A man of many talents, Hamilton [1850-1906] was a lawyer, writer, businessman and minister. He spent most of his career as an attorney in California, first in Merced, later in San Francisco. Active in Democratic state politics, he was a leading supporter of California's 1879 constitution and an unsuccessful candidate for the state senate. He is remembered today for his poem
Ishtar and Izdubar
, a retelling of the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, and his numerous guidebooks to Mexico for American businessmen.
Hamilton's Mexican Law
was the most important of these. Published in San Francisco and London in 1882, it was a standard work into the early 1900s.
Hamilton gathered "many scattered Spanish and Mexican measures as yet uncodified and incorporat[ed] them in his work in an orderly fashion. He went beyond merely commercial matters and included related measures of the Constitution and procedural laws affecting the public in this area."
Clagett and Valderrama
A Revised Legal Guide to the Law & Legal Literature of Mexico
138
xiii, 327, XII pp.