Philadelphia-based Colonial American lawyer Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer best known for his legal victory on behalf of printer and newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger, is believed to have inspired the "Philadelphia lawyer" term.
The trial of John Peter Zenger has been described as a prototypical political trial.
John Peter Zenger's aggressively liberal New York Weekly Journal newspaper, of which Van Dam had been a founder (1733), used the Van Dam case much in its every day crusade of free government.
John Peter Zenger was arrested and imprisoned for seditious libel in 1734 after his newspaper criticized the colonial governor of New York.
John Peter Zenger (1697–1746), a German-American printer, publisher, editor, and journalist
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