennsylvania politics as a Democrat. He served as assistant attorney-general in 1845. In Philadelphia, he edited the North American and United States Gazette. From 1856 to 1863, he was a professor of English, History, and Literature at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
Wharton married Sidney Paul in 1852. After her death, he remarried in 1860 to Helen Elizabeth Ashhurst, with whom he had two daughters. Wharton took orders in the Episcopal Church in [the United States of America|Protestant Episcopal Church] in 1862, and was the rector of St. Paul's Church, Brookline, Massachusetts from 1863 to 1869. From 1871 to 1881, he taught ecclesiastical polity and canon law in the Protestant Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and during this time he lectured on the conflict of laws at Boston University.
For two years thereafter he traveled in Europe, and after two years in Philadelphia Wharton went to Washington, DC, where he was lecturer on criminal law and then professor of criminal law at Columbian (now George Washington) University. In 1885–1888 he was solicitor of the Department of State.
During the last two years of his life, Wharton amassed revolutionary diplomatic correspondence and edited them into a six volume work, published in 1889, the year of his death. This edition of the Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States superseded Jared Sparks's compilation.
Wharton was a "broad churchman" and was deeply interested in the hymnology of the Episcopal church. Wharton was also interested in Christian apologetics, and he wrote an essay on the relationship between apologetics and jurisprudence that was published in The Princeton Review in 1878. He received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1883. In recognition of his accomplishments in international law, Wharton was elected to the Institute of International Law. He authored the doctrine in criminal law that to form a conspiracy takes one more person than is necessary to commit the crime.

Publications

  • A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States
  • State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams
  • A Treatise on the Law of Homicide in the United States
  • with Moreton Stillé, A Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence
  • A Treatise on Theism and Modern Skeptical Theories, in which he applied rules of legal evidence to modern skeptical theories
  • A Treatise on the Conflict of Laws
  • A Treatise on the Law of Negligence
  • A Commentary on the Law of Agency and Agents
  • A Commentary on the Law of Evidence in Civil Issues
  • a companion work on Criminal Evidence
  • "Recent Changes in Jurisprudence and Christian Apologetics," The Princeton Review, Vol. 2, no. 1 pp. 149–168..
  • Commentary on the Law of Contracts
  • Commentaries on Law
  • Digest of the International Law of the United States.
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