David Dudley Field II

David Dudley Field II was an American lawyer and law reformer who lived from 13 February 1805 to 13 April 1894, born in Haddam, Connecticut, a graduate of Williams College who studied law under Harmanus Bleecker in Albany and was admitted to the bar in 1828. He became the foremost American advocate for replacing the old common-law system of pleading with a unified, written code of civil procedure, and his draft became the Field Code, adopted by New York State in 1850 and subsequently taken up, in modified form, by twenty-seven other states, permanently reshaping how litigation is conducted across most of the United States. He briefly represented New York's 7th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives in 1877, and he is remembered as the central figure of a prominent family that also produced his brother Stephen Johnson Field, a justice of the United States Supreme Court, and his brother Cyrus West Field, promoter of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.