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Lighting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore – Pic of the Week

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Last night I attended the lighting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the lighting of the monument, which was built over 200 years ago with its cornerstone laid on July 4, 1815. The monument in Baltimore was the first public monument to honor George Washington, though the monument in Boonsboro, Maryland, was the first completed monument dedicated to the memory of Washington in 1827.

Picture of the Washington Monument in Baltimore with holiday lights

The Lighting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore, December 2, 2021. Photo by Kelly Goles.

The monument, built of local white marble from quarries north of the city in Baltimore County, was designed by Robert Mills, the same architect who would go on to design the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. A competition was held for the monument’s design and Mills won in 1814 with a design that was originally much more ornamented than the final version. Fourteen years after laying the cornerstone, the main column of the monument was completed when the statue of Washington was raised to its top. The statue depicts Washington resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in 1783 at the Maryland State House in Annapolis.

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The Danish Debt Ceiling Legislation

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This month marks 28 years since the Danish Parliament first adopted its debt ceiling legislation, Act on Authorization to Take Out State Loans (Lov om bemyndigelse til optagelse af statslån (LOV nr 1079 af 22/12/1993). On December 17, 1993, Parliament voted to empower the government to take out state loans, without first asking for permission […]

From Summorum Pontificum to Traditionis Custodes: Changes in Liturgical Matters at the Catholic Church

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The following post is by Dante Figueroa, a senior legal information analyst at the Law Library of Congress. He has recently written for In Custodia Legis on the Italian Parliamentary Library; Spanish Legal Documents (15th to 19th Century); Recent Legislation Enacted by Italy to Tackle COVID-19; and Italy: A New Silk Road Between Italy and China – the Belt and Road Initiative. […]

New Report on Children and Data Protection Laws in Ireland

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The following is a guest post by Clare Feikert-Ahalt, a senior foreign law specialist at the Law Library of Congress covering the United Kingdom and several other jurisdictions. Clare has written numerous posts for In Custodia Legis, including 100 Years of “Poppy Day” in the United Kingdom; Weird Laws, or Urban Legends?; FALQs: Brexit Referendum; and The UK’s Legal Response to the London […]

A Civil Body Politic: The Mayflower Compact and 17th-Century Corporations

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Last year, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower Compact, I wrote a post on this blog about the Compact’s origins and legacy in early American history. In that post, I wrote that the Compact served as a place-holder to acknowledge that the colonists were operating outside the region of North America that their […]

Cambodia’s Legal Professions

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The following is a guest post by Pichrotanak Bunthan, a legal research fellow with the Law Library of Congress who is working under the supervision of Sayuri Umeda, a foreign law specialist covering Japan and other jurisdictions in East and Southeast Asia. In my previous blog post, I described what legal education in Cambodia looks like. As a sequel to that post, the […]