Hopkinton, NY is a quiet little town in the northeast part of the state, settled by New Englanders and built in the New England style with a village green, white wood frame churches, and large Victorian houses. Life here has generally moved at a leisurely pace; yet Hopkinton’s people have had their dramas – both comedy and tragic - and their stories have been remembered. In 1903, Carlton Sanford had a book published documenting the settling of the town from a wilderness in 1802 through its first hundred years of development and tracing the descendants of the first settlers. Now Dale Burnett has written a folk history of the second hundred years, chronicling the events in the lives of Hopkinton’s people and the town itself through the 20th century. Mr. Burnett has researched each separate district of the township and spoken with at least one person from each area to get its history from someone who lived there. In addition to the facts one would expect – businesses, history of the fire department, town officers - he has taken almost every house along each road in the town and listed the residents through the years, along with any tales that may have been told about them. Based mainly on interviews with older Hopkinton folk, some of whom were alive when Sanford’s book came out, the stories handed down have been preserved as the old people told them. Facts are supported by newspaper articles, deeds and other documents. Included are tales of Hopkinton’s characters, its three or four murders, and its one kidnapping case with still unanswered questions. And, following Mr. Sanford’s example, at the end of The Second Hundred Years are genealogies submitted by Hopkinton families, many of whom can still trace their ancestry to those early settlers.

In 1882, Elmer Palmer was convicted of poisoning his grandfather Francis in rural northern New York State. In a famous decision in 1889, the New York Court of Appeals denied Elmer the right to inherit from Francis, even though the statute governing wills seemed to entitle him to the legacy. Twentieth-century commentators have treated Riggs v. Palmer as a model of the judicial craft and a key to understanding the nature of law itself; however, the case’s history suggests that it is neither of these things. In its own time, the decision was radically at odds with legal doctrine as then understood by American judges. Rather than a quintessentially principled ruling, it was most likely ad hoc and ad hominem, concocted to thwart a particular individual thought to have been punished too lightly for his crime. The book illustrates the value of two approaches to interpreting decisions, those of "case biography" and "legal archaeology." Both draw upon historical sources neglected in conventional legal scholarship. In doing so, they may challenge—or confirm—the validity as precedent today of classic cases from the past.