Herman Oliphant (1884–1939) was a professor of law. He started at the University of Chicago, going to Columbia University in 1922. Shortly after arriving there, he wrote to the university's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, outlining some plans he had for reorganizing the curriculum of the law school. Essentially, his goal was to transform the school into a research center, placing particular emphasis on the interaction of the law and other social sciences. Under the administration of Huger Jervey, who became dean of the law school in 1924, Oliphant's plans were used as the basis for a reorganization of the law school.
In his 1928 inaugural address as President of the American Association of Law School, Herman Oliphant said: "Our case material is a gold mine for scientific work. It has not been scientifically exploited... We should critically examine all the methods now used in any of the social sciences and having any useful degree of objectivity."[1]
In 1932 he was co-author with Theodore S. Hope Jr. of "Study of Day Calendars" 1932, an in-depth look into how time effects trial cases.
Oliphant later went on to teach at Johns Hopkins University, and later became the chief counsel of the United States Treasury Department, serving in that capacity from 1934 to 1939. While serving in that position, he was regarded as an economic experimenter, and was the prime advocate of the Undistributed profits tax.
While at the Treasury Department, he was lobbied by William Randolph Hearst to make cannabis illegal. Hearst had recently become heavily involved in synthetics based on petroleum hydrocarbons, and wanted to quash efforts from competing companies to make similar products from hemp seed oil.
He is generally regarded as a representative of American legal realism and is famous for his statement that the principle of stare decisis is no longer applicable. Although the approach could be implemented in a time when society was relatively simply structured, in the present age it should be abandoned. To this effect, Oliphant pleaded a scientific approach. In his opinion, the way a judge deals with a case can be qualified as a stimulus-response situation, in the sense that the judge reacts to the stimulus of the case brought to his attention.
He died suddenly in 1939 because of heart disease at the age of 54.