Top of page
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Today’s pic of the week post features an illustration from Silas Andrus’s 1822 compilation of the founding documents of the Colony of Connecticut, “The Code of 1650, Being a Compilation of the Earliest Laws and Orders of the General Court of Connecticut, or Civil Compact Entered Into and Adopted by the Towns of Windsor, Hartford …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library, Pic of the Week
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Magna Carta, the Charter of Liberties sealed by King John of England in 1215 AD, is routinely cited as one of the most important documents of our constitutional tradition. It ranks with the English Bill of Rights (1689), The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution in symbolic power. And while the details of …
Posted in: Education, In the News, Law Library, Research Guide
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
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 …
Posted in: Collections, Global Law, Guest Post, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Don’t let the title of this post mislead you. Of course it was not Robin Hood and his Merry Men who brought King John to his knees in June of 1215. That was accomplished by a band of John’s own barons. But here and there over the last couple of centuries, stories of the legendary …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
At a recent public event, I presented a display of books from the Law Library’s Rare Book Collection including this unusually printed 1591 edition of Littleton’s Tenures. One of the attractive features of the book is that it contains two very nice engravings that were bound into it ahead of the title page. The engravings, …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library, Pic of the Week
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
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 …
Posted in: Collections, Global Law, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Imagine a court that could force you to incriminate yourself. It might go about its work like this: you are made to stand before a judge who refuses to give you any details about the charge laid against you. You are forced to take an oath before your God to answer truthfully any questions that …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
“Tanta enim copia est Librorum Iuris, ut difficile omnino sit viam juris prudentiae ingredienti seligere quos in quavis parte sequator doctores.” (Burkhard Gotthelf Struve, Bibliotheca Iuris Selecta) “For so great is the abundance of lawbooks that it is altogether difficult for the beginning student of jurisprudence to select authoritative authors on the area of his …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library, Pic of the Week
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Nearly everyone who sees the item that appears in today’s pic of the week post makes the same observation: “Law students never change.” Here is a fourteenth century manuscript of Justinian’s Institutes, the introductory textbook for the Roman Law in the form in which it was used in the Middle Ages. In the image below …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library, Pic of the Week