George L. (George Lewis) Canfield

Born in Detroit in 1866, he was educated in the city’s public schools and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1887. Afterward, he studied law in his father’s office and went into practice in a family firm that became closely associated with admiralty work.

By the 1890s, he had joined his father Frank H. Canfield in practice, and the Canfields were later described by Miller Canfield’s firm history as leading specialists in admiralty law in the Midwest. In 1914, their firm merged with the Miller firm, and he became part of what grew into Miller, Canfield, Paddock & Stone.

He is most closely linked as an author to The Law of the Sea (1921), written with George W. Dalzell and with a navigation-law summary by Jasper Yeates Brinton. The book was designed as a practical outline of admiralty law rather than a dense technical treatise, which helps explain why it still draws interest from legal and maritime history readers. He died in Detroit in 1928.