Today, December 15, is Bill of Rights Day, the 230th anniversary of the ratification of the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. On this day in 1791, the Virginia General Assembly completed the ratification process for those amendments. Virginia’s ratification of the Bill of Rights fulfilled the requirement that federal constitutional amendments must …
This post commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month by recounting the story of the first Jewish person to be elected to a popular assembly in American history, Francis Salvador
In Custodia Legis has featured a couple of posts on the bibliography of early law books, both here and here. In this post, I want to look at the beginning of legal bibliography in order to highlight some of the earliest examples of that craft and the people responsible for its creation. The invention of the …
One of the keepsakes given at the Library of Congress’s pre-inaugural black-tie gala for the ongoing Magna Carta exhibition was the commemorative coin depicted below. The coin’s obverse shows the name of the exhibition, Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor. Its reverse shows a reproduction of a medallion that appears on the title page of a 1774 imprint of …
This week’s interview is with Patrick Brown, Friends of the Law Library of Congress Rare Book Fellow. Patrick previously participated in the Junior Fellows Program at the Library of Congress (Summer 2011) and has returned at the invitation of the Friends of the Law Library to combine work and study as the inaugural participant in …