The following is a guest post by Peter Roudik, Director of Legal Research at the Law Library of Congress. Peter has contributed to In Custodia Legis a number of posts related to Russia and the former Soviet Union. These include posts on a spring holiday for workers, the Soviet investigation of Nazi war crimes, lustration in …
December 2, 2016, marked the 250th anniversary of the first Swedish Freedom of the Press Act, which has been regarded as the world’s first statute related to freedom of the press. The Act abolished censorship and specifically provided a right for Swedish citizens to access government archives. It was therefore also the first act to establish …
On Friday, December 9, the Law Library of Congress will commemorate Human Rights Day with a discussion on how the Miranda warning has impacted human rights in Eastern Europe. This program will serve as the Law Library’s annual commemoration of Human Rights Day. In previous years, the Law Library has hosted a number of Human …
The following is a guest post by Luis Acosta, chief of one of the Law Library’s foreign, comparative, and international law divisions. Luis also recently wrote a post about a report on education as a constitutional right in foreign countries. The doctrine of sovereign immunity, or state immunity, is an international law principle that limits …
While reviewing a truck of materials, I found three items with the following bookplate: Since I had run across this bookplate before and admired it, I thought it would be a great visual to share in a blog post. This bookplate was specifically designed for the Yudin Collection. The Library of Congress acquired the Yudin …
More and more internet traffic is encrypted. Encryption is a method of protecting electronic information by converting it into an unintelligible form (encoding) so that it can only be decoded with a key. Google stated in its latest transparency report that 85% of requests from around the world to Google’s servers used encrypted connections in …
It’s almost time for the National Book Festival (#NatBookFest)! I have looked through the line-up, which you can browse by author or schedule, and am excited to try to see the authors of “Rosie Revere, Engineer,” “The Princess in Black,” and “I am Blop!” while there. (Can you guess the ages of the people I will …
I expect almost everyone who works at the Library of Congress can tell you the year in which the Library was established – if not the exact date. The Library is the oldest cultural institution in the United States. Its establishment dates back to April 24, 1800 when President John Adams signed a law that …
The following is a guest post by Peter Roudik, director of legal research at the Law Library of Congress. Peter has previously written a number of posts related to Russia and the former Soviet Union, including posts on the Soviet investigation of Nazi war crimes, lustration in Ukraine, Crimean history and the 2014 referendum, regulating …