Academic

The Source of Perry Miller's Heart versus Head?

By propertyprof

This is primarily of interest to legal historians, but as I was in the stacks of the library this afternoon I pulled John C.H. Wu's 1958 jurisprudence book off the shelf. I was on my way to Neil Duxbury's Patterns of American Jurisprudence; I needed to refresh my memory about what he said about antebellum jurisprudence (not much). Anyway, I was surprised to see Wu's discussion of the heart and head--and even more surprised to see his quotation from The Rapid. Ah, perhaps this is where Perry Miller found that case for use in The Life of the Mind in America from Revolution through Civil War! I've been wondering about that for a long while.

That, however, set me to ask more about Wu---whose work I shamefully was ignorant of.   He was born in China in 1899, educated in France and the United States, worked as a lawyer and judge in China, converted to Catholicism in 1937, was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, served as a justice minister in China and as a diplomat to Rome briefly after the war; following the 1949 revolution he could not return to China.  He migrated to the United States where he taught at the University of Hawaii and later at Rutgers University.   What a life!

Alfred L. Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).