Edward Dumbauld

Edward Dumbauld (October 26, 1905 – September 6, 1997) was a United States federal judge and a distinguished legal scholar and legal and constitutional historian.

Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Dumbauld received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1926, an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1929, and an LL.M., also from Harvard Law School, in 1930. He received a J.D. from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands in 1932. He was in private practice in Uniontown, Pennsylvania from 1933 to 1935. From 1936 to 1949, he served as a special assistant in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. In 1949, he returned to private practice in Uniontown, Pennsylvania from 1949 to 1957, when he became a judge on the Court of Common Pleas, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, serving until 1961.

On August 2, 1961, Dumbauld was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to a new seat on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania created by 75 Stat. 80. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 2, 1961, receiving his judicial commission on August 3, 1961. He assumed senior status on December 31, 1976, serving in that capacity until his death, in 1997, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

In addition to his legal and judicial duties, Judge Dumbauld wrote extensively for scholars and general readers about the life and work of Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Bill of Rights, as well as the Renaissance legal philosopher and treatise-writer Hugo Grotius. He was a longtime member of the American Society for Legal History.

His books, many of them standards of American legal-historical literature, include:

• Thomas Jefferson, American Tourist..." (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946)
• The Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950)
• The Bill of Rights and What It Means Today (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957; reprint ed., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979) ISBN 0-313-21215-5
• The Constitution of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964)
• The Life and Legal Writings of Hugo Grotius (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969)
• Thomas Jefferson and the Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), ISBN 0-8061-1441-X

Sources

• Edward Dumbauld at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.