David Field Movies and Career Information

David Dudley Field II (February 13, 1805 – April 13, 1894) was an American lawyer and law reformer who made major contributions to the development of American civil procedure. His greatest accomplishment was engineering the move away from common law pleading towards code pleading, which culminated in the enactment of the Field Code in 1850 by the state of New York. He was born in Haddam, Connecticut. He was the oldest of the eight sons and two daughters of the Rev. David Dudley Field I, a Congregational minister and local historian, and Submit Dickenson Field. He graduated from Williams College in 1825 and settled in New York City, where he studied law. After his admission to the bar in 1828, he rapidly won a high position in his profession. In 1829, Field married Jane Lucinda Hopkins with whom he had three children: Dudley, Jeanie and Isabella. After his wife's death in 1836, Field remarried twice, first to Harriet Davidson (d. 1864) and second to Mary E. Carr (d. 1874). The eldest child, Dudley Field, followed in his father's footsteps, studying law. He was made a partner in his father's practice in 1854. Over the next few years he became convinced that the common law in America,