Louisiana Bankruptcy Law

From its founding in 1906, the Louisiana State University Law School has offered its students a truly distinctive legal education. Integrated programs in Louisiana's unique civil law, in Anglo-American common law and federal law, and in international and comparative law create an overall global law curriculum that is recognized worldwide for its academic excellence and outstanding teaching, research, and public service faculty. In LSU Law, alumnus and professor W. Lee Hargrave chronicles the first seventy years of the institution--up until the point it was made an autonomous Law Center--revealing the faces and forces that have helped to create the special mystique surrounding the school and the meaning of a law degree from LSU. After an initial discussion of the legal profession in Louisiana before the establishment of formal academic instruction, Hargrave maps the LSU Law School's growth and development. He explores all aspects of the school--its administrators and faculty, student body, shifting admission requirements, curriculum, influence on the legal community and state government, and much more. He also describes how students lived and learned during these years and discusses the effects of outside people and events-- including Huey P. Long, World War II, and the civil rights movement--on the school. Hargrave's sweeping study will be of interest to legal historians and the national law school community, but his primary service is to alumni, who will welcome the opportunity to relive their law school days and discover how their short years there fit into the overall evolution of what has become a Louisiana institution.

Louisiana's legal heritage has long been a source of fascination, curiosity, and sadly, misinformation. Outsiders have viewed the legal system as an anomaly and have shunned its study because of its perceived quirkiness. Moreover, past writings about the state's legal structure have focused on the minutiae of Louisiana's civil law origins, adding to an image of peculiarity. Consequently, Louisiana has been generally ignored in treatments of American or southern legal history. Recently, however, a new vision has emerged -- the New Louisiana Legal History. A product of an energetic cadre of writers, this rendering explores new methods and areas of research with the aim of integrating Louisiana into the mainstream of American legal history, southern history, and American history in general. Proponents of the New Louisiana Legal History have consistently refused to view law in a vacuum, opting instead for interpretative schemes that mingle social, political, and intellectual history into modes of analysis that treat all things legal as one strand in a complex cultural matrix. The ten essays in this volume -- which address law in the state through the nineteenth century -- exemplify the present condition of the New Louisiana Legal History. Topics range from the impact of the printed word on the evolution of Louisiana law, the economic and civic implications of legal publishing during the territorial and antebellum periods, and the military courts in Union-occupied New Orleans to the consequences of the flurry of emancipation cases in New Orleans in the two years before the Civil War, the use of the courts to attack society's conventions, and the legal status of free people of color inantebellum New Orleans. A Law unto Itself? marks the coming of age of the New Louisiana Legal History.