We at In Custodia Legis are sensitive to the fact that some of our readers may be disappointed that the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, predicted for today, has turned out to be a bust. In order to soothe your nerves, we thought it would be courteous to invite you to look at a couple of scenes …
If you’ve been wondering whether your polygamous marriage to three Tarascan women was still valid after you converted to the religion of the conquistadors, look no further. A title recently acquired for the Rare Book Collection of Law Library of Congress answers this and other burning questions on the topics of marriage, canon law …
The Law Library of Congress houses approximately 60,000 rare items, 25,000 of which are contained in a climate controlled vault. To be classified as rare, an item generally must have been published prior to 1801. One of our interesting rare items is a petition for a writ of process handwritten by a young lawyer named …
The following is a guest post by James Martin, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Law Library of Congress. If it can be said that necessity is the mother of invention, then it can also be said that war is quite often its midwife. This was certainly the case in the American Civil War when …
This is a guest post by Pamela Barnes Craig, Instruction/Reference Librarian and co-author of Being Well-Informed: Congress.gov Training. As the Library of Congress opens the exhibit The Civil War in America with 200+ unique treasures, there remain many more valuable Civil War collections available for researching and viewing. The Law Library of Congress has several of …
This is a joint post drafted by Clare Feikert and Margaret Wood. The Global Legal Research Center has done a number of briefings and blogs, as well as too many Global Legal Monitor Articles to list, on electoral law across various jurisdictions around the world. The Russian Federation, Parliamentary Elections: Legal Issues, 2008; Elections in …
How many times have you been stumbling through the dicey Latin of a fifteenth century legal treatise only to stop and wonder what sort of person was behind that pretentious turn of phrase that you just couldn’t interpret? Well, now you can catch a glimpse of the greatest legal authors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance for …
The following is a guest post by Eduardo Soares, a Senior Foreign Law Specialist in the Global Legal Research Center of the Law Library of Congress. Eduardo is a Brazilian attorney and provides research services relating to the laws of Portuguese-speaking jurisdictions. Portuguese explorers first made landfall in Brazil on April 22, 1500. After the discovery, the …
Abolishing ancient laws in England is often no easy task. A significant degree of research is involved before these laws are amended or abolished. The research has to be particularly thorough to avoid one of the oldest – that of unintended consequences. The issue of thoroughly researching laws was demonstrated several years ago when the government was …
The following is a guest post by Donna Sokol, Special Assistant to the Law Librarian of Congress. This was an eventful week for the Law Library! The Library of Congress’ largest single event of the year, the National Book Festival, took place this past Saturday and Sunday. In the photo below, our Stacks Services manager, …