Gustavus Schmidt, Swedish-American legal scholar
The Louisiana Research Collection was pleased to welcome Swedish legal scholar Kjell Å Modéer during his recent trip to New Orleans. Dr. Modéer, Senior Professor of Legal History at Lund University in Sweden, gave a talk entitled “’Young Man Go West!’ The Brethren Carl and Gustavus Schmidt as Examples of Legal Transfers Between Sweden and Louisiana in the Nineteenth Century” at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law on Thursday, April 12, 2012. Gustavus Schmidt was a central figure in the nineteenth-century legal history of Louisiana. He emigrated from Sweden to the United States, where he became a prominent lawyer and legal scholar. A protégé of Chief Justice John Marshall in Virginia in the 1820s, Schmidt later moved to New Orleans in 1829. Gustavus’s brother, Carl Christian, remained in Sweden, and rose to become a Justice of the Swedish Supreme Court. The two brothers maintained an extensive trans-Atlantic Swedish-language correspondence between 1830 and Carl Christia...