Describe your background

I am originally from Kenbridge, Virginia, a very small town about 71 miles west of Richmond.  I grew up on my grandparents’ farm; so I am a country girl at heart.  Later my parents moved to Baltimore, Maryland. I still live in the Baltimore County area.  I have two beautiful daughters and one grandson; he is the joy of my life.  I earned my undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Finance from Sojourner-Douglass College in Baltimore.  I recently completed the Career Development Program here at the Library of Congress, which was an amazing experience.

How would you describe your job to other people?

As the Program Specialist for the Office of the Law Librarian I provide administrative and programmatic support to facilitate the mission of the Law Library of Congress. I coordinate travel arrangements, and input all travel-related authorization and reimbursement claims for the Law Library staff.  I also organize the monthly All Staff Meetings.  I provide a full range of administrative functions and responsibilities needed to maintain a smooth and seamless flow for the daily operations of the Law Library of Congress.

Why did you want to work at the Law Library of Congress?

Working for the Law Library of Congress has given me the opportunity to work in the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution with programs that provide one-of-a-kind national resources and services to both chambers of Congress, the American people, and the public at large. Also, I work with and have met some of the most interesting people from all over the world.

What is the most interesting fact you have learned about the Law Library of Congress?

One of the most interesting facts I have learned about the Law Library of Congress is that on average, the collection grows annually by “50,000 volumes, 1,700 reels of microfilm, 75,000 pieces of microfiche, 50,000 serial pieces and 50,000 official gazettes.”  It is amazing to see the items that we have here in the Law Library.

What’s something most of your co-workers do not know about you?

I enjoy cooking: I am a wonderful cook, if I may say so myself.  I love reading all types of books; I have read over 1000 books.

Richard Dreyfuss and David Mao (Library of Congress photos /Abby Brack)

Mr. Dreyfuss was introduced by David Mao, Law Librarian of Congress, who spoke briefly about the work of the Law Library in sustaining and preserving our collection of five million items.  David also spoke about Law Day and how this day celebrates and promotes the rule of law.  Civics education is of key importance in maintaining and enhancing the rule of law in a country, and Mr. Dreyfuss’ commitment to teaching kids about our government made him a great choice for speaker at our Law Day program.

Mr. Dreyfuss began by speaking about history – what history is and what it is not.  He noted that even science fiction or alternate history can help us to think about and analyze what happened in the past.  He stated that teaching children about particular rulers or requiring students to memorize dates, does not teach history.  History is subject to hundreds of different interpretations.  You can see this in the microcosm of the family where any family story may be told differently due to the various perspectives of the people telling the story.

Mr. Dreyfuss spoke of how the people of England did not write out their constitution but the people of America did, which he said was naïve, arrogant and brave.  Because we have a written constitution and bill of rights the world knows when we have gotten it wrong, but we also have the mechanisms to correct our course.  Until recently, he said, the United States earned the title of being a “good guy.”

Mr. Dreyfuss made interesting points about how art reflects society itself, and how people in the audience of a theater watches to see their own yearnings reflected back to them from the stage.  He believes that current films show nothing but teenage angst and science fiction worlds.  He affirmed that we need to anchor art back to where it belongs.  He spoke of his lifelong passion for acting, but said that when he was 12 he promised himself that he would retire at 50 and devote himself to something he loved just as much: his country.  He said that he did not come from a privileged family but one which had known hardship: his great aunt was killed in Tsarist Russia;  his grandmother had witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and been a secretary to Eugene Deb.  The cause he is currently devoting himself to is that of civics education.

Library of Congress photos /Abby Brack

Mr. Dreyfuss spoke of his views about the accelerated decay of values in this country and the inability to come to an agreement about what the mandate of public education should be.  He asserted that the mandate should be the development of an agile and mobile mind — able to move with confidence from one subject to another.  This is education as laid out by modern thinkers such as Howard Gardner of Harvard and by the ancient Greeks.  The sign of a mature mind, he said, should be the ability to say “I don’t know ” and to change one’s mind.  He believes that we should not ask people to stand for ideas that are wrong and go down with the Titanic.  However, he considers that we do not see this ability in our children today.

Mr. Dreyfuss spoke about some of the background and context for the U.S. Constitution coming into existence and for the development of civics education in this country.  For hundreds of years, he said, education was the preserve of the aristocracy and even during the Enlightenment period the pace of change in Europe was glacial.  However, change was accelerated in the New World.  We fought for the right to be treated as equals and, when the British conceded defeat, a new order was established which was not based on bloodlines or family connections.  He made the point that we wrote the Constitution not to set out different classes from each other but to lay out the shared responsibilities.  This country shared with the world what it had done by memorializing its vision in writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights; we fixed it to the walls and put our names on it – all acts of great bravery.  Americans were encouraged to be more than the sum of our parts.  We learned the phrase “checks and balances,” which reiterates that unfair advantages are not acceptable.  He said that we invited others into this better world where we offered mobility of mind and spirit.  The great immigration waves of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were moments in our history when people were coming to America and not to Norway or Togo. Few nations were prosperous even during the Enlightenment, he said, but the Enlightenment triumphed here over fundamentalism and superstition.  People came to America because we had achieved a political miracle, created a safe haven and offered a second chance.

Mr. Dreyfuss said that the only time we have for imparting our values is when our kids are in school.  We need to teach them about the outrageous, arbitrary history of the world and the example the United States set; and we need to challenge the students to imagine a world without the United States.  The world, he said, was on a very different course, where people like Hitler may have been normal.  But he feels that we have to work at what we created in order to maintain that example.  He referred to Abraham Lincoln saying that no one will beat us but ourselves.  Mr. Dreyfuss emphasized that the War of Independence was a revolutionary war and people need to better understand that and what the American revolution was about.  The war was revolutionary, he said, because it offered a legal code that stated that no king was above everyone else.  The European powers at the time were against this idea.  He compared our revolution to the attacks and criticisms by other European countries when the French published the Declaration of the Rights of Man.  He said that the United States offered an operating manual for the mobile mind and represented a threat to all the “haves” of the world.

Democracy, according to Mr. Dreyfuss, is based on trust, but he said that this trust is now apparently lacking because we see those who enter public service as crooks.  He said that politics is not a commodity nor is it news, and that we need a firewall to separate money and technology from politics.  He expressed the view that the founding fathers believed that the best way to protect religion was to protect a variety of religions, and that this was also the best way to protect speech and a free press.  He feels that we need to teach our children about the realities of politics.  In particular, he said, a republican democracy has been defined as the willingness to share space with those with whom we disagree.  But he feels that this has been morphed out of shape by the influence of money in politics.  He is concerned that we are now living in a world without common sense and that we will be the generation that gets an “F” in handing on the American Dream to our children.

Richard Dreyfuss speaking with Law Library staff, Liah Caravalho and Clifton Brown (Library of Congress photos /Abby Brack)

Mr. Dreyfuss wants us to start to address this issue by asking first, what do we need?  He thinks that we need to set up clubs, attended by nerds like himself, which would have no biases.  He declared that we are all citizens; and as such we, are the solution to our problems.  In particular, Mr. Dreyfuss believes that we need to create a society where people can disagree with each other – a society based on the principles found in the noble preamble to the Constitution.

We thank Mr. Dreyfuss for a very engaging and thought-provoking discussion, and for sharing his views about the intersections between history, society, law, politics, and education.

Susan B. Anthony's dedication on the first volume of the Chicago Legal News. Photograph by Kevin Long

The Chicago Legal News has the distinction of being the first legal publication in the United States that was edited by a woman, Myra Bradwell.  In 1868, Myra submitted a prospectus for a legal newspaper for Chicago.  This paper was launched in the same year and quickly became noted for its authoritative reporting on legal developments and commentary.  In 1869, the State of Illinois enacted a law providing that the state’s courts could take judicial notice of the statutes of Illinois and the decisions of the state’s Supreme Court that were published in the paper.

The Law Library has a copy of the first volume of the Chicago Legal News, which was donated by Susan B. Anthony to the Library of Congress.  A blank sheet before the first issue of the journal has the following inscription in Anthony’s hand:

The first legal paper edited by a woman – Myra Bradwell – This file is from 1868 & 1869 - It was Mrs. Bradwell whose right to be admitted to the Bar of Illinois was carried up to the United States Supreme Court.  Senator Matthew Carpenter made the argument for her.

Congressional Library
Washington DC

Susan B. Anthony
Rochester – N.Y-

Jan. 1.1905

For instance: we might have had a state called Jefferson nestled between California and Oregon—the dream of a determined secessionist movement that came to a sudden end when the United States’ entry into World War II changed the political mood in the region. Had things been different, we might have been able to look northward from Minnesota toward the State of Superior—a long-standing aspiration among the inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, one which appeared as early as 1858 when locals held a constitutional convention in the village of Ontonagon (some proposed that the state be called Ontonagon). An 1845 joint resolution by the U.S. Congress permitted as many as four new states to be created within the territory that came into the Union as Texas. That resolution might have led to the birth of the State of Lincoln (proposed to Congress in 1869) which would have been found between the Rio Grande and Texas’s Colorado River.

Map of the proposed State of Sequoyah (LCCN: a 24000212) Photo by Donna Sokol

One of the most unique states that almost came to be was the State of Sequoyah. The State of Sequoyah, proposed to Congress in 1905, was to have been created out of the Oklahoma Territory as a State with a strong Native American majority. Covering a territory that corresponds roughly to the eastern half of today’s State of Oklahoma, the would-be state included land that had been allotted to Native Americans through a variety of treaties following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tribes had been sovereign over land in Oklahoma for several decades. The political scene, however, was changing. The Curtis Act of 1898, an instrument meant to lead to the assimilation of the Native American population, was about to come into force, effectively abolishing tribal courts and tribal governments in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Anticipating the new realities, representatives of the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations, and later the chiefs of the Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole Tribes (taken together, these were known as the Five Civilized Tribes), gathered in August and September of 1905 to convene a constitutional convention. Their goal: to create a state government that might replace tribal sovereignty with a rough second best—Indian sovereignty through democratic majority. Their efforts yielded a constitution, which included a bill of rights, provisions for the separation of powers among three branches of government, the establishment of counties and their borders, the regulation of trade, and the prohibition of the manufacture of intoxicating spirits among other things. They adopted the name Sequoyah for their state after a suggestion by pamphleteer James A. Norman that the state be named for the storied inventor of the script used to write the Cherokee language.

Strong political forces, however, were aligned against them. With Congress and the White House controlled by Republicans, a heavily democratic Native American state stood no chance of being admitted to the Union under the terms presented by the Sequoyah Convention. Congress refused to consider the 1905 proposal. A reconfigured proposal including the western half of the territory (and a large Euro-American population) resulted in the birth of the State of Oklahoma soon afterward in 1907.

Another unique story relates to the pre-history of Utah. After the U.S. signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico in 1848, it became clear to the Mormon settlers in the West that the new Southwest—which the U.S. had wrested from Mexico as part of the negotiated peace—would soon be divided up into federally controlled territories. The Mormons saw this as an opportunity to take the lead in the political organization of the new territory. In this they wasted no time; by July of 1849, the Mormon community had convened a constitutional convention, drafted and adopted a constitution and set about petitioning Congress for the statehood of the State of Deseret.

Constitution of Deseret of 1849 (LCCN: 34029383) Photo by Donna Sokol

According to the preamble of the State’s constitution, the State of Deseret would encompass all the lands of the Great Basin, stretching from the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas to the Rocky Mountains in the West, running north-south from the drainage divide of the Columbia River to the Gulf of California—an area including all of modern Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California as well as parts of Colorado and Oregon. The preamble proposed that Deseret would be a bulwark of civil order against the anarchy left behind by the withdrawal of Mexican sovereignty and the “failure” of the U.S. Congress to take any measures to guarantee law and order in the region. Legal aspects of the Deseret Constitution are familiar in many details—it was based on the constitution of the State of Iowa. It delineated the separation of powers; it created a militia and provided guidelines for the administration of elections; it also enumerated a list of the civil rights guaranteed to all citizens. Among these was the free exercise of religion to which was added both that no single religion would ever be preferred by the state and that no religious test would ever be administered to seekers of public office.

Mormon Leader Brigham Young, circa 1866 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

In practice, however, the state was—for the duration of its existence—the civil arm of the Mormons’ western settlement. A group of about 11,000 Mormons had come west in 1847 with Brigham Young to seek religious autonomy in the wilderness. The settlement grew rapidly (in the next thirty years these settlers were followed by as many as sixty thousand more devout Mormon immigrants from the East); the church leadership naturally held complete political control over the community. This was not necessarily an advantage for statehood. Prejudice against the new religion was strong and Congress was cool to the idea of a Mormon state, preferring to establish a federal territory where the governor might be hand selected by the President. Additional hostility to Deseret’s statehood came from slave states’ opposition to the creation of a new free state in the West.

Deseret was the de facto civil authority in its borders for two years until the creation of the Utah Territory, when on April 4, 1851 it was dissolved by the General Assembly. But the dream survived initial failure. The Mormons reprised the petition for the statehood of Deseret, unsuccessfully, in 1856, 1862 and 1872.

At the time the first Deseret constitution was created, the community in the West was less than two years old. The Mormons did not yet have a printing press in the region. As a result, the constitution was printed in Kanesville, Iowa (the historic starting point of the Mormons’ trail westward); several copies were dispatched from there to Washington, D.C. A quite rare copy of the Kanesville imprint of the Deseret Constitution, along with a 1905 copy of the Constitution of the State of Sequoyah, can be found in the Rare Book Collection of the Law Library of Congress.

As someone who has on more than a few occasions relied on CALM to obtain articles from various institutions around the country, I am grateful to the Division and its staff.  I hope you enjoy this interview with one of its staff members, Candice Townsend.  Candice is Head of the Reference Section in CALM.

Describe your background.

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia with my five sisters and one brother.  Our parents encouraged loyalty and family values.

I’ve been a resident of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area for more than 19 years.  The District of Columbia offers a wealth of history, culture, and heritage, making it an exciting city in which to reside.  In a household with three males (husband and two sons) there is much fun and excitement.  However, a quiet spot to read remains a pleasant escape.

What is your academic/professional history?

I am a first generation college graduate.  I received an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Trinity College, Washington, D.C. and a Master of Library Science (MLS) degree from The Catholic University of America (CUA).

Inside the Thomas Jefferson Building

After graduating from Trinity College, I was employed as an Office Manager for a small lobbying firm, based in Minneapolis.  It was a great experience.  I received a healthy introduction to Westlaw and LexisNexis.  Unfortunately, our Washington, D.C. travel office closed.  Considering my passion for books and organization, my husband encouraged me to pursue a post secondary degree in librarianship. This degree was instrumental in my first position as an assistant librarian with the District of Columbia Public Library.  Needless to say, my life was really busy: reference desks by day and classes in the evening.  I received a tremendous amount of support from my family, CUA faculty and friends.  They all encouraged me to work hard, championing my progression from Reference Librarian to experienced Branch Manager. After eight years of direct public service with the District of Columbia Public Library, I began to seek a broader and more challenging position in the library field.  Such an opportunity was presented through an opening at the Library of Congress for which I applied.  The rest is history.

How would you describe your job to other people?

The Reference Section of CALM is fast-paced and invigorating; there is never a dull moment.  We provide direct access to the Library’s collections to Members of Congress and their staff, the Supreme Court, embassies and the Executive Office of the President.  We also process interlibrary loan requests, both foreign and domestic.

Why did you want to work at the Library of Congress?

A passion for reading led me to pursue a career in Library Sciences.  As a Reference Librarian, it is an honor and a privilege to work for the Nation’s Library.  The collections are awesome and often cited and referenced throughout the world.

What is the most interesting fact you’ve learned about the Law Library of Congress?

I am most impressed with THOMAS.  This website provides extensive, up to date legislative information.  I’ve had an opportunity to attend several informative sessions and found them to be a great resource.

What’s something most of your co-workers do not know about you?

I am an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.  It is the oldest Greek-lettered organization established by African-American, college-educated women.  I am committed to community service and am able to volunteer through my sorority.  Our current goals and initiatives include, among other things, eradicating global poverty, enforcing human rights, ensuring economic security and fostering young-adult leaders.  It allows me to provide personal support and interact socially with sorority sisters while working on these worthy endeavors.

Here is the list of GLM articles most viewed in April in the order of their popularity:

1. South Korea: Permanent Dual Nationality Allowed after 60 Years
2. Turkey: New Minimum Wage
3. Belarus: Browsing Foreign Websites a Misdemeanor
4. France: Law on Digital Exploitation of Unavailable Books
5. Hong Kong: Minimum Wage Law Takes Effect
6. France: Law on Immigration, Integration and Nationality
7. Denmark: Retirement Age Raised
8. Mongolia: Election Law Amended, New Election System Adopted
9. Council of Europe / United Nations: Organ Trafficking Treaty Proposed
10. China: Amendment of Criminal Procedure Law

While most of the articles on the list are appearing for the second or third time, those on China, Mongolia and France (No. 4) are new to the top ten list.

The article on China discusses recent amendments made to the country’s Criminal Procedure Law.  Amendments included expanding the provisions of the Law that relate to residential surveillance and strengthening rules of evidence through the introduction of an exclusionary rule.  The new rule renders inadmissible evidence obtained via illegal means, including torture and intimidation.

The article on Mongolia focuses on a newly adopted amendment to the country’s election law.  This law changed the election process for parliamentary seats from  “a majoritarian one, under which individual candidates were elected by a majority vote, to a ‘mixed member proportional system.’”

Finally, the article on France describes a recently adopted law aimed at establishing a database through which unavailable books (books published before 2001 and not currently available in the market in print or digital form) will be made accessible to the public free of charge.  This law allows any individual to petition for any such book to be put in a register of sorts, and if no objection is raised by the person/s who hold the rights to the book within six months, the authority in charge of managing the program would grant limited rights for its publication.

The Global Legal Monitor published a total of 60 articles in April on a wide range of interesting legal issues.  Since they could not all fit in the top ten list I thought I would highlight several articles that I found particularly interesting:

• An article on a new regulation in Denmark requiring owners of air guns to purchase gun licenses or join hunting clubs;
• An article describing recent Kenyan court decision ordering the country’s Parliament to review a recent law that may adversely affect the importation and distribution of generic medicine;
• An article discussing a soon to be implemented Trinidad and Tobago law which, among other things, prohibits the importation and breeding of “dangerous dogs” (including pitbull terriers, Fila Brasileiros, and Japanese Tosas); and
• An article on changes made to Moldova‘s Parliament Rules of Internal Procedure to penalize legislators that miss Parliament plenary sessions or committee meetings.

This is a good opportunity to catch up on interesting GLM articles you may have missed last month.  You can read more GLM articles by visiting the Law Library website or by simply signing up for email alerts or RSS feeds.  If you’re on Twitter, you can access some GLM articles through tweets via @LawLibCongress and #GlobalLegalMonitor.

Which GLM articles do you find interesting?

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo! (And just as everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day, everyone is Mexican on Cinco de Mayo.)  This year marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Mexican forces’ victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862.  (If you’re interested in reading more, see last year’s post, “Cinco de Mayo is Not Mexican Independence Day?“.) Irrespective of the French defeat, the Gazette Officielle de l’Empire Mexicain pictured above is proof positive of a French presence in Mexico.  This is a digitized image taken from one of three volumes of the official gazette of Mexico during the Second French Intervention under the reign of Maximilian I.  These documents and many more are available here, at the Law Library of Congress.  If you are interested in expanding your research resources on Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Lusophone/Hispanophone Africa, another great stop is at the Hispanic Reading Room of the Library of Congress.  For those of you who do not have physical access to the Library of Congress’s collections, please see your local library for information concerning its participation in interlibrary loan or use the “Ask a Librarian” interface to explore other options.

If you are looking for a venue to celebrate in the daytime, the Mexican Embassy will be hosting a commemoration and celebration at its Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. and invites “visitors to experience the art, culture, cuisine and much more” of the Mexican state of Puebla–best known for its mole poblano.  Another day-time venue for celebration with the family is at the 20th Annual National Cinco de Mayo Festival at the National Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument.

If the French were to have succeeded in perpetuating their rule over Mexico, perhaps you would be asking for une bière française or une bière mexicaine instead of your cerveza of choice this weekend. Would a beer by any other name taste just as sweet?

Wherever you choose to celebrate, have a fun and safe Cinco de Mayo.  ¡Salud! or Santé!

The top three posts from a year ago in the April 2011 Retrospective were:

1. An Irishman’s “Gust of Passion” in the American Trial Collection
2. Not All Research is Online – Pic of the Week
3. The Conspirators of the Lincoln Assassination – Pic of the Week

The ten most viewed posts for April 2012 are: 
1. Failure to Update the Law a Titanic Mistake
2. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
3. A Matter of Size: Israel’s New Legislation against Too-Skinny Models
4. The Loch Ness Monster, Zombies and the Law
5. Citizen Activist Richard Dreyfuss to Speak at the 2012 Law Day Program
6. The History of the Mexican Constitution
7. W3C Government Linked Data Working Group Drafts Open for Comment
8. Slavery in the French Colonies: Le Code Noir (the Black Code) of 1685
9. THOMAS House Committee Hearing Video Update
10. Law Library of Congress Hosts Event, Releases Guide on Legal Translation

The Career Development Program Graduation post had the most comments with words of congratulations for Barbara and Agata.

On our Facebook page (which now has more than 8,000 likes), the most liked blog post was on our Law Day event.  The most clicked through post from Facebook was Failure to Update the Law a Titanic Mistake.  On Twitter, it was The Loch Ness Monster, Zombies and the Law.

This month, Tariq was our only interview. My favorite pics from April are:

There were 24 posts altogether in April:

• Myra Bradwell
• Bebe Mom vs. Brit Mum: Manners and Junk Food
• March Retrospective
• W3C Government Linked Data Working Group Drafts Open for Comment
• Career Development Program Graduation – Pic of the Week
• Law Library of Congress Hosts Event, Releases Guide on Legal Translation
• Global Legal Monitor: March Highlights
• A Matter of Size: Israel’s New Legislation against Too-Skinny Models
• First 100 Days as Law Librarian
• The Trial of Seif al Islam al Gaddafi
• Recap of Presentation – Jews on Trial: The Papal Inquisition in Modena, 1598-1638
• Failure to Update the Law a Titanic Mistake
• Visit to the University of Costa Rica’s Law School Library
• The District of Columbia 1862 Emancipation Law
• Citizen Activist Richard Dreyfuss to Speak at the 2012 Law Day Program
• An Interview with Tariq Ahmad, Legal Analyst at the Law Library of Congress
• The Loch Ness Monster, Zombies and the Law
• American Bar Association in the Library – Pic of the Week
• OASIS Puts Akoma Ntoso on the Standards Track
• Updated New Zealand Legislation Website – It’s Pretty (and Useful)!
• Happy Birthday William: Shakespeare, Henry V and Salic Law
• A New Volume of U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs at the Law Library of Congress
• Happy Birthday, @THOMASdotgov! – Pic of the Week
• Sonnets at the End of the Reign of H.I.M. Don Agustín I of Mexico

Which one was your favorite?

Be sure to sign up for alerts from the blog.  You can subscribe via email or RSS.

The book we misplaced is the 1910 edition of ‘A Law Dictionary‘ by Henry Campbell Black, known now as Black’s Law Dictionary.  This title has been relied upon by many legal scholars and academics, and cited by the Supreme Court, although interestingly, the use of dictionaries by the Supreme Court is not without controversy.

There are now apps for this title, and a pocket sized and desktop version.

When I set about writing this post, I initially looked in our collection for the first edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, which I thought would be in the Rare Book Collection so I asked our Rare Book Curator and fellow In Custodia Legis blogger Nathan if we happened to have a copy.  He was unable to find a record in the Library of Congress’ Online Catalog, so he consulted ye olde but trusty (but no longer updated) card catalog. What he found was that the Library of Congress had a copy of the first edition of Black’s once upon a time – but there was a penciled in note on the card indicating that it was already determined to be “not found,” nearly a hundred years ago, on December 14th, 1917.

The shelf that I put Black’s Law Dictionary on is located in “the vault,” where we keep the rare books of the Law Library.  The vault is maintained at the cool temperature of 65° Fahrenheit to help preserve the books.  Even the chilly temperature is not much of a deterrent to me once I get in there to take a look at the other materials we have; it truly is an unbelievable place.  As this post addresses law dictionaries I asked Nathan, who assisted me greatly, if we had any other dictionaries in the Rare Book Collection.  Nathan, the true intellectual that he is, listed a series of titles off the top of his head, and quickly returned with what legal historians regard as the first legal dictionary ever printed, the Vocabularius utriusque juris, with the astounding date of publication of 1475.  I was very glad I left my cup of tea in my office at this point.  My English tongue does not allow me to pronounce the title correctly, so translated into English it is: a vocabulary of both laws.  When referring to “both laws” the title covers both canon and civil law. This title has over seventy editions published and the University of Texas at Austin’s Tarlton Law Library, Rare Books and Special Collections has a nice synopsis about  it.

The second dictionary in the Law Library’s Rare Book Collection that Nathan brought out was

A copy of John Rastell's Expositiones terminorum legum Anglorum held in the Law Library of Congress' Rare Books collection

John Rastell’s Expositiones terminorum legum Anglorum. These titles were definitely making me feel one of the many errors of my youth in not taking more foreign language classes, although Nathan was very patient and kind, and within showing me two books he gave the Latin name and then immediately translated it into English for me.  In this case, the translation is the exposition of the terms of the laws of England.  This dictionary is an early edition of the first ever English Law dictionary (although it’s written in Anglo-Norman), and is in the format that most of us are used to today – alphabetized.  It was first published around 1523, and the copy in the Rare Book reading room was published in 1527.

Thank you once again to Nathan, and for the understanding of my colleagues that I really did put Black’s dictionary in its rightful place.

I intentionally put a book on the wrong shelf.  To my librarian colleagues who came to me with heart palpitations that I misplaced a book on the shelves, please do not worry, I made sure that I put it back in its proper place afterwards.  Can you tell from the (intentionally blurry) picture and the clues which item it is? 

• I am over one hundred years old and one of nine.
• Legal scholars, professionals and students alike rely on me.
• I provide both history and clarity.
• I am cited by courts, even the Supreme Court takes note of me.
• I am mobile and can fit in your pocket or sit on your desk.
• Yes, there is an app for me.
• I have been translated many, many times.

What am I?