foreign commerce. The act was opposed by the
Federalists and the New England states, who
wanted to encourage trade with the British.
They feared that the Embargo Act would stifle
New England’s economy. Adams voted for the
Embargo Act, against the wishes of his party
and region, believing that it benefited the nation
as a whole.
Adams paid the price for breaking with his
party. Federalist leaders in Massachusetts—who
felt that Adams had betrayed them—elected
another man to the Senate several months
before the 1808 elections. Adams resigned, and
later that year, in a move indicative of his
political independence, attended a Democratic-
Republican congressional caucus meeting,
where
JAMES M ADISON was nominated for presi-
dent, thus allying himself with that party.
Adams attempted to retire from public life
and devote himself to a teaching position at
Harvard College, but the lure of public service
was too strong. In 1809 President Madison
persuaded him to accept an appointment as
minister to Russia. In 1814 and 1815 Adams
played a key role in the negotiations resulting in
the Treaty of Ghent, with the British, ending the
WAR OF 1812. The negotiations helped Adams
gain respect as a diplomat.
In 1817 President
JAMES MONROE called

an unfriendly disposition toward the United
States.
Adams served as secretary of state for the
entire eight years under President Monroe.
When the presidential election of 1824 came
around, Adams was considered a favorite; after
all, the previous two presidents, Madison and
Monroe, had also served as secretaries of state.
But 1824 was no normal year for politics in the
United States. All four candidates were mem-
bers of the same political part y, the
DEMOCRATIC-
REPUBLICAN PARTY, and party affiliation had given
way to sectionalism. Secretary of the Treasury
William Harris Crawford, of Georgia, who had
recently suffered a paralytic stroke, was nominat-
ed by a congressional caucus. The Tennessee
legislature nominated
ANDREW JACKSON, and the
Kentucky legislature nominated
HENRY CLAY.
Adams was nominated by an eastern faction of
the party in Boston. On Tuesday, November 9,
1824, voters went to the polls and cast 153,544
votes for Jackson, 108,740 for Adams, 46,618 for
Clay, and 47,136 for Crawford. (Figures from
Kane, Facts about the Presidents; figures in other
sources differ.) The electoral vote results were as
follows: Jackson, 99; Adams, 84; Crawford, 41;
and Clay, 37. As no candidate received a majority

.
—JOHN QUINCY
ADAMS
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
88 ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY
canals, weather stations, and a national univer-
sity. He urged Congress to use the powers of
government for the benefit of all people.
Congress disagreed. Many of the programs
advocated by Adams were not realized until
after his death.
Despite his best efforts, Adams felt worn
down by the burdens and demands of the
presidency. His personal reserve, austerity, and
coolness of manner prevented him from appeal-
ing to the imagination and affections of the
people. He had not even tried to defend himself
against the attacks of Jackson and his followers,
feeling that it was below the dignity of the
president to engage in political debate. Through-
out Adams’s presidency, Jackson gained in
popularity, so much so that in the elections of
1828, he defeated Adams by 178 electoral votes
to 83. Jackson won a popular vote proportionally
larger than that of any other presidential candi-
date during the rest of the 1800s.
Once again Adams sought to retire from
public life, but the people of Massachusetts
called him back. In 1830 he defeated two other
candidates and was elected to the U.S. House of

the right of citizens to petition their government
as guaranteed in the
FIRST AMENDMENT.Asthe
leading opponent of the gag rules, Adams
became the person abolitionists sent their
petitions to. He, in turn , tried to have the
House consider those petitions, only to run up
against the gag rules. For several years Adams
tried unsuccessfully to have the rules repealed,
but he was able to win supporters to his side
each time he tried, and in 1844 he finally
succeeded in having the rules abolished.
Another contribution of Adams to the
antislavery cause was his championing of
Africans on the slave ship Amistad. The slaves
had mutinied off the coast of Cuba, capturing
their masters. The slaves, unfamiliar with
navigation, asked their captives to help them
sail to a country where slave trade was illegal.
The former masters took advantage of the
slaves’ navigational inexperience and directed
the ship into U.S. waters near Long Island,
hoping to find sympathetic U.S. auth orities.
Adams was one of two attorneys who argued the
case of the Africans before the U.S. Supreme
Court, defending the blacks as free people.
President
MARTIN VAN BUREN had taken the
position that the slaves must be returned to
their masters and to their inevitable death.

A Compilation of Biographical and Historical Informa-
tion. 7th ed. New York: Wilson.
Nagel, Paul C. 1997. John Quincy Adams: A Public Life,
A Private Life. New York: Knopf.
Parsons, Lynn H. 1998. John Quincy Adams. Madison, Wis.:
Madison House.
Remini, Robert Vincent. 2002. John Quincy Adams. New
York: Times Books.
ADAPTATION
The act or process of modifying an object to render
it suitable for a particular or new purpose or
situation.
In the law of patents—grants by the
government to inventors for the exclusive right
to manufacture, use, or market inventions for a
term of years—adaptation denotes a category of
patentable inventions, which entails the appli-
cation of an existing product or process to a
new use, accompanied by the exercise of inven-
tive faculties. Federal law provides: “Whoever
invents or discovers any new and useful process,
machine, manufacture, or composition of matter,
or any new and useful improvement thereof,
may obtain a
PATENT therefore, subject to
the conditions and requirements of this title.”
35 U.S.C.A. §101.
The adaptation of a device to a different
field can constitute an invention if inventiveness
exists in the conception of new use and with

use is so comparable to the old that the concept
of adapting the device to the new use would
occur to a person proficient in the art and
interested in devising a method of changing the
intended function, there is no invention even
though significant alterations have been made.
The application of an old device to a new use is
normally patentable only if the new use is in a
different field or involves a completely novel
function. In addition, the physical modifica-
tions need not be extensive, as long as they are
essential to the objective.
In the law of copyrights the exclusive right
of the author of a literary project to reproduce,
publish, and sell his or her work, which is
granted by statute, adaptation refers to the
creation of a derivative work, which is protected
by federal
COPYRIGHT laws.
A derivative work involves a recasting or
translation process that incorporates preexisting
material capable of protection by copyright. An
adaptation is copyrighted if it meets the
requirement of originality, in the sense that
the author has created it by his or her own
proficiency, labor, and judgment without di-
rectly copying or subtly imitating the preexist-
ing material. Mere minor alterations will not
suffice. In addition the adapter must procure
the consent of the copyright owner of the

led to a number of efforts, including those by the
Recording Industry Association of America, to
find new methods for protecting the rights of the
copyright holders.
A second cause of concern among copyright
owners is the ability of computer users to make
copies of computer programs and adopt these
programs to serve the users’ purposes. The
Copyright Act provides an exclusive right to
the copyright holders of computer programs and
allows owners of copies of these programs to
make additional copies only in limited circum-
stances (17 U.S.C.A. § 117 [1996]). Like sound
recordings, protection of these copyrights has
proven difficult, leading lawmakers to consider
a number of new options to protect these rights.
In the law of real property, with respect to
fixtures (articles that were
PERSONAL PROPERTY but
became part of the realty through annexation to
the premises), adaptation is the relationship
between the article and the use that is made of
the realty to which the article is annexed.
The prevailing view is that the adaptation or
appropriation of an article affixed to real
property for the purpose or use to which the
premises are devoted is an important consider-
ation in ascertaining its status as a fixture.
According to this theory, if the article facili tates
the realization of the purpose of the real

Frederick, MD: Aspen.
ADD-ON
A purchase of additional goods before payment is
made for goods already purchased.
An add-on may be covered by a clause in an
installment payment contract that allows the seller
to hold a security interest in the earlier goods until
full payment is made o n the later goods.
v
ADDAMS, JANE
Jane Addams, a pioneer in social reform, founded
Hull House, the first
SETTLEMENT house in the
United States, to serve the immigrant families
who came to Chicago at the beginning of the
industrial revolution. For nearly 50 years,
Addams worked relentlessly for improved living
and working co nditions for America’s urban
poor, for women’s suffrage, and for interna-
tional
PACIFISM.
Addams was the youngest of eight children,
born on September 6, 1860, to John H. and
Sarah Addams. Her mother died when she was
two years old, and her teenage sisters, Mary,
Martha, and Alice, took over her upbringing.
Her family followed the Quaker faith, and
valued hard work and change through peaceful
efforts. Addams idolized her father, whom she
described as a man of great integrity. He

women in America, she and Starr attempted to
convince the seminary to offer coursework
equivalent to that of men’s colleges. Eventually,
the seminary did become Rockford College.
Addams graduated from Rockford in 1881.
Several months later, she was devastated when
her father died of a ruptured appendix while on
a family vacation in Wisconsin. His death left
her a wealthy woman, and she decided to fulfill
her plan to attend the Women’s Medical
College of Philadelphia. Addams began her
studies that fall, but almost immediately the
back pain she had suffered all her life flared up,
forcing her to undergo back surgery.
During her lengthy recovery, Addams
toured Europe with her stepmother, Anna
Haldeman Addams. Throughout her trip,
Addams was struck by the poverty of the
industrialized countries she visited. At a fruit
and vegetable auction in London, she watched
as starving men and women fought over
decayed and bruised produce. As she wrote in
her autobiography, her impression was of
“myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless
and workworn, clutching forward for food
that was already unfit to eat.” She was also
appalled at the lack of concern for poor people
shown by better-off Europeans.
Jane Addams.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

1930 Published The
Second Twenty
Years at Hull House
1931 Awarded
Nobel Peace Prize
1935
Died
1939
World
War II
began
▼▼
▼▼
18501850
18751875
19001900
19251925
◆
◆
1920 Nineteenth Amendment became law,
giving women right to vote
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
92 ADDAMS, JANE
On her return home in 1885, Addams found
herself exhausted, depressed, and unsure of her
life’s purpose. On a second trip to Europe, she
visited Toynbee Hall, an experimental Oxford-
based project in London’s poverty-s tricken
East End. Educated young men had moved into
the area and were offering literacy classes,

heir, Helen Culver, gave her the entire house
and some surrounding land.
After several months of cleaning and
refurbishing, Addams and Starr opened Hull
House in September 1889. Initially the two
were met with great suspicion by the area’s
residents. Local priests warned their parishion-
ers the women might try to convert them to a
new
RELIGION, and street children threw garbage
and rocks at the house. But Addams and Starr
continued to greet their neighbors in a friendly
manner, and the residents soon discovered that
the women were concerned about their well-
being. They also found that the women would
sell them nourishing food for just a few pennies,
and they soon came to depend on Hull House.
In the first few years of the settlement
house, Addams established a kindergarten, a
women’s boarding house, the nation’s first
public playground, and a day care center for
mothers forced to leave their children alone for
as long as ten hours each day in order to work.
Hull House offered evening college extension
courses, English and art classes, a theater group,
and books and magazines for children and
adults. Observing the long hours and dangerous
working conditions that the neighborhood
children were forced to endure, Addams and
her friends soon began working for state regula-

In the first decade of the twentieth century,
Addams established herself as a prolific writer,
publishing Democracy and Social Ethics (1902),
Newer Ideals for Peace (1907), The Spirit of
Youth and the City Streets (1909), and the best-
selling first volume of her autobiography,
Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). During
these years, she began to turn her attention
more and more to women’s issues—particularly
the right to vote. In 1913, seven years before the
NINETEENTH AMENDMENT to the U.S. Constitution
PRIVATE BENEFI-
CENCE IS TOTALLY
INADEQUATE TO DEAL
WITH THE VAST
NUMBERS OF THE
CITY
’S DISINHERITED.
—JANE ADDAMS
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
ADDAMS, JANE 93
granted women the right to vote in all elections,
she helped secure the vote for women in
Chicago.
Addams’s work continued to expand be-
yond Hull House and women’s rights. In 1909
she supported the founding of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (
NAACP) and served on its executive

Addams felt justified her pacifist work to the
world. Frederick Stang, of the Nobel Committee
in Norway, said Addams had clung to her
idealism during a difficult time in which peace
was overshadowed. Addams went on to receive
fourteen honorary degrees, among them one
from Yale, the first honorary degree that school
had ever awarded to a woman.
In 1930 Addams completed her autobiog-
raphy with the publication of The Second
Twenty Years at Hull House. A few years later,
surgery revealed that Addams was suffering
from advanced cancer. She died in May 1935.
Shortly before her death, Addams was honored
at an event marking the twentieth anniversary
of the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom. In response to the many tributes
she received, she said she was driven by the fear
that she might give up too soon and fail to make
the one effort that might save the world.
FURTHER READINGS
Addams, Jane. 2002. Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press.
Davis, Allen Freeman. 2000. American Heroine: The Life and
Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan Dee.
Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the
Chicago School, 1892–1918, New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Books.
Linn, James Weber. 2000. Jane Addams: A Biography.
Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

trees, damage from ice or snow storms, or
additional risks not otherwise covered by the
LIABILITY policy.
ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS
A charge given to a jury by a judge after the
original instructions to explain the law and guide
the jury in its decision making.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
94 ADDICT
Additional instructions are frequently need-
ed after the jury has begun deliberations and
finds that it has a question concerning the
evidence, a point of law, or some part of the
original charge.
ADDITUR
The power of the trial court to assess damages or
increase the amount of an inadequate award made
by jury verdict, as a condition of a denial of a motion
for a new trial, with the consent of the defendant
whether or not the plaintiff consents to such action.
This is not allowed in the federal system.
Damages assessed by a jury may be
SET ASIDE
when the amount is shocking to the judicial
conscience—so grossly inadequate that it con-
stitutes a miscarriage of justice—or when it
appears that the jury was influenced by preju-
dice, corruption, passion, or mistake.
For example, a 61-year-old woman was
mugged in a hallway of her apartment building

had been steadily employed as a plumber until he
was permanently disabled in an auto accident. In
such a case, however, the jury could have found
that the plaintiff’s
NEGLIGENCE contributed to the
cause of the accident and reduced the damages
proportionately, as is permitted in most states.
An award of additur is not permitted in
every state, nor is it allowed in the federal
courts. Under the rules that govern procedure
in the federal courts, a trial judge has the power
to set aside a verdict for a
PLAINTIFF on the
ground that the damages awarded are clearly
inadequate, but then the judge’sonly
RECOURSE is
to grant a new trial.
CROSS REFERENCES
Civil Procedure; Tri al.
ADDUCE
To present, offer, bring forward, or introduce.
For example, a
BILL OF PARTICULARS that lists
each of the plaint iff ’s demands may recite that it
contains all the evidence to be adduced at trial.
ADEMPTION
The failure of a gift of personal property—a
bequest—or of real property—a devise—to be
distributed according to the provisions of a
decedent’s will because the property no longer

from its sale are not its equivalent for
INHERI-
TANCE
purposes. In some states, however, if all of
the proceeds had not yet been paid, the nephew
would be entitled to receive the unpaid balance.
Because the testator no longer owns the
diamond watch when she dies, that specific
bequest is also adeemed by extinction.
Satisfaction
Ademption by satisfaction takes place when the
testator, during his or her lifetime, gives to his
or her heir all or a part of the gift he or she had
intended to give by his or her will. It applies to
both specific bequests and devises as well as to a
general bequest or legacy payable from the
general assets of the testator’s estate. If the
subject of the gift made while the testator is
alive is the same as the subject of a provision of
the will, many states presume that it is in place
of the
TESTAMENTARY gif t if there is a parent-child
or grandparent-grandchild relationship. Other-
wise, an ademption by satisfaction will not be
found unless there is independent evidence,
such as express statements or writings, that the
testator intended this to occur. A father makes a
will leaving his ski house to his daughter and
$25,000 to his son. Before death, he gives the
daughter the deed to the ski house and he gives

provide adequate service does not create a right
for customers to sue the electric company
whenever the meat in their freezers spoils
because of a power outage in the absence of
NEGLIGENCE. Service does not have to be perfect
in order to meet a standard of adequacy.
ADEQUATE REMEDY AT LAW
Sufficient compensation by way of monetary
damages.
Courts will not grant equitable remedies,
such as
SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE or injunctions,
where monetary damages can afford complete
legal relief. An
EQUITABLE REMEDY interferes much
more with the defendant’s freedom of action
than an order directing the
DEFENDANT to pay for
the harm he or she has caused, and it is much
more difficult for a court to supervise and
enforce judgments giving some relief other than
money. Courts, therefore, will compensate an
injured party whenever possible with monetary
damages; this remedy has been called the
remedy at law since the days when courts of
equity and courts at law were different.
ADHESION CONTRACT
A type of contract, a legally binding agreement
between two parties to do a certain thing, in which
one side has all the bargaining power and uses it

pay loan installm ents promptly that are physi-
cally hidden by small print located in the middle
of an obscure paragraph of a lengthy loan
agreement. In such a case a court can find that
there is no meeting of the minds of the
PARTIES
to the contract and that the weaker party has
not accepted the terms of the contract.
ADJACENT
Lying near or close to; neighboring.
Adjacent means that objects or parcels of
land are not widely separated, though perhaps
they are not actually touching; but adjoining
implies that they are united so closely that no
other object comes between them.
ADJECTIVE LAW
The aggregate of rules of procedure or practice.
Also called adjectival law, as opposed to that body
of law that the courts are established to administer
(called substantive law), it means the rules
according to which the substantive law is adminis-
tered, e.g., Rules of Civil Procedure. That part of
the law that provides a method for enforcing or
maintaining rights, or obtaining redress for their
invasion. Pertains to and prescribes the practice,
method, procedure, or legal machinery by which
substantive law is enforced or made effective.
CROSS REFERENCE
Civil Procedure.
ADJOINING LANDOWNERS

INJUNCTION to stop the unlawful
use of the land. In addition, the purchaser has
violated zoning laws by using residential property
for commercial purposes without seeking a
VARIANCE.
Property owners have the right to grade or
change the level of their la nd or to build
foundations or embankments as long as proper
precautions are taken, such as building a
retaining wall to prevent soil from spilling upon
adjoining land. If permitted by law, landowners
may blast on their own property but will be
liable for damages caused by debris thrown onto
adjoining land.
Lateral Support A landowner has a legally
enforceable right to
LATERAL SUPPORT from an
adjoining landowner. Lateral support is the
right to have one’s land in its natural condition
held in place from the sides by the neighboring
land so that it will not fall away. Land is
considered in its natural condition if it has no
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
ADJOINING LANDOWNERS 97