Litchfield Law School Sources

Among the recent activities of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation is a  project to locate and facilitate the use of Litchfield Law School student notebooks and related sources.  The project now has a website, Litchfield Law School Sources, at the Yale Law School Library’s Document Collection Center.  The site explains:

Tapping Reeve, 1744-1823 (Credit)

This resource brings together text, images, interpretive material and bibliography about Litchfield Law School and the law notebooks kept by its students.  During the school’s years of operation, 1774 to 1833, nearly 1,000 young men traveled to Litchfield to study with Tapping Reeve, the founder, and James Gould, his assistant and sole proprietor after Reeve’s death. More than 270 notebooks have survived, representing the efforts of 90 students as they recorded law lectures delivered by their teachers and copied charts and essays on particular points of  law. At a time when the usual method of legal training in this country was an apprenticeship with a solo practitioner, these notebooks are evidence of the beginning of professional legal education, based on a comprehensive curriculum which relied heavily on the content and structure of  William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. These manuscript notes are housed in 36 academic law libraries, historical societies, and state repositories, concentrated in New England, but also found in New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio and Michigan. Gathering, describing and scanning these notebooks in a single location enables further study without additional travel. This website is a portal for research, description, and comparison of those volumes which have been digitally scanned.  Readers can also consult the Litchfield Historical Society website, where the Litchfield Ledger provides biographical information and a list of students both at the law school and at Miss Pierce’s Female Academy in Litchfield, where many law students met their future wives.

The Selected Letters of Learned Hand

Recently published by the Oxford University Press is Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand, edited by Constance Jordan, with a preface by the late Ronald Dworkin.  Here is the press’s description:

Judge Learned Hand is an icon of American Law. Though he was never nominated to our country's highest court, Hand is nevertheless more frequently quoted by legal scholars and in Supreme Court decisions than any other lower court judge in our history. He was the model for all judges who followed him, setting the standard for the bench with a matchless combination of legal brilliance and vast cultural sophistication.

Hand was also renowned as a superb writer. Now, in Reason and Imagination, Constance Jordan offers a unique sampling of the correspondence between Hand and a stellar array of intellectual and legal giants, including Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Berenson, and many other prominent political and philosophical thinkers. The letters--many of which have never been published before--cover almost half a century, often taking the form of brief essays on current events, usually seen through the prism of their historical moment. They reflect Hand's engagement with the issues of the day, ranging from the aftermath of World War I and the League of Nations, the effects of the Depression in the United States, the rise of fascism and the outbreak World War II, McCarthyism, and the Supreme Court's decisions on segregation, among many other topics. Equally important, the letters showcase decades of penetrating and original thought on the major themes of American jurisprudence, particularly key interpretations of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and will thus be invaluable to those interested in legal issues.

Most of these letters have never before been published, making this collection a priceless [sic; it costs $39.95]  window into the mind and life of one of the giants of American law.

Here is the TOC:

Preface, Ronald Dworkin

Introduction, Constance Jordan

Prologue: A Better Social Philosophy, 1897-1908
Part I: The United States and Europe, 1909-1920
Part II: In for Democracy, 1921-1931
Part III: World War and World Power, 1932-1946
Part IV: The Bill of Rights, 1947-1958
Epilogue: "Pagan and Puritan," 1959-1961

Weekend Roundup

• The School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study invites candidates to apply for a single term or full academic year. (Hat tip: H-Law)

• Some legal works in Swann's auction of Printed and Manuscript Americana on October 10, including Henry St. George Tucker’s Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia (1836-37); Laws of the State of New-York, Comprising the Constitution, and the Acts of the Legislature since the Revolution (1789); and The Two Principal Arguments of William Wirt, Esquire, on the Trial of Aaron Burr, for High Treason (1803).

• The Stanford Humanities Center invites applications for the 2014-15 fellowship term. (Hat tip: H-Law)

• "Lord Grantham's Predicament: What Downton Abbey Can Teach Us about Dying without a Will"

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Do You Know Where Your Ph.D.'s Are?"

• "The Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) at Princeton University invites outstanding faculty members, independent scholars, lawyers, and judges to apply for visiting, residential appointments for the academic year 2014–2015." There is a long and proud tradition of legal historian LAPA fellows, so apply! More information is available here.

• "Should historians use twitter?" The bloggers at the Historical Society weigh the pros and cons.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• Attention all potential book reviewers! H-Law is seeking to update its list: "If you are interested in possibly reviewing a book for H-Law please send your name and contact information (as well as the time periods, geography and/or areas of expertise) to hlawbookreview@gmail.com. Reviewers at all levels of experience (grad student through senior scholar) and position (historians, law professors, independent scholars) are encouraged to reply."

• From Past Imperfect (the blog of the Smithsonian magazine): an old-fashioned tale of breach of promise ("The Football Star and the Wrath of his Would-Be Bride").

• With a campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC, coming on for argument, Ronald Collins has a post over at Concurring Opinions on the Supreme Court’s conference notes in Buckley v. Valeo and FEC v. National Conservative Political Action Committee.

•  From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "'Report Card' on the Humanities Finds Light Amid the Gloom."

• NYC-area readers: CUNY School of Law invites you to celebrate the publication of Dressing Constitutionally, by Ruthann Robson.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• From In Custodia Legis: A beginner's guide to the Magna Carta.

• Earlier this year we noted the forthcoming release of Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson. Via a recent NYU Press announcement, we now know that the book available, in both hard copy and ebook form.

• Bad news, from the Los Angeles Times: "CIA closes office that declassifies historical materials." (Hat tip: History News Network)  

• From the Junto: "Pauline Maier and the History of Women in History."

• Prawfsblawg reports that Michael Lobban is moving from Queen Mary to the London School of Economics.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Atlantic: Geoff Shepard writes about new documents that have surfaced from the "Watergate cover-up trial" and wonders about "justice denied." 

• In related news, the Nixon Library has released the final batch of White House tapes and the State Department has released "Foreign Relations, 1969-1976, Volume XXXIII, SALT II, 1972-1980." (Hat tip: History News Network)

• H-Net has begun to migrate to a new platform, H-Net Commons. Read the full announcement here.

• The National Archives has an interesting new blog: Rediscovering Black History. It spotlights documents, photographs and videos that archivists found while updating NARA's black history guide. (Hat tip: H-Net)

• New from the Folio Society: An Expression of the American Mind: Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited and introduced by R. B. Bernstein.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

A Finding Guide to Papers of US Supreme Court Justices

Over at SCOTUSblog, Ronald Collins has posted a finding guide to the papers of U.S. Supreme Court justices: Accessing the papers of Supreme Court Justices: Online & other resources.

Weekend Roundup

• Around the web, friends and admirers continue to pay tribute to Pauline Maier (1938-2013). MIT's obituary is here; the New York Times write-up is here; the Washington Post's, here. Chris Beneke penned a nice note here, at the Historical Society. (A taste: "Maier treated her fellow historians with the same honest consideration that she tendered her historical subjects, remaining ever open to the possibility that the lowly might possess more insight than their better appointed counterparts (as well as the possibility that they might be out of their senses).").

• I love the opening to this op-ed, by Catherine O'Donnell (Arizona State University): "I am an historian with a secret. I don’t think studying the past tells us what to do in the present. I should qualify that: If you are considering whether to invade Russia in winter, history provides the answer." The rest is good, too. (Hat tip- History News Network) (KMT)

• From In Custodia Legis: a compilation of unusual (from today's perspective) and now defunct laws from the United Kingdom, including "the common law offense of being a 'common scold'" and the statutory offense of gambling in a library. 

• The Summer 2013 issue of Common-place is out. Readers may be interested in Edward M. Griffin's contribution, "A Loyalist Guarded, Re-guarded, and Disregarded: The Two Trials of Mather Byles the Elder."

• From the Atlantic: "Civil Rights, Cambodia, and Cuba: Memos That Made History. A newly released collection of legal documents reveals what high officials thought about the major events of their times."

• The Spring 2013 issue of Canadian Issues includes a few articles of interest, one on federalism and one on human rights law. (Hat tip: Canadian Legal History Blog)

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Welcome to the Blogosphere: History and the Law

A hearty welcome to the blogosphere to History and the Law, the brainchild of Rohit De, a legal historian of South Asia and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, and Fei-Hsien Wang, a legal historian of modern China.  They describe their project as “a set of digital resources for legal historians, particularly those working on the non-Western world.”  They are creating an online directory of scholars, and their directory of digital resources already has two curated section.  One focuses on ways of reading primary legal sources; the other consists of conversations with legal historians whose books have recently been published: Rachel Sturman, Mitra Sharafi, and Issa Husin.

Scott on Farge, "The Allure of the Archives"

Via LHB reader Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan) we have word that Yale University Press will soon publish an English translation of The Allure of the Archives, by Arlette Farge (Director of Research in Modern History, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris). Normally we post whatever description the press has offered, but Professor Scott generously allowed us to publish her own write-up on the book:

In 1989 the French historian Arlette Farge published an elegantly-written small book on judicial archives and the ways in which historians can engage the documents those archives contain. The book was titled _Le Goût de l'archive_ , a play on words implying both the taste of & a taste for the archive. Insightful, witty, and erudite, the work became a classic among readers in France, and was translated into Spanish and into Portuguese. Farge vividly evokes the vision of life in ancien régime Paris that emerges from police records and the archives of the Bastille, while warning of the traps that archives have laid for us, the illusions of immediacy that can lead us astray. In short, astringent chapters she reflects on the difficulty of confronting "Traces by the Thousands," and the lure of finding "Captured Speech."

For years no publisher took on the task of translating Farge's (nearly poetic) prose into English. So aficionados of the book who wanted to teach it had to try to coax students into reading it in the original French, or attempt to convey Farge's brilliance in paraphrase. But this month the book will appear from Yale University Press, under the title THE ALLURE OF THE ARCHIVES, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, with a forward by Natalie Zemon Davis. The advance reviews are admiring.

The book will apparently be available from Yale University Press as of Monday, August 19, in time for last-minute additions to syllabi in courses on methodology, on legal history, on historical writing. . . or any course in which one needs to discuss what it is that historians do and how they do it. (I will be assigning selections, for example, in a seminar on law and slavery, by way of preparing law students to use raw testimony from U.S. court records in developing their own analyses.)

Supreme Court Records at the Texas State Archives

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission recently posted the following:

Disputes over land and slaves in pre-Civil War Texas are among the courtroom conflicts recorded in the 19th century case files of the Texas Supreme Court. These records capture not only state legal history, but also social and cultural life during the Republic and early statehood years. Today, they reside in the Texas State Archives, which is in the midst of a long-term preservation project aimed at providing researchers with improved access to these fragile yet revealing records.

Thanks to a $5,000 grant from the Texas Historical Foundation (THF) in 2012, the State Archives, which is part of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, initiated a comprehensive conservation and indexing project with the goal of preserving these aged documents for future scanning and the subsequent creation of an online database.

More

Weekend Roundup

• From the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Student's simple stand made history in Abington v. Schempp" (Hat tip: History News Network).

David Garland (credit)

• Over at the Faculty Lounge, Roman Hoyos, reflecting upon Sally Gordon's post on legal historians and the hiring market and an accompanying comment, points out that among our attractions for law faculties is our interest in teaching a variety of high-traffic and required courses.

• The Law Librarians at the Library of Congress have put together a useful Beginner's Guide to researching Congressional debates.

• Over at the New Books in Law podcast, David Garland, NYU Law, discusses his book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2010).

•  From Unredacted: Migration Declassified.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Civil Rights Collections at the Library of Congress

In the July-August 2013 edition of the Library of Congress Magazine, Adrienne Cannon, African American history and culture specialist for the Manuscript Division, discusses the scope of the Library’s civil rights collections.

Hat tip: Library of Congress Blog

Weekend Roundup

• The conversation on dissertation embargoes continues at the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Embargoes Can Go Only So Far to Help New Ph.D.'s Get Published, Experts Say." See also this post over at Historiann. (For earlier coverage of the topic, check out last Saturday's roundup.)  

• The Times Colonist recently published the story Royal B.C. Museum Protects Court Documents Full of History and Great Stories.  These include “60 boxes of bound volumes and other items . . . largely from the B.C. Court of Appeal, which first sat in 1910, but some are from its predecessor, the Supreme Court of B.C. — then also known as the Full Court.”  These include “a number of ‘cause’ books included in the material, heavy volumes that contain summaries of cases and were once toted from place to place by judges.” 

• We've previously noted the publication of Opening Statements: Law, Jurisprudence, and the Legacy of Dutch New York, edited by Albert M. and Julia C. Rosenblatt.  Here is an interview of the editors from the Poughkeepsie Journal.

• From the Junto: a post on "Teaching with Legal Sources: The Case of Ann Hibbens."

• R. B. Bernstein's appreciation of Edmund Morgan for H-law is here. Also worth a read: Roman Hoyos's thoughts on "Edmund Morgan . . . and Popular Constitutionalism," over at the Faculty Lounge.

• 

  David Beito (credit)

  From the National Review: The New Deal Witch Hunt. "Federal targeting and intimidation of conservatives is nothing new," writes David T. Beito (University of Alabama).

• "Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion in the United States?" Ruth Rosen (University of California, Davis) offers answers over at History News Network.

• Here's a headline you don't see every day: "Kenyan lawyer on quixotic quest to nullify trial of Jesus." (Hat tip: HNN)   

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Boston, 1767

Recently discovered in Harvard’s Houghton Library are eight subscription sheets, dated October 28, 1767, containing more than 650 signatures of Bostonians pledging to participate in the boycott of British imports.  The Harvard Gazette story here.  Hat tip: David Warrington.

Weekend Roundup

• We recently noted the publication of Thurgood Marshall: Race, Rights, and the Struggle for a More Perfect Union, by Charles L. Zelden (Nova Southeastern University). Follow the link to hear him discuss the book with a local PBS station.  

• Via History News Network: Revolutionary Moments has joined the blogosphere. Here's a snippet of its first post: "With the world once again filled with anticipation and dread of revolution, it is reasonable to examine what relevant past events our predecessors experienced. . . . [T]he moderators propose to introduce questions relevant to current events with the notion that scholars who study revolutions throughout the globe will comment."

•  From the Chronicle of Higher Ed: "Ph.D. Attrition: How Much Is Too Much?"

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Dorn on "In Custodia Legis"

We have just missed until now a terrific series of posts by the Law Library of Congress’s Curator of Rare Books, Nathan Dorn, on In Custodia Legis.  This year’s posts include:

How Robin Hood Defied King John and Brought Magna Carta to Sherwood Forest

The True Portraiture of Judge Littleton

The World’s Legal Heritage in Great Subterranean Halls, or… A Collection Big with Babylonian Perspective

John Lilburne, Oaths and the Cruel Trilemma

Law Librarians and Immortal Glory

Doodling Away the Middle Ages

Signatures, Subscription Lists and Printing for the First U.S. Congress

From Magna Carta on Trial to the Holy Experiment

Pomp, Ceremony and the Simplicity Befitting a Republic

On Despising English Liberties and Other Wisdom from the Founders

Weekend Roundup

• CALI does constitutional history!  Hat tip: Ross Davies and Roger Skalbeck.   

• Over at JOTWELL: William Baude (Stanford Law School) writes a glowing review of Clyde Spillenger's "Risk Regulation, Extraterritoriality, and the Constitutionalization of Choice of Law, 1865-1940."  

• If you've never perused the website of the Historical Society of the New York Courts it is worth a look. 

• From the New York Review of Books Blog: Spying on Americans: A Very Old Story. 

• Over at H-Law, Kenneth J. Hirsh, Cincinnati Law, plugs the Louis Marshall Papers at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College.

• Lori Clune, an assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno, makes the case for sparing the Rosenbergs at HNN.

• Scott Douglas Gerber (Ohio Northern University Law), editorializes in the Providence Journal on Law and the Lively Experiment in Colonial Rhode Island.

• The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its residential fellowships for 2014-2015, as well as early applications for the academic years 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. The deadline is Monday, September 2, 2013 (12 pm EST or 6 pm CET).  More.

• The University of Pennsylvania Law Review is looking for contributors to “its online companion, Heightened Scrutiny. Essays selected for HS go through the full editorial process and are published to the major databases, in addition to being perpetually available on our website. We typically run shorter pieces with an eye towards more timely commentary on current events in the law.”

• It's still June, so there's still hope for our summer writing agenda.  If you're feeling the need to be sternly talked to on the subject, try Rachel Toor in the Chronicle of Higher Education: I Don't Write Enough Because ...  Hat tip: Linda Przybyszewski.

• From Books & Ideas: Eva Hemmungs Wirtén on the Commons, Old and New: From Land Use to Information Sharing.

The Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Another Report on the Taussig Collection

. . . from the National Law Journal.  Our earlier post on this acquisition by the Yale Law School is here.

Yale Law Acquires the Taussig Collection

In case you missed the story in yesterday's New York Times:

A pocket-size 14th-century handwritten copy of Magna Carta, the first book on the legal rights of women published in England, letters from the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone and papers belonging to a real-life London lawyer praised by Charles Dickens’s fictional yes-man Uriah Heep are among the highlights of a rich trove of rare legal books and manuscripts just acquired by Yale University.

More.