On January 28, 2021, Foreign Law Specialist Nicolas Boring discussed the Napoleonic Code’s history, evolution, and legacy in an installment of the Law Library of Congress’ foreign and comparative law webinar series. The webinar discussed the prehistory of the French Civil Code, its drafting and adoption, its contents, and the history of its immense influence …
Quid sit quod multi vitas principum and ducum… diligentissime conscripserint atque inde genus hoc scribendi profectum, paulatim ad eos homines pervenerit, qui leniores quodammodo virtutes profitentur, Philosophos dico, Medicos, Oratores, Poetas… donec ad Rhetores ac Grammaticos deventum est, nemo adhuc extiterit, qui sibi Legumlatorum et Iurisprudentum vitas in argumentum iusti et peculiaris operis desumpserit… How …
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 …
This is a guest post by Hilary Ott, the Deanna Marcum Fellow for the summer of 2013. Hilary has spent the past five weeks working in the Law Library examining engravings in 17th and 18th century law books from northern Europe. Part of my project at the Law Library this summer has been to identify …
A walk through the stacks of the Law Library of Congress will give you a vivid sense, if you had ever wondered, of what more than a million books looks like. Current statistics show that the Law Library houses 2.78 million physical volumes in its collection. Nearly all of these are stored in four gigantesque …
The idea of republican simplicity is a relic from the age of the American Revolutionary War. To get at its meaning, it’s easiest to meditate on its opposite. Think to yourself: How do I address a king? Am I meant to bow/curtsey? How low? What do I do with my hands while I bow? Do …
King Canute may have failed to stop the rising of the tide when he commanded the sea to halt, but Pope Gregory XIII was able to decree the annulment of time itself; or to be more specific, he declared the erasure of 10 days in October of 1582, and he pulled it off in such …
Although Alessandro Aldobrandini (1664-1734) was not the first in the long history of Italy’s Aldobrandini family to traverse the cursus honorum of the church’s hierarchy, his record of achievement was substantial: educated first in the Seminario Romano and later in the University of Pisa, where he attained the degree of doctor utriusque juris, he was …
