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Mixed Jurisdictions and Convergence: The Louisiana Example

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Extract

Once on a plane to New Orleans I chanced to half overhear a conversation between two passengers who shared the same row of seats with me. Somewhere between wakefulness and drowsiness, my ear caught a telltale accent that betrayed one of my seatmates as an Orleanian as they chatted animatedly about the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the ways that both diverged from the rest of the country. The native noted reverently the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, he remarked grandly on the extraordinary cuisine, he waxed pridefully about the city as the birthplace of jazz, and he spoke warmly about the manifold ethnic origins of his fellow Louisianians. Then, as if to fortify his contention that he hailed from a truly unusual place, he pointedly observed that Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose legal system rested upon the Napoleonic Code, even as he confessed to an uncertainty about why that difference existed or what it meant precisely.

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Copyright © 2001 by the International Association of Law Libraries 

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References

1 See, for example, Wigmore, John H., “Louisiana: The Story of its Legal System,” Tulane Law Review 1 (1916): 145; Dart, Henry Plauché, “The Legal Institutions of Louisiana,” ibid., 3 (1918): 254–80; Charbonneau, Thomas E., Combe, David A., and Herman, Shael, The Louisiana Civil Code: A Humanistic Appraisal (New Orleans, 1981); Palmer, Vernon Valentine, ed., Louisiana: Microcosm of a Mixed Jurisdiction (Durham, N.C., 1999). That view has also suffused more popular writing, such as Flake, Carol, New Orleans: Behind the Masks of America's Most Exotic City (New York, 1994), 64–67. Recently, though, it has come under scrutiny and revision. See Billings, Warren M. and Fernandez, Mark F., eds., A Law Unto Itself? Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History (Baton Rouge, 2001).Google Scholar

2 The origin of the myth is treated in my introduction to Schafer, Judith Kelleher and Billings, Warren M., eds., An Uncommon Experience: Law and Judicial Institutions in Louisiana, 1803–2003 (Lafayette, La., 1997), 11–17 and Fernandez, Mark F., “Louisiana Legal History: Past, Present, and Future,” in Billings and Fernandez, eds., A Law Unto Itself, 123.Google Scholar

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21 The Mississippi River makes nearly a two hundred-seventy degree bend at New Orleans. Hence the synonym “Crescent City.”Google Scholar

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28 Between 1812 and 1845, members of the court were designated “judges” rather than “justices,” and there was no formal recognition of a chief judge as such. However from the first session of court forward, it was the custom for the senior judge in point of commission or length of tenure to preside. The judiciary article in the Constitution of 1845 adopted the style “justice” and “chief justice.”Google Scholar

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