Abstract

Mitchell Franklin's contributions to American legal thought were in large part the result of his devotion to the study of the United States' Romanist legal heritage. A leading theme of his work is that the Roman legal tradition presents more promising prospects for progressive legal developments than the Anglo-American common law tradition. Thus, Franklin became an advocate of Roman-style codification of American law which began with the American revolution and has continued.

His Romanist position sharply distinguished Franklin from almost all American jurists of this century, even those considered liberal and progressive. Thus, Franklin criticized Holmes for his Anglophilic Humean1 conceptions of law and judicial hegemony.