Business Records

Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer was born in 1942 in Oslo, Norway. Her career as nurse in the military included distinguished service in Vietnam, work for the Veteran’s Administration, and a position as Chief Nurse of the Washington National Guard. As a result of her statement in an interview for top security clearance that she was a lesbian, she was separated from the military in 1992. She successfully challenged her discharge and the military’s regulations that mandated that lesbians and gay men be separated from the service. This experience, documented in her memoir, Serving in Silence, inspired her to become involved in LGBT activism and politics. The Margarethe Cammermeyer papers contain her personal, professional, and activist materials including correspondence, legal documents, photographs, videotapes, ephemera and other materials. The majority of the material relates to her successful challenge in the courts of both her discharge and the military’s regulations that mandated t...

Few historians, however, hold themselves out as fictionists." Jerome Frank, The Place of the Expert in a Democratic Society' True, no man can be wholly apart from his fellows. But, if each of us is a promontory, yet the promontory reaches out beyond the social mainland to a point where others cannot intrude .... It is a no-other-man's land, for others can't penetrate it, can't communicate with it. Jerome Frank, Judge Learned Hand 2

Much of the history of the American law of evidence, including its most contentious issue, hearsay, is the story of stasis and reform.  The case of Hoffman v. Palmer represents one of few cases concerning hearsay known by name, and illustrates that “false” evidence has often been used to caution against efforts proclaiming “radical reform” of the law of evidence. 

In this case involving a collision between a car and a train, the critical question was: Is the defendant railroad permitted to introduce into evidence the transcript of a question and answer session made two days after the accident between the engineer of the train and another railroad employee?  If believed, a statement made in this session would exonerate the railroad from liability. 

Writing for a divided court, Judge Jerome Frank held that the absence of a motive to lie on the part of the declarant (the railroad engineer who gave the statement) was required in order for the statement to be admissible.  Because such a motive could reasonably be presumed present, the engineer’s statement was therefore determined not admissible.  Frank’s opinion was unanimously affirmed by the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas.  However, Edmund M. Morgan, Jr., law professor and prior member of both the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Committee on the Model Code of Evidence, vehemently disagreed with both Frank and Douglas’s opinions.

Frank and Douglas’s decisions in this case, and Morgan’s opposition to the precedent those decisions set, incited considerable debate over the law of evidence and the issue of hearsay, and launched significant reform efforts.  For these reasons, Hoffman v. Palmer is emblematic of the history of the American law of evidence, law reform, and the history of twentieth century American legal thought.