Yesterday I highlighted 14 Nobel Peace Prize winners who were leaders of their country before, during, or after they won the prize. Today, I will highlight 19 more winners with legal backgrounds. Many of these laureates were leaders in international law, disarmament policies, or helped to broker peace in time of conflict. Elihu Root was …
As Elin mentioned yesterday, the Nobel Peace Prize will be given out on Thursday in Oslo, Norway. I was interested in the recipients this year, the National Dialogue Quartet, and while researching I found that one quarter of this organization was the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. That piqued my interest as to how many other …
This week is Nobel Week, a week celebrating the awarding of Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, physics, literature, and peace, as well as the affiliated Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. Thursday (December 10) marks the commemoration of Alfred Nobel’s death …
On this day, 215 years ago, Congress met in the Capitol Building for the first time. The Sixth Congress established the residence of the Congress and seat of the United States government in Washington, D.C. with the move on November 17, 1800. The newly established United States had nine capitals between 1776 and 1800: Philadelphia, …
On this day in 1989, the South African president, F. W. de Klerk, soon after assuming the presidency, ordered the desegregation of the country’s beaches. He promised that the repeal of the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, which segregated beaches and many other public facilities, would soon follow. The Reservation of Separate Amenities …
On a recent trip to Philadelphia, I stopped at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Opened in 1829, this was the most famous and expensive prison of its time. Tourists and researchers came from around the world to study this innovative prison system, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens. Eastern State Penitentiary was famous because it …
During a vacation in New Zealand in September, I was able to visit a new exhibition at Te Papa (New Zealand’s national museum) called Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War. The exhibition, which opened in April, provides insight into this particular aspect of World War I by telling the stories of eight New Zealanders involved …
Last year, we added Statutes at Large to our Digitized Material page. Initially, each Congress from 1789-1950 had a webpage that included a large PDF file of all statutes for that congressional session. Then we began splitting the large PDF documents into smaller pieces, which meant that we had to browse each statute, add metadata to …
The following is a guest post by Clare Feikert-Ahalt, foreign law specialist for the United Kingdom at the Law Library of Congress. She previously wrote a Halloween-themed blog post for In Custodia Legis on the issue of revealing the presence of ghosts when selling houses. With Halloween fast approaching, I’ve prepared a ghost story – …