Francis Wharton

Francis Wharton (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 7, 1820 – February 21, 1889) was an American legal writer and educationalist.
Life.
Wharton graduated from Yale in 1839, was admitted to the bar in 1843, became prominent in Pennsylvania politics as a Democrat, and served as assistant attorney-general in 1845. In Philadelphia, he edited the "North American and United States Gazette". He was professor of English, History, and Literature at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, from 1856-1863.
He took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1862, and was rector of St. Paul's Church, Brookline, Massachusetts from 1863-1869. In 1871-1881 he taught ecclesiastical polity and canon law in the Protestant Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at this time he lectured on the conflict of laws at Boston University.
For two years he traveled in Europe, and after two years in Philadelphia he went to Washington, DC, where he was lecturer on criminal law (1885–1886) and then professor of criminal law (1886–1888) at Columbian (now George Washington) University; in 1885-1888 he was solicitor (or examiner of claims) of the Department of State, and from 1888 until his death was employed on an edition (authorized by Congress) of the "Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States" (6 vols, 1889, ed. by John Bassett Moore), which superseded Jared Sparks's compilation.
Wharton was a "broad churchman" and was deeply interested in the hymnology of his church. Wharton was also interested in Christian apologetics, and he wrote an essay on the relationship between apologetics and jurisprudence that was published in "The Princeton Review" in 1878. He received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1883, and was the foremost American authority on international law. He authored the doctrine in criminal law (Wharton's Rule of Concert of Action) that to form a conspiracy takes one more person than is necessary to commit the crime (i.e. it takes two people to gamble. Therefore, two people gambling cannot be guilty of conspiracy to gamble, though three can).
During the last two years of his life Wharton amassed revolutionary diplomatic correspondence and edited them into a six volume work, published in 1889, the year of his death.
Publications.
See the Memoir (Philadelphia, 1891) by his daughter, Mrs. Viele, and several friends; and J. B. Moore's "Brief Sketch of the Life of Francis Wharton," prefaced to the first volume of the "Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence".