On this day 196 years ago, September 15, 1821, the Acta de Independencia de Centro América declared independence from Spain for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Last weekend I was pulling English ivy off the corner of my house where it had grown over from the neighbor’s yard, and I reflected on the large number of invasive plants I see growing all over the national capital area: kudzu, porcelain berry, water hyacinth, callery pear, and tree of heaven. I wondered what …
For those of you who closely observe In Custodia Legis, you might have noticed that I recently updated my biography on the blog’s About page. I am now in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Library of Congress. I still work on Congress.gov, I just do it from a new location. We are in …
I was in Ithaca, N.Y. recently for a meeting of the Northeast Foreign Law Libraries Cooperative Group (NEFLLCG) hosted by Cornell University Law Library. This group meets semiannually to discuss collection development issues, new acquisitions, and ensure the law collections in the region sufficiently represent foreign jurisdictions. Whenever I attend a conference or meeting, in …
Last week, I had the honor to give a gallery talk on the Library of Congress exhibit, Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration. As a co-curator for the exhibit, I had helped in doing legal research for information about the cases portrayed by the drawings in the exhibit. At the talk, I spoke about …
The Law Library staged a mock appeal for the Shakespearean character, Shylock, from the play, The Merchant of Venice. A full re-cap of the mock trial (including video!) is forthcoming, but we wanted to quickly share with you a scene from …
This post is coauthored by Nathan Dorn, rare book curator, and Robert Brammer, senior legal information specialist. Our picture of the week is an image of Fort Caroline, Florida, which was founded by French Huguenots on June 22nd of 1564. This print has a complicated, but interesting history. It is part of a 1591 imprint of Theodor de …