Wharton, Francis, 1820–89, American clergyman and lawyer, b. Philadelphia, grad. Yale, 1839. Admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1843, he became an authority on criminal law and wrote A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States (1846). He was (1856–63) professor of history and literature at Kenyon College. He was ordained (1862) an Episcopalian minister, and he was (1871–81) professor of canon law at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. During this period he wrote A Treatise on the Conflict of Laws (1872). As head of the legal division of the U.S. Dept. of State (1885–88), he edited A Digest of the International Law of the United States (3 vol., 2d ed. 1887) and The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (6 vol., 1889, 2d ed. 1969).
See biography by H. E. Wharton (1891).
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