In tribute to Justice Antonin Scalia’s life and commitment to the rule of law, this pic of the week features Justice Scalia at the Library’s Magna Carta evening gala. Justice Scalia was a monumental legal thinker, who was known for his deep reverence of the United States Constitution, exuberant personality, and interest in opera. Therefore, it probably does …
Trial of a Sow and Pigs at Lavegny, from The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character, ed. Robert Chambers, 1879. https://archive.org/stream/b22650477_0001#page/128/mode/2up At present, one of the projects that I am working on involves …
Today is the New Year’s Day on the Chinese lunar calendar (阴历, also known as the “rural calendar” (农历)). As explained in my previous blog post, Happy Lunar New Year!, the New Year’s Day falls on a different day each year. Starting February 8, 2016, this is the Year of the Monkey — which, of …
Most fans of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses celebrate the day of the novel’s action, June 16, also known as Bloomsday. I knew a Joyce specialist who used to honor the day by eating a gorgonzola sandwich on white bread with a glass of burgundy—he said he couldn’t face the grilled mutton kidneys. Fans of the …
The remnants of snow from the colossal Washington, DC snow storm did not hinder Malibu law students from Pepperdine University School of Law from visiting the Law Library on Thursday, January 28. The law students, who are participants in the law school’s Washington, DC, Externship Semester program, visited the Law Library to receive Congress.gov research …
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 …
It seems as though Collection Services Division’s staff have been composing On the Shelf posts for ages. Since we’ve started posting, I’ve been reminded by colleagues about items found years ago that we would pass around or send photos of or talk about over lunch. One such item is a book Brian Kuhagen found a …
This week’s interview is with Randall Hicks, Scholar-in-Residence at the Law Library of Congress and International Relations Officer in the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking (OCFT) at the United States Department of Labor. As Scholar-in-Residence, Randall is conducting research on the cultural foundations of law and their impact on rule of …
Well, winter finally hit the D.C. metropolitan area. And it came with a bang. The temperatures on Tuesday morning dipped down into the teens with “feels like” temps in the single digits. You’d think that on a day like that staff would stay indoors sipping hot tea or coffee while they work, and for the …