Legal Forms and the Practice of Law in Nineteeth-Century Kansas

Historians depend upon the availability of sources about the subjects upon which they wish to write. At a certain point, there are simply too few sources to permit even a tentative historical narrative. At best, whatever narrative an historian writes will be a partial view of reality as it once was because of the limitations of the sources. 1 The most common sources utilized by legal historians are the same sources used by practicing lawyers: legislation and court decisions. These form the basis for doctrinal legal history. Within the past fifty years, growing numbers of historians have looked to other sources, such as arrest records, newspaper reports, and other popular media in order to interpret the more traditional sources from a broader perspective. In the past several years, a number of legal historians have expanded their source materials even further by looking at such things as law books and legal publishing, office practices of lawyers, and the places where lawyers practiced. These types of sources are, generally, seen as providing the material with which historians can write about “material culture.” In the legal historical context, this refers primarily to the ways in which lawyers practiced law on an everyday basis. Efforts at writing the history of the material culture of Kansas law have been stymied by a lack of reliable source materials. For the most part, the sources for the everyday life of the law and lawyers in Kansas have either not been preserved or have been scattered in private hands and, thus, are often undiscoverable by historians. 2 Indeed, in my twenty