Professor William Meyer’s new book takes a closer look at a classic case studied in first-year law courses.
On the afternoon of April 25, 1882, Francis Palmer took a swig of rum that turned out to be his last. A farmer in upstate New York, Palmer had no idea that his 17-year-old grandson, Elmer Palmer, had put strychnine in the liquor, intending to kill him. His motive was clear: Elmer was heir to his grandfather’s property. Although his crime was quickly discovered and Elmer found guilty of second-degree murder, nothing in the letter of the law prevented a murderer from inheriting the property of his victim.
Elmer’s aunts protested when a lower court ruled accordingly, and in 1889, the New York Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The case, Riggs v. Palmer, has become a classic in first-year law classes, used to question an overly literalistic interpretation of the law. “The case is written very much as a universal principle,” says William Meyer, author of The Great Murdering-Heir Case: A Biography of Riggs v. Palmer (State University of New York Press, 2024). “But the case is really not what everyone has taken it to be. It was really an ad hoc and ad hominem decision just good for this one case — and never really intended to be more general.”
A geography professor at Colgate, Meyer used the burgeoning tools of legal archaeology, which scrutinizes the origins of a case, and case biography, which looks at the after-effects of a decision, to examine how Riggs was decided and interpreted over the years. Those are tools he’s uniquely suited to use as a geographer. “Geography is both a natural and social science, and it’s pretty standard in those disciplines to look for all the sources you can find and test your assumptions against them,” Meyer says. “Legal studies doesn’t routinely do that, focusing only on the text of the decision instead.”
Legal studies has long been “a hobby” of Meyer, and Riggs often came up in books in that field. When Meyer had a sabbatical in 2019, he decided out of curiosity to look into the case, scouring old newspaper stories online. “I quickly noticed there were facts about it that didn’t jibe with the image I had of it,” Meyer says. He dropped other projects to focus on the case. Among its curiosities was that the jury convicted Elmer of second- degree murder — a murder of passion — even though the evidence showed it was clearly premeditated, which should have warranted a first-degree murder verdict.
Another quirk is that even though second- degree murder was normally punishable with life in prison, New York at the time was piloting reformatories for youthful offenders, and Elmer only served four years before he was let out and stood to inherit his grandfather’s farm. Those facts so galled the Court of Appeals judges that they twisted themselves into knots to overturn the lower-court decision, offering two contradictory explanations for, in effect, amending the law. On the one hand, says Meyer, they said that it just hadn’t occurred to the lawmakers that such a situation might arise, and that they would have excluded murderers if they had thought of it. On the other hand, they said that the legislators had had such an exception clearly in mind and had assumed that it went without saying.
For some 30 years after it was decided, Riggs was pilloried by the legal profession as wrongly decided. “The prevailing idea of the 1880s and some decades after was that judges have no business making law; all they can do is follow it,” Meyer says. It was only later, in the 20th century, when judges exercised more latitude in interpreting the law, that Riggs was pressed into service to justify that trend, first by influential Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, and later by other judges and scholars. Meyer doesn’t take a position on whether that judicial creativity is warranted, only on the use of Riggs to justify it. “All these lessons it supposedly teaches may or may not be true, but they don’t follow from the case,” he says. “It’s too freakish and unusual to do the work it’s expected to do.”
Meyer’s critical examination of the case illustrates the usefulness of analytical tools such as legal archaeology and case biography for legal studies. On the one hand, he says, judges shouldn’t be expected to be historians and investigate every case they cite; on the other, this kind of intensive research can help set the record straight and test the validity of important precedents, says Meyer, who plans to split his time 50/50 between geography and legal studies going forward. “For a lot of legal questions, you need a wider range of sources than legal scholarship usually relies on,” he says. “And people would also learn more and get more engaged with cases if they knew something about the people and context behind them.”