We sincerely thank the following individuals for their help in making this exhibit possible.
      -- Michael von der Linn & Michael Widener

Virginia Apple
State of Connecticut Judicial Branch

Whitney Bagnall

Kate Baldwin
Litchfield Historical Society

The Hon. Henry S. Cohn
Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court

Linda Hocking
Litchfield Historical Society

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

Mark Jones
Connecticut State Library

Debra R. Kroszner
Office of Public Affairs, Yale Law School

Bill Landis
Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library

Christine Pittsley
Connecticut State Library

Emma Molina Widener
Southern Connecticut State University

The image: Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School, from 1793 to 1827 inclusive (Litchfield, Conn.: S. S. Smith, 1828). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Baldwin, Simeon E. “Zephaniah Swift.” In Great American Lawyers (William Draper Lewis; ed.; Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1907-1909).

Fisher, Samuel H. Litchfield Law School 1774-1833: Biographical Catalogue of Students. Yale Law Library Publications, no. 11. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.

Forgeus, Elizabeth. “An Early Connecticut Law School: Sylvester Gilbert’s School at Hebron.” 35 Law Library Journal 200-203 (1942).

Forgeus, Elizabeth. “Sylvester Gilbert’s Law School at Hebron, Connecticut: The Students.” 39 Law Library Journal 49-52 (1946).

Hicks, Frederick C. Yale Law School: The Founders and the Founders’ Collection. Yale Law Library Publications, no. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

Hoeflich, Michael H. Legal Publishing in Antebellum America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Klafter, Craig Evan. Reason Over Precedents: Origins of American Legal Thought. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Klafter, Craig Evan. “The Americanization of Blackstone’s Commentaries.” In Essays on English Law and the American Experience (Elisabeth A. Cawthon & David E. Narrett, eds.; College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994).

Langbein, John H. “Blackstone, Litchfield, and Yale: The Founding of Yale Law School.” In A History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures (Anthony T. Kronman, ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Langbein, John H. “Law School in a University: Yale’s Distinctive Path in the Later Nineteenth Century.” In A History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures (Anthony T. Kronman, ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

The Litchfield Ledger, <http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/ledger>. A biographical database of students at the Litchfield Law School and Litchfield Female Academy, provided by the Litchfield Historical Society.

McKenna, Marian C. Tapping Reeve and the Litchfield Law School. New York: Oceana, 1986.

Reed, Alfred Zantzigner. Training for the Public Profession of the Law: Historical Development and Principal Contemporary Problems of Legal Education in the United States, with Some Account of Conditions in England and Canada. New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons, 1921.

White, G. Edward. “Law and Entrepreneurship.” In White, Law in American History, Volume 1: From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

The image: Zephaniah Swift, A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut, vol. 1 (Windham: Printed by John Byrne, for the author, 1795-1796). Ownership signature of Samuel W. Southmayd (1773-1813), a student at the Litchfield Law School in 1793. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Affiliation with Yale helped to insure the continuity of Hitchcock and Daggett’s school. The others did not survive. Gilbert closed his school in Hebron around 1818. We’re not sure why, but he was probably responding to a combination of professional obligations, including his term in the U.S. Congress in 1818-1820, and advancing age. The Windham school ended with Swift’s death in 1823; ill health and declining enrollments led Gould to close the Litchfield Law School in 1833. From then, Yale remained the only law school in the state until the establishment of the University of Connecticut Law School in 1921.

Yale College diploma, 1852 July 1, awarding William Thomas Marsh the degree of Bachelor of Laws. [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

An early example of a Yale Law School diploma. A North Carolinian, William T. Marsh (1830-1862) graduated with honors, returned home, and became a distinguished member of the North Carolina bar. In 1860 he represented Beaufort County in the state House of Representatives. Though he opposed secession, he chose to serve his state when it joined the Confederacy. In 1861 he became an officer in a local militia regiment, the Pamlico Rifles, and was fatally wounded during the Battle of Antietam.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A handful of college and college-affiliated law schools existed in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The College of William & Mary established a law department in 1790, which granted America’s first LL.B. in 1793. Others schools followed, such as Transylvania University (1799-1861), Harvard University (1817), and the University of Virginia (1826).

Although some have proposed earlier dates, it is generally agreed that the New Haven Law School was joined to Yale College in 1826. Existing records do not explain the reasons for this union, but we can point to a few possibilities. In the early nineteenth century American colleges were beginning to evolve into universities by establishing or acquiring professional schools. Elite lawyers, many of them members of college corporations, encouraged the creation of college-based law schools.

Finally, the New Haven Law School was an attractive bargain; it was a successful, self-financed, self-managed school with a fine library and a distinguished faculty. And it was available to Yale for nothing more than the prestige conferred by its name. On their part, Hitchcock and Daggett probably viewed their school’s union with their prestigious alma mater as a way to raise its profile and compete with other prestigious schools, Harvard especially.

Catalogue of the Officers and Students in Yale College (Nov. 1826). [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Yale’s 1826 Catalogue marked the re-birth of the New Haven Law School as Yale Law School, a peer institution of the “Theological Department,” founded in 1822, and the “Medical Institution,” founded in 1813. Daggett was appointed to the Yale College faculty as “Professor of Law” in 1826, another factor that joined the two schools. He was granted an LL.D the same year. Hitchcock received a courtesy title of instructor in the college in 1830 and an LL.D in 1842.

Aholiab Johnson (1799-1893), Account book, 1825-1840. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Gift of Lois S. Montbertrand, Law ’85.

Johnson’s account book records the cost of a year’s tuition at the New Haven Law School: “Due Hitchcock & Daggett for tuition use of Library &c from Dec. 1st 1824 to Dec. 1st 1825 - $75.00”. Johnson went on to practice law in Enfield, Connecticut for over 50 years. His obituary in the Connecticut Reports noted, "he had lived during all the lives of the presidents of the United States. He had been for a long time the oldest lawyer in the state."

Samuel J. Hitchcock, letter to Yale Corporation requesting permission to grant LL.B., 1842 Aug. 6. Yale University Corporation Records (RU 164, Accession 1993-A-083: box 2, folder 2). Courtesy Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library.

Hitchcock offers two reasons why Yale should confer the LL.B.: it would enable the law school to compete with other degree-conferring schools, especially Harvard, and it would “raise the standard of attainments” and “moral conduct” of the students. His second point reflects a larger effort among elite lawyers to expand the scope of legal education beyond preparation for the bar exam, which was the sole purpose of the proprietary schools.

Yale College Law School [circular]. New Haven, 1843 Sept. 1. [Image cropped.] Yale Law School Records (RU 449, Accession 1939-A-001: box 1, folder 6). Courtesy Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library.

Intended for enrolled and prospective students, the 1843 circular describes requirements for the LL.B. This text was also published as an advertisement in several nationally circulated journals. The law school’s enrollments increased after 1826, but it drew even more students after it became a degree-granting institution. By 1865 it had trained students from 31 states and territories and six foreign countries.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In Connecticut and elsewhere, instructors in the proprietary schools played a crucial and self-conscious role in the Americanization of the common law. Applying practical experience, political beliefs, and the ideology of the American Revolution, they revised it to suit local circumstances and showed where it was incorrect, obsolete, or irrelevant. This is especially evident in their reception of Blackstone’s Commentaries. On a fundamental level they helped to de-Anglicize the law by teaching the positive and case law of their state.

Instructors in the Connecticut schools played a dominant role in this process, training dozens of men who became influential lawyers, judges, legislators, and teachers. Litchfield’s alumni list, our largest and most distinguished example, includes two vice-presidents, 101 United States congressmen, twenty-eight United States senators, six cabinet members, three United States Supreme Court justices, fourteen governors, thirteen chief justices of state supreme courts, and seventeen members of the Connecticut House of Representatives. Reeve, Gould, and Swift’s widely circulated treatises, all published versions of their lectures, were equally influential.

Benjamin Pomeroy (1787-1855), Manuscript notes of lectures by Sylvester Gilbert at his Law School in Hebron, Connecticut (c. 1811). [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Instructors in the Connecticut schools rejected Blackstone’s unquestioned reverence for the common law. As we see in this lecture by Gilbert, they often subjected his doctrines to counterexamples drawn from natural, civil, and Roman law.

Tapping Reeve, The Law of Baron and Femme (New-Haven: Oliver Steele, 1816). [Image cropped.] Ownership signature of Isaac Leavenworth (1791-1864), a student at the New Haven Law School in 1822. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The first American treatise on family law, Reeve’s Law of Baron and Femme is a restatement of Blackstone’s Commentaries, Book I, Chapters XIV-XVII. It rejects some of the fundamental doctrines of the common law, most notably coverture. As Blackstone puts it, “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage.” Reeve says the opposite. Also a prescriptive work, Baron and Femme aimed to liberalize the American law of domestic relations, arguing, for example, that married women were permitted to make wills, a point contradicted by the contemporary statute and case law of Connecticut and several other states.

Zephaniah Swift, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Connecticut (New-Haven: Printed and published by S. Converse, 1822-1823).
[Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Zephaniah Swift’s System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut, the first original American legal treatise, was highly regarded throughout the United States. Published on a subscription basis, its subscribers included George Washington, John Adams, Aaron Burr, James Kent, James Madison and other notables. Structured in the manner of Blackstone’s Commentaries, it presented an overview of the common law of Connecticut, and the common law generally, based on local court decisions and legislation. Swift’s Digest, a more ambitious work, is a complete recasting of the Commentaries. Though it referred to Connecticut law, the Digest addressed American law generally and was intended for a national audience. Both works were deeply influential and are still cited today.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) was based on a course of undergraduate lectures that Blackstone delivered at Oxford University. Intended for future members of England’s ruling class, it was the first truly comprehensive synopsis of the common law and its underlying principles. Attractively written, it was soon adopted by aspiring lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Blackstone’s Commentaries was especially popular in America. Members of the legal elite cited its origins to promote the establishment of law schools. Students used it for self-guided study or background reading. Instructors used it as a syllabus. In a letter to a prospective Yale law student dated Dec. 9, 1831, for example, Daggett says that “Blackstones Com. are the outlines & I endeavor to fill up certain of his topics such as mortgages, evidence, pleadings, contracts, equity &c. &c.”

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1 (Portland [Maine]: Thomas B. Wait, & Co., 1807). Armorial bookplate, “Doggett Daggett,” which is the family of Yale law professor David Daggett. William Blackstone Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Notebook of Charles Adams (1795-1821) from lectures of Tapping Reeve and James Gould at the Litchfield Law School, June-Aug. 1812. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The Connecticut law schools were devoted almost exclusively to private law, then the purview of elite lawyers, which is covered in the first three volumes. The first citation in the right margin, "1 B_ 426", is to Blackstone's Commentaries, volume 1, page 426.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century law books became widely available at affordable prices, thanks to the growth of the American publishing industry and improved communications. Instruction shifted gradually to the textbook-lecture method. In this system, still used today, students are assigned a schedule of readings, asked to summarize their readings in class, and answer questions about them. From its founding, this was the method used at the New Haven Law School. It remained the dominant form of instruction in American law schools until the late nineteenth century, when it was gradually supplanted by the case method, which was introduced by Harvard Law School in the 1870s.

William Cruise, A Digest of the Laws of England Respecting Real Property (4th American ed.; New York: Collins and Hannay, 1834), vol. 2. Ownership signature of Samuel J. Hitchcock. Founders Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The library that Hitchcock assembled was used by students in the New Haven (later Yale) Law School. The titles owned in multiple copies, such as Blackstone’s Commentaries and Cruise’s Digest of Real Property, were those issued to students. The remnants of this library make up the Founders Collection. This volume of Cruise’s Digest, from the Founders Collection, indicates the dates of recitations under Hitchcock’s supervision.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Reeve, Gilbert, Gould, and Swift taught their students through lectures. This was the most common pedagogical system of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The lectures presented a synopsis and interpretation of a given topic, along with case summaries and references to authorities. Students would record the lectures as they were read, then edit and preserve them in notebooks.

Journal or chronicle of Sylvester Gilbert (1755-1846) of Hebron. Photostat. [Image cropped.] Reproduced courtesy of the Connecticut State Library.

The law schools at Litchfield, Hebron, and Windham used the lecture method throughout their existence. In this memoir Gilbert notes that he read a set of lectures based on two years of intensive research and study. Like Reeve, Gould, and Swift, Gilbert believed that he could transmit a complete summary of the law to his students.

James Gould, "Law School at Litchfield," United States Law Journal and Civilian’s Magazine, vol. 1, no. 3 (Jan. 1823). [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Gould emphasized the pedagogical value of taking lecture notes and organizing them in a notebook. It was also a practice that gave each student a “manual, or commonplace book, (including a repository of references,) to aid him in his professional practice.” Increasingly obsolete over the course of the nineteenth century, Gould’s method reflected an era when law books were scarce and expensive.

Litchfield Law School, Moothall Society. Continuation of reports of cases argued and determined in Moothall Society from August 5th 1797 to July 12 1798. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.

In Litchfield and the other schools, students participated in moot courts and learned how to draft legal instruments. Hitchcock and Daggett also required occasional essays and presentations on legal topics.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Tapping Reeve (1744-1823)

• B.A., Princeton, 1763, M.A., 1766.
• Read law in Hartford under Judge Jesse Root, later chief justice of Connecticut.
• Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, 1798-1815, chief judge, 1815-1816.
• Author of The Law of Baron and Femme (1816) and A Treatise on the Law of Descents in the Several United States of America (1825).

Engraving by Peter Maverick, 1820, based on a portrait by George Catlin. Reproduced courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.

James Gould (1770-1838)

• B.A., Yale, 1791, LL. D, 1819.
• Received his legal education at Litchfield Law School.
• Judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, 1816-1818.
• Author of Principles of Pleading in Civil Actions (1832).

Oil on canvas, by Samuel L. Waldo. Reproduced courtesy of the Yale Law School.

Zephaniah Swift (1759-1823)

• B.A., Yale 1778, M.A. 1781, LL.D., 1815.
• Appears to have been self-educated as a lawyer.
• Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, 1801-1806, chief justice 1806-1819; Connecticut State Assemblyman, 1787-1793, 1820-1822; representative, U.S. Congress, 1793-1797.
• Author of System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut (1795-1796) and Digest of the Laws of the State of Connecticut (1822-1823); compiler of Laws of the United States of America (1797), the first official digest of U.S. statutes.

Oil on canvas, by James Weiland, based on an engraving. Reproduced courtesy of the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch.

Sylvester Gilbert (1755-1846)

• B.A., Dartmouth, 1775.
• Read law in Hartford under Judge Jesse Root, later chief justice of Connecticut.
• State attorney for Tolland County, 1786–1807; chief judge of the Tolland county court and judge of the probate court 1807–1818, 1820-1825; Connecticut State Assemblyman 1780–1812, 1815-1816; representative, U.S. Congress, 1818-1819.

From “Journal or chronicle of Sylvester Gilbert.” Reproduced courtesy of the Connecticut State Library.

Seth P. Staples (1776-1861)

• B.A., Yale, 1797, M.A., 1801.
• Read law in New Haven under David Daggett.
• Practiced in New Haven, later New York City; Connecticut State Assemblyman (representing New Haven), 1814-1816.

Oil on canvas, by Jared Bradley Flagg. Reproduced courtesy of the Yale Law School.

Samuel J. Hitchcock (1786-1845)

• B.A., Yale, 1809, M.A. 1812, LL.D., 1842.
• Attended Litchfield, studied in New Haven with Staples.
• Judge of the New Haven County Court, 1838-1842; chief judge of the New Haven City Court, 1842-1844; mayor of New Haven, 1839-1841.

Oil on canvas, by Jared Bradley Flagg. Reproduced courtesy of the Yale Law School.

David Daggett (1764-1851)

• B.A., Yale, 1781, LL.D., 1826.
• Read law under Charles Chauncey, a distinguished New Haven lawyer.
• Connecticut State Assemblyman, 1791-1804, 1809-1813; U.S. Senator, 1813-1819; associate justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, 1826-1832, chief justice, 1832-1834; mayor of New Haven, 1828-1829.

Oil on canvas, by Ulysses Dow Tenney, after a portrait by Nathaniel Jocelyn. Reproduced courtesy of the Yale Law School.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

“Advertisement.” In Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School, from 1793 to 1827 inclusive (Litchfield, Conn.: S. S. Smith, 1828). [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

For the most part, Connecticut law schools attracted students through the reputation of their instructors and the recommendations of former students. As indicated here, they also relied on circulars and advertisements. Several were published in prominent regional and national periodicals. Litchfield’s course was completed in fourteen months, but students were welcome to attend for briefer periods. The other three schools adopted Litchfield’s schedule (and charged similar fees).

John C. Calhoun, Letter of introduction to Tapping Reeve, 1810 Feb. 10. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.

The reputation of the Connecticut schools attracted students from nearby states and, over time, other regions of the country. John C. Calhoun, a future U.S. Senator, cabinet secretary, and Vice President trained at Litchfield, is a distinguished example. In this letter he introduces William Martin, a fellow South Carolinian who will be attending Litchfield. Martin did not choose Litchfield due to a lack of options in the South; by 1810 there were good law schools in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Certificate of Charles Adams’s attendance at Litchfield Law School lectures in the summer of 1812, signed by Tapping Reeve, 1812 Aug. 2. [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Certificate of Elijah P. Grant’s studies at Yale Law School from August 1831 to April 1832, signed by David Daggett and Samuel J. Hitchcock, 1832 Dec. 22. [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

In most cases, bar associations would not admit a candidate to his examination unless he submitted a testimonial letter that confirmed his satisfactory completion of an apprenticeship. Applicants trained at law schools were not excluded from this requirement.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Until the end of the nineteenth century most students prepared for the bar through an apprenticeship or self-study. These methods were often criticized by elite lawyers, who believed legal education would be more rigorous and thorough if it was taught in a classroom. By the late-eighteenth century a few colleges offered law lectures, beginning in 1779 with the College of William and Mary, but these lectures were designed not to train lawyers, but rather to educate future political leaders and businessmen.

Vocational legal education in America began with Tapping Reeve’s establishment of the Litchfield Law School in 1784. The success of Reeve’s program, and its perceived value, inspired the establishment of three other schools in Connecticut: Seth Staples’s in New Haven, Zephaniah Swift’s in Windham, and Sylvester Gilbert’s in Hebron.

Into the second decade of the nineteenth century Connecticut had more law schools than any other state in the union. Their proprietors had similar backgrounds. Born into comfortable circumstances, they were mostly graduates of Yale College, who became some of Connecticut’s leading attorneys. Their ability at the bar brought them wealth, fame, and high social status. They tended to be politically and socially conservative. Civic-minded and active in politics, they were involved in public service as legislators, judges, and local officials.

(1) Litchfield Law School. Years of operation: 1782-1833. Proprietor: Tapping Reeve, 1782-1820, James Gould, 1820-1833. Instructor: James Gould, 1798-1820. Number of students: 1,000+. (2) New Haven Law School. Years of operation: c.1800-1826. Proprietor: Seth Staples, c.1800-1824, Samuel Hitchcock, 1824-1826. Instructor: Samuel Hitchcock, 1820-1824, David Daggett, 1824-1826. Number of students: 67+ (lists of students prior to 1819 are unknown). (3) Gilbert’s Law School, Hebron. Years of operation: 1810-1818. Proprietor: Sylvester Gilbert. Number of students: 56. (4) Swift’s Law School, Windham. Years of operation: 1805-1823. Proprietor: Zephaniah Swift. Number of students: 12+ (records incomplete).

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

Map: Amos Doolittle & Mathew Carey, “Connecticut From the Best Authorities,” in The general atlas for Carey's edition of Guthrie's Geography improved (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1795). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A new Yale Law Library exhibit celebrates Connecticut's role as the birthplace of vocational legal education in the United States.

The exhibit, "From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," is on display through May 2013 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It was curated by Michael von der Linn, Manager of the Antiquarian Book Department at The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., with help from Michael Widener, Rare Book Librarian in the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Although Virginia's College of William & Mary began offering law lectures in 1779, the Litchfield Law School in northwest Connecticut was the first school to provide a focused curriculum of legal training, beginning in 1782. The school's success inspired the establishment of a law school in New Haven in about 1800, which eventually evolved into today's Yale Law School. Two other law schools operated for several years in Hebron and Windham. In the early 19th century Connecticut had more law schools than any other state in the union.

On display are student notebooks, textbooks, letters and other documents of the schools and their instructors. Included are items on loan from the Litchfield Historical Society and from Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library.

The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily, February 5-May 31, 2013 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

At right: Lectures on law delivered in Litchfield (Connt.) by the Hon. Tapping Reeve and James Gould, esqr. in 1809 & 1810 / transcribed by Josias H. Coggeshall. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

We thank the following people for their help in organizing and mounting this exhibit:

• Shana Jackson
  Lillian Goldman Law Library
  
  
• Liliane McClenning
  Lillian Goldman Law Library
  
  
• Emma Molina Widener
  Adjunct Lecturer, Southern Connecticut State University

WORKS ABOUT JOSEPH HÉMARD

Hémard, Joseph. Joseph Hémard: A Short Autobiography. Paris: H. Babou & J. Kahane; New York: Brentano's, 1929. "With a critical study by Marcel Valotaire, and a portrait of Hémard by Joseph Hémard." "Bibliography of books illustrated by Joseph Hémard": p. 41-[43].

"Joseph Hémard" (Lambiek Comiclopedia).

"Joseph Hémard" (Wikipedia).

Joseph Hémard. This website, in French, features a detailed timeline of  Hémard's life, photos of Hémard, a bibliography of 125 books illustrated by  Hémard, and examples of Hémard's paintings.

Katz, Farley P. "The Art of Taxation: Joseph Hémard's Illustrated Tax Code", Tax Lawyer 60:1 (Fall 2006), 163-172. Also available online.

Teissier-Ensminger, Anne. La fortune esthétique du Code civil des Français. Paris: Éditions La Mémoire du Droit, 2004.

Teissier-Ensminger, Anne. "La loi au figuré: trois illustrateurs du Code Pénal français." In La Justice en images (Frédéric Chauvaud & Solange Vernois, eds. Paris: CREDHESS, 2004), 277-291.

POCHOIR

Vibrant Visions: Pochoir Prints in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library

The Art of the Pochoir Book (University of Cincinnati, Archives and Rare Books Library)

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

"I like work. I like idleness. I like all that I know (very little). I like on trust all that I know not (a very great deal). I like reading, good wine, talking to my friends (my wife says that I talk too much; she may be right). I like town, I like the country, the sea, and the mountains. I like travelling, sea voyages, boating, the theatre, walking, dancing, motoring, swimming, music, animals, pictures, flowers, and the sound of the horn. 'Then you like everything?' Yes, Madam, everything. That is why I am never bored. My conduct is seemly, my digestion still good. I pay landlord and taxes – I have no alternative! – and I never forget to vote."

-- Joseph Hémard, Joseph Hémard, a Short Autobiography (Paris, 1929).

Joseph Hémard: A Short Autobiography. 1929. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Hémard's self-portrait.

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Two years after illustrating the French family code, Hémard figured, why not illustrate a pharmacy manual? In 1927, his publisher, René Kieffer, published Formulaire Magistral, in identical format to the Code Civil, consisting of an illustrated technical manual of medicinal formulas. These included medicines for curing tapeworms, venereal disease, and other wretched maladies, which gave Hémard incomparable material for crude and disgusting, but, above all, hilarious illustrations.

Formulaire Magistral. 1927. Pochoir. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Hémard's interest in medicine led him to illustrate (and even write) other medical works, including a promotional pamphlet concerning the prostate.

Joseph Hémard, Physiologie de la Prostate. 1937. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Scènes de la Vie Médical. 1939. Pochoir? Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Hémard's apparent willingness to accept any paying commission produced illustrations for a great variety of miscellaneous works including calendars, utility promotions, menus, letterheads, and bookplates. Shown here is Les Reves la Destinée, a "dream book," in which the reader can find the meaning of his dreams (possibly authored by Hémard).

Les Reves la Destinée [dream book]. Circa 1931. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Finally, we have Hémard's own bookplate, depicting himself as a naked caveman pondering an open book he has chanced upon.

Bookplate of Joseph Hémard. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Hémard must have loved children as he made numerous drawings of them and also illustrated, and even wrote, books specifically intended for children. These include ABCs, coloring books, and fairy tales.

In Trente Tableaux d'Historie de France (1912), an early work of Hémard's, he illustrated thirty events in France's history, from the legend of the founding of Marseilles in 600 B.C. to the Paris Commune of 1871. The image below depicts King Louis IX rendering justice beneath the oak of Vincennes, apparently in the case of a badminton game gone terribly wrong.

Joseph Hémard, Trente Tableaux d’Historie de France. 1912. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

André Lichtenberger, Le Petit Chaperon Vert [Little Green Riding Hood]. 1922. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

For Pergaud's delightful novel of warring armies of young boys entirely unaffected by civilization, La Guerre des Boutons [War of the Buttons], Hémard made the definitive illustrations in vibrant pochoir.

Louis Pergaud, La Guerre des Boutons. 1927. Pochoir. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Curnonsky [Maurice Edmond Sailland], Deux Nocturnes. 1927. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Charles Perrault, Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye [Mother Goose]. 1930. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Hémard illustrated a great number of classics of French literature, including works such as Le Malade Imaginaire (1921), Gargantua et Pantagruel (1922), Jacques Le Fataliste (1922), Cyrano de Bergerac (1927) and Aucassin et Nicolette (1936), as well as more modern titles. Many of his illustrations are set in France's past, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and filled with scenes of courtiers, knights, soldiers, peasants, drunks, animals, and women in various stages of undress. The selection here is representative.

Honoré de Balzac, D'ung Paouvre qui avoit nom le Vieulx-par-Chemins. 1914. Pochoir. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

François Villon, Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere. 1921. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Anatole France, La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. 1923. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Théophile Gautier, Le Capitaine Fracasse. 1926. Pochoir. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Georges Courteline, Boubouroche Madelon Margot. 1927. Pochoir. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In 1925 someone, probably Hémard or his publisher, René Kieffer, came up with the brilliant idea of publishing an illustrated version of the part of the Code Civil of France containing the family law statutes that govern marriage, divorce, children, adoption, and other aspects of personal life. Hémard took the opportunity to produce witty and lively vignettes of individuals caught up in various family dilemmas. The book was published as a limited edition on special paper, with the illustrations done in pochoir.

Code civil: Livre premier, Des personnes. 1925. Pochoir. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Gift of Farley P. Katz.

In about 1940 (the book is undated), Hémard moved on to the French Penal Code. Those statutes gave him even more material to work with, and the illustrations became increasingly wild and filled with black humor.

Code Penal. Circa 1940. Pochoir. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Illustration for Article 319 (involuntary manslaughter).

Among Hémard's more pedestrian commissions were annual promotional pamphlets for the French National Lottery (1937-1942). Shown here is the 1938 Règlement de la Loterie National, setting forth the official rules.

Règlement de la Loterie National. 1938. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Gift of Farley P. Katz.

In 1944, while Paris was still occupied by the Germans, Hémard produced his greatest legal achievement, the Code Général des Impôts Directs et Taxes Assimilées (the French Tax Code), fully illustrated, colored in pochoir and published as a lavish limited edition for collectors. The illustrations are larger and more numerous than in the earlier works, the puns more outrageous and the humor more broad. His Code Général des Impôts is one of the most accomplished works of legal humor ever published.

Code Général des Impôts Directs et Taxes Assimilées. 1944. Pochoir. No. 679 of 800 numbered copies. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Gift of Farley P. Katz. Illustration for Art. 73, error in the application of tax. The translation of the sign: "The excuse the tax collector hears every day."


"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Joseph Hémard's life, and art, was repeatedly affected by war. He was captured shortly after World War I began and spent the remainder of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. During his captivity, he drew his surroundings, fellow prisoners, and guards and published those with his reminiscences in 1919 as Chez les Fritz [Fritz's House].

Joseph Hémard, Chez les Fritz. 1919. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

On the cover of another book about war, published on the eve of World War II, Hémard painted a lonely private on guard.

Amédée Pavard, Monsieur Pavard s’en va-t-en Guerre. 1939. Vellum binding with color drawing by Hémard. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

Hémard remained in Paris during the occupation, after which he co-authored and illustrated a pamphlet of humorous stories from the war years, Gavroche Sous la Botte [Citizen Under the Boot]. Shown is an illustration for a story in which Hitler attempts to enter Heaven, but is told that he must first paint "Juif" (Jew) on each star in the universe.

M. Fougerole & Joseph Hémard, Gavroche Sous la Botte. 1945. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Hémard produced several anti-Hitler joke postcards. In the one shown here, the matron Germania scolds Hitler for allowing the Allies to kick his rear end.

Joseph Hémard, Anti-Hitler post cards. After August 25, 1944. Collection of Farley P. Katz.

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Joseph Hémard was born in 1880, in a small town near Paris. He was a prolific artist, designing costumes, theatre sets, patterns for printed textiles, book bindings, posters, menus, letterheads, and even a façade for a bar in the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Art.

Hémard's lasting fame, however, lies in his book illustrations – always with a distinctly French character, usually comic, and often mildly erotic. He was probably the most prolific book illustrator in the first half of the twentieth century in France, if not the entire world. Many of his illustrations were executed in pochoir, a hand stenciling process producing intense, gorgeous colors still vibrant after three-quarters of a century.

A great number of books feature Hémard's comic illustrations, including the classics of French literature and many otherwise humorless works of nonfiction such as the French Tax Code (pictured at right), a pharmacy manual, and promotional booklets for the French National Lottery. Hémard was himself a prolific author, writing many of the books he illustrated including a children's history of France and textbooks of grammar, French history and arithmetic. Hémard also wrote novels and songs, and, in his final years, created crossword puzzles.

It is apparent from his drawings that Hémard loved all that he encountered in life – the young and the old, the rich and the vagrant, children and dogs, but above all, women.

Hémard died in Paris in 1961. After World War II, his popularity at home waned. He remains virtually unknown in the United States. In recent years, however, interest in Hémard has increased in France where his art has been the subject of exhibitions and scholarship.

The title of this exhibition is taken from a brief autobiographical essay in which Hémard first discusses a number of supposed ancestors, devotes two paragraphs to his childhood, and then states: “And then I drew for books.”

Farley P. Katz
San Antonio 2012

"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard," curated by Farley P. Katz and Mike Widener, is on display Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Joseph Hémard was one of the most prolific book illustrators of the 20th century, and certainly one of the funniest, yet he remains virtually unknown outside of his native France. Farley P. Katz, a San Antonio tax lawyer and a leading collector of Hémard’s works, is working to change this. Katz will speak on “The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard” on October 5 at the Yale Law School.

The talk is in conjunction with an exhibition at Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library, curated by Katz and Mike Widener, the library’s Rare Book Librarian. The exhibition features items from Katz’s collection and books that he donated to the Law Library.

What sets  Hémard apart from other illustrators are the books that one would not normally associate with illustrations. Chief among these are French law codes. Alongside the dry legalese of French tax law are Hémard’s hilarious visual puns and lampoons of tax collectors and government officials.

Katz will deliver his illustrated talk on Hémard at 1:00 p.m. on October 5, in Room 128 of the Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT). The talk is free and open to the public.

The exhibit, “‘And then I drew for books’: The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard,” is on display until December 15 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2 in the Yale Law School). It displays two dozen of Hémard’s works. An online version of the exhibit will appear in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, at (203) 432-4494 or mike.widener[at]yale.edu.

 A Joseph Hémard illustration from Code général des impôts directs et taxes assimilées (Paris: Editions Littéraires et Artistiques; Librairie "Le Triptyque", 1944), page 218.

It would take a genius to illustrate one of the most boring books imaginable, a code of tax laws, and create a comic tour-de-force. That genius was Joseph Hémard (1880-1961), who in his lifetime was probably France's most prolific book illustrator. His illustrations are the focus of the latest exhibit in the Yale Law Library, "'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard."

The exhibit, on display until December 15, is curated by Farley P. Katz and Michael Widener. Katz, a tax attorney from San Antonio, has built one of the world's finest collections of Hémard's works. Widener is the Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Hémard's illustrations have a distinctly French character, usually comic, and often mildly erotic. Many of his illustrations were executed in pochoir, a hand stenciling process producing intense, gorgeous colors still vibrant after three-quarters of a century.

The exhibit showcases eight of the 183 illustrations in Hémard's Tax Code, donated to the Yale Law Library by Katz, along with two of the other three law books on display from the library's Rare Book Collection.

The other 19 titles on view are all from Katz's personal collection. They include children's books and some of the many classics of French literature that Hémard illustrated, such as works by Balzac and Anatole France. Items on war include Hémard's own pictorial account of his time as a German prisoner in World War I, and a set of anti-Hitler postcards. Hémard even illustrated a pharmacy manual and a pamphlet on the prostate.

The exhibition's title comes from Hémard's tongue-in-cheek autobiography. Following a long, rambling description of supposed ancestors, he devotes two paragraphs to his early life, and finishes with: "And then I drew for books."

The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily, September 15 - December 15, 2012 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

On October 5, Katz will give an exhibit talk at 1:00 p.m. in Room 128 of the Yale Law School. The talk is also open to the public.

-- MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The poster illustration is from the cover of Code penal: commentaires imagés de Joseph Hémard (Paris: Editions Littéraires de France, ca. 1940), Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library is proud to be a partner in an exhibition for an upcoming conference in the Italian Alps. The conference, "'Naturally separated': History and Autonomy of the Ancient Alpine Communities," will take place September 29, 2012, in the Palazzo della Cultura in Breno, Italy. Visit the conference website for the schedule of speakers and events.

The exhibition, "Antiche mappe e statuti delle Alpi," includes images from our collection of Italian statutes. Among them is the image shown here, Statuta et privilegia Valliis Antigorij (Geneva, 1685), the statutes of the Valle Antigorio. Also featured are maps from the collections of the other exhibition partner, the Moravian Library (Brno, Czech Republic). The exhibition was coordinated by Luca Giarelli.

The speakers at the day-long conference will discuss the legal, social, and political history of Italian Alpine communities and how they mantained their autonomy since the Middle Ages. The conference is sponsored by LontánoVerde and Incontri per lo Studio delle Tradizioni Alpine. The conference is open to the public, and admission is free.

Our best wishes for a successful conference. I wish I could be there!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The Lillian Goldman Law Library is one of the few U.S. libraries that owns a set of the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii). We now know that our set is an Imperial set, one that came from a palace of the Tsars.

Tatjana Lorkovic, Curator of Slavic and East European Collections, Yale University Library, provides a detailed account of the set's acquisition in her recent article, "The Past as Prologue: Building Yale University Library’s Slavic and East European Collection from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century until Today; Part One: 1896-1956," SOLANUS: International Journal for the Study of the Printed and Written Word in Russia and East-Central Europe, New Series, vol. 22 (2011), pp. 43-62. In summary, it came about as follows.

In 1927 Professor George Vernadsky, a Russian emigre, was hired by Yale to teach Russian history, and also to help the library develop its Russian holdings. Vernadsky reported that the most significant gap in Yale's collection was a set of the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii), a 232-volume set. Vernadsky found a set for sale and warned that it could be Yale's last chance to acquire a complete set. The hefty price tag was initially an obstacle, but Law Librarian Frederick C. Hicks (1875-1956) stepped forward and committed the Law Library to the purchase. The set was purchased from a New York dealer, Simeon J. Bolan, who specialized in Russian books.

The 1920s-30s were the Golden Age for accessioning choice items of Russian origin as the Soviet State sold off unwanted early books in order to earn desperately needed foreign currency and finance ambitious economic plans.

The set is bound in a stunning bright green morocco with the Imperial arms in gold stamped on the front cover as a super libros (see the image below). The Imperial arms are sufficient to indicate Imperial provenance, but precisely to whom did the set belong? The answer lies in at the base of the spine, where the Russian text identifies the origin of the set as the Elagin Palace (see the image at right).

The Elagin Palace, located on the Elagin Island in St. Petersburg, became the summer home of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (1759-1828), mother of Emperor Alexander I (1777-1825). The original building was commissioned by I. P. Elagin, a St. Petersburg merchant, who is believed to have retained Giacomo Quarenghi (1744-1817), the most noted architect of his day in Russia and a pre-eminent practitioner of the Palladian style, to design the edifice. Emperor Alexander purchased the Palace to ease the burdens of travel for his mother, who found the trip to the outlying palaces at Tsarskoe selo to be too strenuous. Carlo di Giovanni Rossi (1775-1849) was retained to redesign and enlarge the estate. After the death of Maria Fedorovna, Elagin Palace declined into a summer residence for the Imperial family and gradually a place of diversion for Russian prime ministers, among them S. Witte (1849-1915) and P. A. Stolypin (1862-1911). The buildings sustained heavy damage during the Second World War. After restoration the palace became and remains a museum devoted to porcelain, glass, and some folk arts. The island is a popular park these days and has been used in Soviet films as a backdrop.

Although Empress Maria Fedorovna had a bookplate (represented in the Yale bookplate collection), the Collected Laws of the Russian Empire was published shortly after her death and therefore represented a “Palace set” rather than a personal copy.

• W. E. Butler, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University
  Mike Widener, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," now on display in the Yale Law Library, is perhaps the first rare book exhibit in the U.S. to focus on the history of Russian law. The exhibit's lead curator, Professor William E. Butler of Penn State, will give a talk on the exhibit on May 9, in Room 121 of the Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven).

Butler is the pre-eminent U.S. authority on the law of the former Soviet Union. He is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of more than 120 books on Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian, and post-Soviet legal systems. He is a member of the Grolier Club, the leading U.S. society for book collectors, and the Organization of Russian Bibliophiles. He is also a leading bookplate collector who has authored several reference works on bookplates, and serves as Executive Secretary of the International Federation of Ex-Libris Societies.

The exhibit features principal landmarks in Russia's pre-1917 legal literature. Among these are the first printed collection of Russian laws, the 1649 "Sobornoe ulozhenie", and three versions of the "Nakaz", the law code that earned Empress Catherine the Great her reputation.

The exhibit is on display through May 25, 2012 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily.

Image: Portrait of Empress Catherine the Great, the frontispiece from Instruction donnée par Catherine II., impératrice et législatrice de toutes les Russies: a la commission établie par cette souveraine, pour travailler à la rédaction d'un nouveau code de loix (Lausanne: François Grasset & Comp., 1769). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The exhibit curators wish to thank the following individuals for their help in organizing this exhibit:

Karen S. Beck
Manager, Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

Molly Dotson
Bookplate Project Archivist, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University

Paula Zyats
Assistant Chief Conservator, Yale University Libraries

Marjorie F. B. Lemmon
Risk Manager, Yale University

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Basia Olszowa
Lillian Goldman Law Library

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Szeftel, Marc. The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy. Brussels: Librairie Encyclopédique, 1976. Yale University Library

The Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 weakened the monarchy sufficiently for demands to introduce a "constitution" limiting the powers of the Emperor and creating a parliament called the State Duma to be realized. Although the word "constitution" was never used in the document itself, the expression "Basic Law" has come to mean the equivalent of a constitution in Russian political theory and practice.

Even though the canons of Marx, Engels, and Lenin did not contemplate the enactment of a post-revolutionary constitution, the Bolshevik Party together with the other Russian political parties and movements in existence after the abdication of the Tsar in February 1917 supported the preparation of a Constitution for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, ultimately introduced in 1918. In the post-Soviet era those who prepared the present 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation looked back to the Basic Law of 1906 for inspiration and experience.

Marc Szeftel's book contains the only English-language translation of the 1906 Russian Basic Law.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Wortman, Richard S. The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Lillian Goldman Law Library

The period 1864 to 1917 is widely known as "The Golden Age" of Russian law and the Russian legal profession. The reforms of the Russian judiciary and establishment of the "Advokatura" (the professional society of legal professionals who represented litigants) were perceived to be the principal reasons for this "Golden Age".

Wortman's study (recently translated into Russian) fundamentally altered our perception of these legal reforms. Doubting that a "Golden Age" could appear spontaneously and suddenly, he persuasively traced the reforms back to the professionalization of the Russian civil service under Alexander I, the foundation of law faculties in other urban centers besides Moscow (St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kazan, and others), the formation of a cadre of Russian jurists gradually appointed to administrative, judicial, and academic posts, the inclination of these jurists to regard law as an independent source of authority, the codification of Russian legislation, the publication of treatises and textbooks based on positive Russian law (rather than natural law), and the gradual emergence of an authentic Russian jurisprudence.

For Wortman the judicial reforms of 1864 were not the inexplicable commencement of a Golden Age, but the ultimate culmination of institutional modernization and the happy confluence of personalities. In due course these institutions, and the sense of legal consciousness which they encouraged, proved to be incompatible with the Russian brand of autocratic absolutism and contributed to the appearance of a constitutional monarchy in 1906.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 – May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Tomsinov, V. A. Kvestianskaia reforma 1861 goda v Rossii [Peasant Reform of 1861 in Russia]. Moscow: Zertsalo, 2012. Private Collection

Sometimes reforms are born in the bowels of revolution, but like as not also in the measured reflections of a leadership committed to change. The emancipation of Russia’s serfs is properly dated to 19 February 1861, when Alexander II issued the necessary documents to fundamentally reshape the legal relationship between landowner and serf that had subsisted for centuries. In the United States analogous legal relationships had led to a devastating Civil War.

The emancipation of Russian serfs opened a series of “Great State Transformations” that during the 1860-70s brought far-reaching changes to the socio-economic and political life of Russia. Out of a population of 67 million persons (1858-59 census), some 23 million were serfs. It was this segment of the population that was liberated and granted civil rights under Russian law. The reforms immediately demonstrated inadequacies in the judicial system, still appointed on the basis of the old system of estates and incapable of adapting to new circumstances without major changes in court organization and procedure. Other reforms would ensue in higher education, land assemblies, urban affairs, and the military.

Preparations for the emancipation of the serfs commenced as early as November 1857, and by January 1858 a Chief Committee of Peasant Affairs had been established together with numerous provincial committees, charged with reporting to the Government on peasant reform. Once the legislation had been prepared, the drafts were submitted to the State Council, which met on fourteen occasions to discuss them. Finally, on 19 February 1861 the Emperor signed and issued eighteen manifestos, edicts, statutes and rules to introduce and give effect to the emancipation.

The book shown here contains the principal preparatory enactments adopted from 1857 to 1860 and all of the enactments of 19 February 1861. The editor relates the volume to the contemporary issues confronting Russia: “Russia stands at present, as it did 150 years ago, on the edge of an era of Great Reforms” (p. xiv). Twenty years after emancipating the serfs, Emperor Alexander II remarked to his Minister of Finances, A.A. Abaze, on 20 February 1881: “Of all that I have been able to do, I consider the peasant reform the most important achievement of my entire reign”.

See: Alan P. Pollard (ed. & transl.), The Laws of February 18-19, 1861 on the Emancipation of the Russian Peasants (2008).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 – May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Speranskii, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1772-1839). Rukovodstvo k poznaniiu zakonov [Manual for Knowledge of Laws]. St. Petersburg, 1845. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library

M.M. Speranskii is the individual most closely associated with Russian achievements in the systematization of laws. He was deeply involved during the early nineteenth century in promoting Benthamite and Napoleonic models for Russia. Educated in theology rather than law, Speranskii acquired his formidable command of legal history and theory, Roman law, and skills in legal analysis while serving in various civil service positions. He assisted in drafting the reforms of Alexander I and from 1807 rose rapidly in rank and responsibility. During 1808-09 he helped prepare draft legislation that, if enacted, would have transformed Russia into a constitutional monarchy. Exiled from 1812 to 1816, upon his return he held a number of administrative posts. Emperor Nicholas I, however, directed him to undertake the systematization of Russian legislation, which resulted in the publication of the PSZ and Digest of Laws.

Speranskii’s archive in St. Petersburg contains more than 1,000 notes and articles devoted to legal matters, mostly unpublished. He left three major works on law, including the one shown here, which addresses legal history and codification.

See: Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia 1772-1839 (2d rev. ed.; 1969); “Speranskii, Mikhail Mikhailovich”, in W.E. Butler & V.A. Tomsinov, Russian Legal Biography (2007).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii [Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire]. 1st series. 48 vols. St. Petersburg, 1830. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library

Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii [Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire]. 16 vols. St. Petersburg, 1904-1905. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library

Emperor Alexander I laid the ground work for major law reforms. He introduced ministerial reforms to supplant the collegial model of Peter the Great, accompanied by an expansion of the educational system, founding of new universities, and introduction of civil service examinations. Foreign law professors were gradually replaced by Russian-trained candidates. With the abandonment of codification models based on foreign schemes, codification work fell into desuetude. When revived in the spirit of von Savigny, progress was slow.

Nicholas I (1796-1855) acceded to the throne in 1825 and immediately accelerated the pace and altered the direction of systematization. Drawing upon the presence and talents of a small group of lawyers at St. Petersburg University, M.A. Balugianskii (1769-1847), of Hungarian origin, and M.M. Speranskii (1772-1839) brought to completion the most ambitious and comprehensive systematization of legislation attempted in the world.

First to appear was the volume exhibited here, the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire (known by its Russian acronym: PSZ), a chronological collection of Russian legislation (more than 30,000 enactments) commencing with the 1649 Sobornoe Ulozhenie to 1825. The second series of the PSZ was published annually from 1826 to 1881, and the third series from 1881 to 1916. A four-volume addendum to the PSZ includes illustrations such as the guide to weights and measures shown here.

The PSZ formed the foundation for the next stage of systematization, the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832). Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction: Including Correspondence with The Russian Emperor, and Divers Constituted Authorities in the American United States. London: Printed by J. M'Creery, 1817. Yale University Library

Bentham had genuine expectations of being invited to Russia to help codify the laws of the Russian Empire. The published translation of his work on codification had enjoyed the support of the Emperor himself, who was known to have read the work, and Bentham quietly lobbied his friends in London and in St. Petersburg to further this project.

Napoleon's invasion of Russia derailed the project. Bentham perhaps did not appreciate how deeply the Napoleonic wars had antagonized the Russian court towards anything French, including the example of the Napoleonic codes. Rightly or wrongly, Bentham was seen as being part of the French codification movement. Emperor Alexander I did not pursue Bentham's intimations that he would welcome a return to the project, whereupon Bentham, partly in annoyance, published his correspondence and the Reply of the Emperor, together with collateral correspondence conducted along the same lines with American politicians and statesmen -- for Bentham likewise entertained hopes of contributing to codification in the United States. Bentham's correspondents in the United States included Simon Snyder (1759-1819), the Governor of Pennsylvania, and James Madison (1751-1836), late President of the United States.

Rather than pursue codification of law based on abstract principles and logic, Russia turned to its own historical traditions in law. In this Russia was influenced by the thinking of, among others, Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779-1861), a leading proponent of the historical method and severe critic of the Code system imposed on Europe by Napoleon. Savigny's attack on codification was first published in 1814 and revised in 1828; for an English version, see Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, transl. A. Hayward (1831).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

 Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832). Izbrannyie sochinieniia Ieremii Bentama. Tom Pervyi. [Selected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Volume One. Introduction to the Bases of Morality and Legislation. Basic Principles of a Civil Code. Basic Principles of a Criminal Code], transl. A.N. Pypin & A.N. Nevedomskii. Preface by Iu. G. Zhukovskii. St. Petersburg, 1867. Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

Jeremy Bentham, the noted jurist and legal philosopher, spent nearly all of 1786 in Russia, visiting his younger brother Samuel (1757-1831), who was in Russian service for more than two decades. The two brothers were unusually close, Jeremy supporting Samuel financially, morally, and intellectually. Samuel made important contributions to Russian industry, shipping, naval victories, and commerce. The two brothers corresponded frequently.

While in residence at the estate of Prince G.A. Potemkin (1739-1791) at Krichev in modern Belarus, Jeremy Bentham composed and sent back to London for printing his celebrated Defence of Usury (1787) and commenced work on his ideas for a modern penal institution, eventually published as his Panopticon (an outline of which appeared in 1790). The Benthams were close to the Russian Ambassador in London, S.R. Vorontsov (1744-1832), and the family of Admiral N.S. Mordvinov (1754-1845).

M.M. Speranskii and Emperor Alexander I were attracted by Bentham's early writings in French on codification and invited Bentham's secretary, Etienne Dumont (1759-1829), to St. Petersburg to supervise a translation of Bentham's writings on codification into the Russian language (published in three volumes, 1805-1810, omitting only Bentham's strictures on press censorship). Every major law reform in Russia through the end of the Imperial Period was attended, in one fashion or another, by a translation and publication of one of Bentham's works.

The present volume contains Bentham's classic treatise on codification. First published in 1803, the edition shown here appeared soon after the celebrated Russian judicial reforms of 1864, in a fresh translation and with additional materials added from the Collected Works of Bentham edited by Sir John Bowring (1792-1872) and the French versions of Dumont. Only volume one appeared.

See: Ian Christie, The Benthams in Russia: 1780-1791 (1993).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Blackstone, Sir William (1723-1780). Istolkovaniia angliiskikh zahonov [Commentary on English Laws of Mr. Blackstone]. Moscow, 1780-82. 3 vols. Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

Catherine II became aware of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) through the French translation. It became her bedside book, replacing Montesquieu, and greatly influenced her ideas on law and administration. Only volume I of Blackstone was translated into Russian, at her behest by S.E. Desnitskii (c. 1740-1789), the Glasgow-educated first Russian professor of law, and A.M. Briantsev (1749-1821). While Catherine had a special need for the book, it was part of her larger commitment to translations expressed in the establishment of a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, which survived until 1783 and which she subsidized handsomely.

Among the 700 pages of notes which Catherine II took while reading Blackstone were drafts for a High Court of Justice. On her trip to the Crimea in 1787 Catherine II took her notes on Blackstone and her Nakaz with her to compare the two texts and work on further plans for constitutional reform. Her scheme for a High Court of Justice drawn from Blackstone seemed to combine legislative features of Parliament in England with judicial elements. Her contemplated High Court would have chambers consisting of appointed councilors and assessors elected by the local nobility, urban dwellers, and State peasants.

Blackstone wrote approvingly of Catherinian reforms in penal law:

"Was the vast territory of all the Russias worse regulated under the late Empress Elizabeth, than under her more sanguinary predecessors? Is it now under Catherine II less civilized, less social, less secure? And yet we are assured, that neither of these illustrious princesses have, throughout their whole administration, inflicted the penalty of death; and the latter has, upon full persuasion of its being useless, nay, even pernicious, given orders for abolishing it entirely throughout her extensive dominions." -- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4, p. 10.

See: I. de Madariaga, Catherine the Great: A Short History (1990).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Catherine II (1729-1796), Empress of Russia]. Armorial bookplate, engraved. Text: Catherine Alexievna II, | Imperatrice de toutes les Russies. Second half 18th century, after 1762. Irene D. Andrews Pace Memorial Collection, Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections, Yale University

Catherine II was a voracious reader and formed a substantial personal library. Two bookplates are attributed to her collections, neither of which has been actually found in a book. The present plate is the only copy known and came to Yale from Irene D. Pace, a well-known American bookplate collector.

See: News from the Yale Library 10 (1996), 2.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Catherine II (1729-1796), Empress of Russia]. Instruction donnée par Catherine II., impératrice et législatrice de toutes les Russies: a la commission établie par cette souveraine, pour travailler à la rédaction d'un nouveau code de loix, telle qu'elle e été imprimée en Russe & en Allemand, dans l'Imprimerie Impériale de Moscow. Lausanne: François Grasset & Comp., 1769. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library

This is the last of three French editions of the Nakaz, testimony to the wide interest in Catherine's law reform project in Western Europe. The translator was the Swiss historian Joseph Anton Felix von Balthasar. The year this edition appeared, the French crown placed the "libertine" Nakaz on its list of prohibited books.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Medal awarded to deputies of Catherine II's Legislative Commission. Private Collection

The Legislative Commission summoned to Moscow has been seen as a "major, highly personal political experiment" formed by election and intended to represent the "estates" of the Russian Empire (I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981), p. 139). Representation was accorded to state institutions, landowners, and social groups not otherwise included in the first two categories. Deputies were paid a salary, enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, and were awarded a badge of office that nobles were entitled to incorporate in their coats of arms.

Each member of Catherine the Great's Legislative Assembly was awarded a medal in commemoration of their participation, such as the one exhibited here.

Aware that much of her population was illiterate, including some deputies elected to the Legislative Commission, Catherine II composed her Nakaz in a style suitable for reading aloud, imparting to the text an "urgent rhythm" in imitation of Montesquieu's series of short staccato chapters in his Spirit of the Laws. The entire text was read aloud to the assembled deputies, who were said to have received the text with rapture. Many were moved to tears.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Catherine II (1729-1796), Empress of Russia]. Nakaz jeio impieratorskogo velichestva Ekateriny Vtoroi samodevzhitsy vserossijskaia olannyi Kommissii o Sochinenii proekta novogo ulozheniia | Instructio Sacrae Imperatoriae Maiestatis Aecaterinae Secundae Autocratorissae Omnium Rossiarum Coetvi Auspiciis Illius Convocato ad Conficiendam ideam Novi Legum Codicis | Ihrer Kayserlichen Majestät Instruction für die zu Verfestigung des Entwurfs zu einem neuen Gesetz-Buche verordnete Commission  | Instruction de sa Majesté Impériale Catherine II. pour la Commission Chargée de dresser le project d'un Nouveau Code de Loix. St. Petersburg, 1770. Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

The Nakaz has been described as "one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign in modern times" (I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981), p. 151).

The most magnificent and desirable of the more than 40 editions of the Nakaz, this four-language version is spread across two quarto pages, two columns to a page. There are four separate title pages, respectively in Russian, Latin, German, and French. The opening and closing pages include allegorical engravings designed by Jacob Shtelin (1709-1785) and engraved by a Swabian artist then resident in Moscow, Christopher Melhior Roth (d. 1798). The Latin translation was by Catherineís state secretary and current favorite, Grigorii Kozitskii (1724-1775). The translators of the French and German texts have never been identified.

Catherine II presented copies of the four-language version to contemporaries throughout Europe. The copy shown here was given to the Earl of Chesterfield, accompanied by a letter of presentation in her own hand.

The four-language version evidently enjoyed a large print run. In 1808 the Academy of Sciences remaindered 1,421 copies by weight of the paper; whether they were pulped is unknown. By 1861 this edition of the Nakaz was bringing a substantial auction price.

See: A bibliography of 43 editions of the Nakaz appears in W.E. Butler & V.A. Tomsinov (eds.), The Nakaz of Catherine the Great: Collected Texts (2010).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Catherine II (1729-1796), Empress of Russia]. The Grand Instructions to the Commissioners Appointed to Frame a New Code of Laws for the Russian Empire. London: T. Jeffreys, 1768. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library

The enduring contribution of Catherine II (1729-1796) to Russian law commenced in 1767, when Catherine herself composed a new law code, the Nakaz, mostly in the French language with extensive borrowings from leading Enlightenment thinkers, notably Beccaria, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Although the Nakaz was never enacted, its translations into the major European tongues and issuance in more than twenty editions made the Nakaz the single piece of Russian legislative material best known abroad. It secured for Catherine the encomium "the Great".

Two contemporary English translations are known of the Nakaz. Shown here is the version published at London in 1768 by Mikhail Tatishchev, of whom little is known except that he was attached to the Russian Embassy in London. The second is a manuscript held by the Library of Congress, acquired in 1942 from the Collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), one of the foremost bibliophiles of all time. The manuscript was originally owned and perhaps commissioned (or even translated) by Sir George Earl Macartney, Ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg. Macartney returned to England two months before Catherine actually convened her Great Commission, but the text of her draft was circulating in Europe by early Spring 1767. Jeremy Bentham owned a copy of this edition.

See: Both the Tatishchev and Macartney/Phillipps versions are reprinted in W E. Butler & V. A. Tomsinov (eds.), The Nakaz of Catherine the Great: Collected Texts (2010).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Strube de Piermont, Friedrich Heinrich (1704-1790). Lettres russiennes: suivies des notes de Catherine II. Pisa: Goliardica, 1978. Facsimile reprint; originally published 1760 in St. Petersburg. Yale University Library

Peter the Great set in motion the measures required to found the Academy of Sciences in Russia, which opened shortly after his death in 1725. Law was among the sciences to be pursued. The Academy was to be simultaneously a research and a teaching institution, an Academy and a University. In 1738 Friedrich Heinrich Strube de Piermont (1704-1790) was appointed to be the Professor of Jurisprudence and Politics. He published at St. Petersburg in 1740 a major study in the French language on the origins of natural law. A revised edition issued at Amsterdam in 1744 was reprinted several times with emendations.

In 1748 Strube was assigned by the Academy to "expound the natural law and the law of nations", for which he prepared a syllabus in Russian and Latin. Later that same year Strube petitioned the Academy to prepare ìa concise manual on Russian lawsî. He devoted the remainder of his life to the project, producing outlines and draft chapters, but never completing the work to the satisfaction of the Academy. He wrote in German, mostly copying from manuscript versions of early legislative compilations (relying on translators to tell him what they said). Although never published, the draft gave Strube his materials for a lecture treating the origins of Russian law that was published in Russian and Latin in 1756 and assisted a codification commission which used the draft in 1754.

Strube's "Russian Letters," shown here, were an extension of his studies of Russian law and history, especially his views on the origins of the Russian people. In this work he undertakes to "prove that the government of Russia is not a despotic government properly speaking" and makes mention of the "five" principal Russian law codes and the Commission formed in 1753 to prepare a new Code.

See: W.E. Butler, "F.G. Strube de Piermont and the Origins of Russian Legal History", in Butler, Russia and the Law of Nations in Historical Perspective (2009).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Zertsalo. Russia. ca. 1750-80. Russian Historical Museum, Moscow. Photograph by M. Kravtsova.

Peter the Great spent the majority of his years in power at war with his neighbors. His reforms were directed principally towards modernizing the structure of the Russian State, which had implications for Russian administrative law. He recognized the need for the continual systematization of legislation and appointed three commissions between 1700 and 1720 to attend to the matter. None progressed very far. Peter's reforms of the State apparatus and of military and naval law gave him claim to the title of law reformer. The Russian government was reorganized with close account being taken of practices in Sweden and Prussia. In 1722 Peter established the Procuracy, which has endured to this day as a component of the Russian legal system. His Military Statute (1716) and Naval Statute (1720) both drew upon European models, including German, French, Swedish, Dutch, and English; these two statutes remained in force with minor modifications for more than a century and extended to certain civilian matters.

Peter's enduring legacy to Russian law was a visual image of law and legal consciousness in the person of the Zertsalo, a trihedral object reproducing the text on each of its three sides of designated edicts issued between 1722 and 1724 on preserving civil rights, offenses in courts, and the importance of complying with State statutes. Atop the prism was placed a Russian crowned double-headed eagle, often removable.

The presence of the Zertsalo was required if a court was formally in session; in the presence of the Zertsalo, the court officials were considered to be performing their official duties. If the court moved on to unofficial matters or other events were held on court premises, the Zertsalo was to be taken from the room or the double-headed eagle was to be removed and carried out of the room. Penalties were established if these strictures were violated, the guilty official being subject to a fine and, after 1840, a reprimand. At least thirteen Zertsalos are known to survive today in Russian and Ukrainian museums -- all different, often dramatically so.

See: W.E. Butler, "On the Formation of a Russian Legal Consciousness: the Zertsalo", in Butler, Russia and the Law of Nations in Historical Perspective (2009).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Kormchaia Kniga [Book of the Pilot]. Moscow, 1650. Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

Ecclesiastical jurisdiction remained intact under the 1649 Ulozhenie. The Russian Orthodox Church immediately set about producing a modern version of the Book of the Pilot. This was approved by an ecclesiastical council and printed in 1650 and, with revisions, again in 1653.

For the remainder of the Imperial era (and beyond in some territories where Russian Orthodoxy continued to prevail), this ecclesiastical "code" remained in force with minor modifications introduced in the late eighteenth century. Here were preserved tenets of Byzantine and medieval Russian law. In 1656 the Patriarch Nikon, acting through the Novgorod ecclesiastical court, ruled on the extent to which a widow's dowry was liable for her late husband's debts by applying the relevant provisions of the Ecloga preserved in the Book of the Pilot.

See: Ivan Žužek, Kormčaja kniga: Studies on the Chief Code of Russian Canon Law (1964).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Sobornoe ulozhenie]. [Moscow], 1649. Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library

Throughout Europe the period 1648 to 1650 was a watershed. During those years in Russia, two major law codes, unprecedented in scope and size, became the first printed law books in Russian history. Following the 1497 and 1550 Sudebniks, there were hundreds of supplemental enactments that circulated in manuscript, as did the Sudebniks themselves. Tsar Aleksei Mikkhailovich (1629-1676) summoned a Land Assembly in late 1648 and gave the delegates two months to prepare the Sobornoe ulozhenie, the most substantial and important achievement of medieval Russian law. The book has no title page; its name is acquired from the Assembly which produced it. The text is in Church Slavonic, the literary language of the time, later to be simplified in 1708 by Peter the Great, who introduced a civil script.

Comprising 967 articles divided haphazardly into 25 chapters, the Ulozhenie consolidated provisions drawn from the Russkaia Pravda, the Sudebniks, the Litovskii statut (Lithuanian Statute) of 1588, countless individual edicts, and introduced some new provisions. Representing the turning point in the transition from feudalism to absolutism in Russia, the Ulozhenie summarized the heritage of the medieval past and simultaneously became the point of departure for Imperial Russian codification. A Latin text was translated by Baron von Mayerburg and printed by him in 1661 (a manuscript Danish translation was prepared by Rasmus Ereboe in 1721 at Copenhagen).

Legal historians continue to debate the extent to which the Ulozhenie represented a reception of Polish-Lithuanian and even Byzantine law in Russia. It addresses sacrilege, deference to the Tsar, the Tsar’s household, forgery and counterfeiting, jewellers, goldsmiths, and coiners, legal procedure, trials of various classes of the population, oaths, land law, succession, land tax, serfdom, robbery, capital crimes, the Cossacks, and liquor licensing. Its severe criminal penalties attracted the attention of foreign observers. The gradual enserfment of the peasantry was confirmed and consolidated by the Ulozhenie, which prohibited peasants from leaving their landlords’ estates for any reason whatsoever.

Three states of the book exist. The print run was substantial, for all local offices and officials needed to be supplied. Printing enabled the Russian administrative apparatus, including the judges, to have for the first time a uniform official authoritative text in quantity of the Tsar’s commands.

See: Richard Hellie (transl. & ed.), The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (1988).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Iaroslav I (c. 978-1054), Russkaia Pravda. [Bound with:] Ivan IV, the Terrible (1530-1584), Note on the Sudebnik of Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich. Russia, 18th century manuscript. Private Collection

Virtually all surviving documents from the Kievan period of early Russian and Ukrainian history are legal texts of one kind or another. The earliest are peace treaties concluded between Kievan Rus and Byzantium in or about 907, 911, 944, and 971. The supposition is compelling that the Slavic peoples inhabiting the lands of what became Kievan Rus had rules for interpersonal and interclan or intertribal behavior long before Kievan princes consolidated their authority.

The Russkaia Pravda (also known as Lex Russica) is the earliest surviving compilation of Russian laws. Whether it is a creative codification or a reduction of customary law to written form continues to be debated. So too does the extent to which the substance of the Russkaia Pravda, which contains striking parallels with aspects of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon law, was the result of mutual influence or an independent development.

No contemporary versions of the Russkaia Pravda survive; there are only three texts prior to the fifteenth century and ninety-two texts dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The traditional approach is to consider that there exist three versions of a single law (Russkaia Pravda, Expanded Pravda Russkaia, and Short Pravda Russkaia), but it is conceivable that each version may comprise an autonomous enactment. The initial version, believed to date from the reign of Iaroslav the Wise, began with the rules of blood feud, which the Expanded version relates was abolished by Iaroslav’s sons and replaced by a system of monetary compositions. Matters addressed were stealing, interest, custody of property, suits for money, shipwreck, beekeeping, succession, oaths, slavery, and ownership. The versions suggest that the Prince’s court played a minor role in prosecution and litigation. The system relied upon party initiative; there were no permanent judges, merely officials who presided over proceedings. There was no appeal, no systems of courts, no legal profession, no legal commentaries. Nor can we be certain of the territorial jurisdiction of the Russkaia Pravda.

In the manuscript exhibited here the Russkaia Pravda is accompanied by commentary on what has been called the first national Russian law code, the Sudebnik of 1497, here represented by an expanded and polished version from 1550. The Sudebniks are essentially manuals of procedure and to some extent of criminal law. The few articles devoted to civil law may reflect the inability of the compilers to consolidate satisfactorily the diversity of local rules. The extent to which the Sudebniks created new rules of procedure or embodied pre-existing patterns is much debated. The evidence of judgment charters prior to 1497 suggests that the transition to a vertical system of justice with a hierarchy of courts and judges was a gradual process rather than an innovation in 1497. The 1550 Sudebnik is known only through forty later copies, of which thirteen are of the sixteenth century. The text was adopted with the participation of the Boyar Duma in 1550 and confirmed by the Stoglav Assembly in 1551. Consisting of 99 or 100 articles, depending upon which copy is consulted, this document had no official title. The 1550 Sudebnik lay the foundations of a Russian administrative system at the central and local levels, reflecting the enhanced stature of the Tsar and the further centralization of power in Russia.

On exhibition is a previously unrecorded 18th-century manuscript of the short version of the Russkaia Pravda and the 1550 Sudebnik, with notes by V.N. Tatishchev (1686-1750), regarded by some as the first proper historian in Russia. He began editing the Russkaia Pravda in 1738, but it was published for the first time in Russia only in 1786, long after his death. Five other manuscript versions of the short version of the Russkaia Pravda are known with Tatishchev notes, all from the eighteenth century and all held by St. Petersburg institutions. The version exhibited here differs from the printed authoritative text in the numbering of clauses and in the precise text of the Tatishchev notes.

See: W.E. Butler, Russian Law (3d ed. 2009), Chapter 2; D.H. Kaiser, The Growth of Law in Medieval Russia (1980); D.H. Kaiser, The Laws of Rus': Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries (1992).

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The post-Soviet era of Russian history has made the legacy of the pre-1917 era newly relevant in ways unimaginable. It is not merely a country recovering historical experience suppressed or distorted for ideological reasons during the Soviet regime, but a country seeking to modernize partly on the basis of its earlier legal legacy. A transition to the legal foundations of a market economy is happening before our eyes in Russia, partly an adaptation of foreign legal experience and institutions, partly the preservation and re-adaptation of those elements of Russian legal experience that are essential in the twenty-first century, partly the pioneering of new legal approaches to achieve a transition that is without precedent in human experience.

This exhibition contains principal landmarks of the pre-1917 era, drawing upon the riches of Yale University and augmented by a loans from the Harvard Law School Library and a private collection. So far as we can determine, this is the first occasion in the United States that an exhibition has been mounted on this topic. Wonderful exhibitions devoted to Russian relations with the west or to elements of Russian history generally have omitted law and the legal system.

The notes which follow situate each book in the fabric of Russian legal history. As a general observation, it may be observed that the systematization of legislation is among the larger contributions that Russian law has made to civilization. The story of that contribution is well told by the materials here.

In accordance with normal Russian practice, the relevant titles and other data are provided in Library of Congress transliteration, short form.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," curated by William E. Butler and Mike Widener, is on display Mar. 1 - May 25, 2012, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," the latest exhibit from the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection, is perhaps the first rare book exhibit in the U.S. to focus on the history of Russian law.

The exhibition features principal landmarks in Russia's pre-1917 legal literature. Among these are the first printed collection of Russian laws, the 1649 Sobornoe ulozhenie, and three versions of the Nakaz, the law code that earned Empress Catherine the Great her reputation.

The exhibit draws on the riches of Yale University libraries, augmented by loans from the Harvard Law School Library and a private collection.

"The post-Soviet era of Russian history has made the legacy of the pre-1917 era newly relevant in ways unimaginable," writes William E. Butler, one of the exhibit curators. "It is not merely a country recovering historical experience suppressed or distorted for ideological reasons during the Soviet regime, but a country seeking to modernize partly on the basis of its earlier legal legacy."

Butler is the John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor of Law and International Affairs at the Dickinson School of Law,  Pennsylvania State University. The exhibit's co-curator is Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Butler is the pre-eminent U.S. authority on the law of the former Soviet Union. He is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of more than 120 books on Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian, and post-Soviet legal systems. He is a member of the Grolier Club, the leading U.S. society for book collectors, and the Organization of Russian Bibliophiles. He is also a leading bookplate collector who has authored several reference works on bookplates.

Widener has been Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library since 2006. He is a member of the Grolier Club and a faculty member of the Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

The exhibit is on display through May 25, 2012 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily. The exhibit will also go online via the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, at (203) 432-4494 or <mike.widener@yale.edu>.

Our current exhibit, "The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law", is now available online. Up to now, you've been able to view the Rare Book Collection's exhibits online via this blog. While the blog has been a great way to provide access to our exhibits, it has a problem as well: since the exhibits are posted to the blog in installments, the viewer sees them in reverse order.

The new stand-alone exhibit allows the viewer to see the exhibit in its original intended order. In addition, the "Contents" links on the left side of the screen enables the viewer to skip around the exhibit.

A big thank-you to Jason Eiseman, our Librarian for Emerging Technologies, who built the new stand-alone exhibit site.

In the next several weeks, we will add online versions of all the exhibits that have appeared on the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog. I will continue to post our future exhibits to the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog, but now the same exhibits will also be available on their own websites, where the viewer can see them as they were intended to be seen.

For those of you, my readers, who can visit our exhibits physically, there's nothing like the real thing. I'm a huge fan of digital access, but it remains virtually impossible to communicate the size, scale, and dimensionality of the objects on display. Please come visit!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

• Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). "By mapping the remarkable run of the icon of Justice, a woman with scales and sword, and by tracing the development of public spaces dedicated to justice—courthouses—the authors explore the evolution of adjudication into its modern form as well as the intimate relationship between the courts and democracy." In addition, the Representing Justice page, in the Lillian Goldman Law Library's Document Collection Center,  brings together image collections, articles, and videos relating to the book.
  
  
• Fondo Antico - Immagini della Giustizia, a website prepared by the library of the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, is a well organized and thorough examination of how the image of Justice is employed in early printed books. It includes a lengthy bibliography.
  
  
• The Digital Collections page of the Rechtshistorie website includes annotated lists of useful links under the headings "Databases for legal iconography" and "Thematic image collections".
  
  
• Rechtshistorie's editor, Otto Vervaart, also writes a companion blog, Rechtsgeschiedenis. He has written several thoughtful and informative posts on the topic of legal iconography, dealing with their importance for legal history and the challenges in locating online resources. See, for example, "The face of justice" (Dec. 19, 2010) and click the Legal iconography tag to see the others.
  
  
• Justitia: Iconography of Justice is a Flickr gallery that as of September 2011 contained 133 images of Justice taken from volumes in the Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. See also the related gallery, Justitia - headpieces. Headpieces are ornaments used as decoration at the head of a chapter or division of a book.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance in preparing this exhibit:

Kathryn James
Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts,
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Nicholas Salazar
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Yale University

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Drew Adan
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Image:Frontispiece from Maximae juris celebriores, deductae ex jure canonico, civili, glossa (Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis, S. Jesu, 1742). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

This glimpse at the imagery of Justice makes plain the richness of its history and signification. Didactic emblems addressed fears of corruption, of irrational authority, and an absence of even-handedness. Blindfolds, double-headed Justices, and handless judges captured some of these stresses.

Yet recall that Justice iconography was once far more varied. Within a century after Ripa, his seven Justices had been distilled into one stock figure identified by scales and sword. And Ripa's mention of a blindfold as a marker of the obligation that Justice not be "tempted away from using reason" came to be an expected accoutrement.

The images in this exhibit are a testament to the normative enterprise that built public courts of law and sought to elaborate the import and obligations of law. The movement away from public adjudication is a problem for democracies because adjudication has important contributions to make to democracy. Adjudication is itself a democratic process, which reconfigures power as it obliges disputants and judges to treat each other as equals. The scales, the attribute of Justice with the longest history (dating back to Babylonia and Egypt), evoke the evenhandedness to which judges aspire today.

Our excursion into Justice iconography aims to appreciate but not to romanticize the roots of the didactic practices surrounding adjudication. While old images remain legible, courts in today's democracies are new inventions -- benefits of political and social movements insistent on equality, dignity, and fairness for all. But these aspirations have yet to be realized, just as a visual vocabulary to match those ideas remains under-developed. Whether political will exists to support both the infrastructure of courts and access for all those now eligible to use courts is in question, and hence, the ability of courts to provide active sites of public exchange before independent judges cannot be taken for granted.

Image: Decorative headpiece from Johann Stephan Pütter, Patriotische Abbildung des heutigen Zustandes beyler höchsten Reichsgerichte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1756). Lillian Goldman Law Library (German Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York).

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Dumont, Jean. Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (8 vols.; Amsterdam: P. Brunel [etc.], 1726-31), vol 1. Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Jean Dumont's Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (The Universal Diplomacy of the Laws of Men) is a compilation of European treaties beginning in the time of Charlemagne in the tenth century. The engraved frontispiece, entitled "Traitez de Paix" (Peace Treaties), is by Bernard Picart (1673-1733), who was considered a "magnificent engraver." In the background, the Virtues Justice and Peace (both clear-eyed half-naked women) embrace. They are seated on a pedestal and surrounded by other Virtues, all labeled and including Fortitude, Wisdom, Natural Law, and Truth.

The French text below the engraving explains that the two male figures at the center are kings "swearing an alliance" that is confirmed through a handshake above a chalice-shaped urn in which a fire burns. Each of the men bears a palm, symbolizing peace, and ministers and counselors surround each. At the bottom, War is enchaining Ambition, Discord, Fraud, and Impiety. At the top of the frame, the eye of Providence looks down from thundering clouds from which harpies emerge.

The picture of two persons clasping hands over a fire occurs often in diplomatic imagery of this era and signifies "bona fides" (good faith) or "pacta sunt servanda" (promises must be kept). The depiction's iconic weight resulted in variations being used in seventeenth-century wedding poems, with husband and wife clasping hands to symbolize their union.

A simplified version of the Picart image made its way into the logo of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, established in 1907 at the Hague. A facsimile of the logo used by the Court until 2007 shows the artistic borrowing.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A clear-sighted Justice is at the center of the frontispiece to a 1788 German edition of Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishment, first published in 1764. Beccaria was an eighteenth-century Italian jurist, philosopher, and politician. His well-known treatise, condemning torture and the death penalty, remains a foundation for theories of punishment. Beccaria's premises of reason, utility, and deterrence resulted in his rejection of executions.

Depicted is a Justice turning her eyes away, with scales, entangled with tools used in farming and industry, dangling by her side. She refuses the offering of a severed head by an executioner. Her posture enacts the position adopted today by those seeking to abolish the death penalty. The illustration was based on a sketch drawn by Beccaria himself.

Beccaria, Cesare. Von Verbrechen und Strafen (Breslau: Johann Friedrich Korn, 1788). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The engraved title page of Bernard van Zutphen's Practycke der nederlansche rechten van de daghelijcksche soo civile als criminele (Dutch Law and Practice in Civil and Criminal Matters) depicts a crowded and lively courtroom scene. At the center, the presiding jurist is seated behind a table and beneath a small statue of Justice, who holds scales and a sword; her thin blindfold is dimly visible. The densely populated courtroom, with seats filled by men, includes some spectators focusing on the court proceedings and others chatting -- with dogs at their feet.

With minor variations, this same image can be found in several other volumes of that era, all illustrating how seventeenth-century town halls served as public gathering places, and court proceedings were ordinary events.

Zutphen, Bernhard van. Practycke der nederlansche rechten van de daghelijcksche soo civile als criminele questien (Leeuwarden: G. Sijbes, 1655). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

By the sixteenth century, the blindfold had come to be seen as a potentially positive constraint on earthly Justice, seen to be at risk of corruption or of misplaced passion. But Justices without blindfolds remained commonplace, as seen in the 1669 edition of the Republic of Genoa's criminal statutes. The engraving is by Giuseppe Maria Testana (d. 1679), a printmaker and engraver whose works included allegorical images and portraits of popes, cardinals, and other public figures.

Genoa (Republic). Criminalium iurium serenissimae reipublicae Genuensis, libri duo (Genoa: Giovanni Battista Tiboldi, 1669). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A rare and intriguing portrayal of a two-faced Justice, titled "A Portrait of Worldly Justice," comes from a popular sixteenth-century guide to civil procedure by the Flemish jurist Joost de Damhoudere. One face is sighted and the other has blindfolded eyes. The face of the sighted Justice looks toward her large sword, held upright in her right hand, while the face of the blindfolded Justice turns toward tipped scales in her left hand.

The sighted face has the well-to-do on its side, while the blindfolded face is turned toward the side with more needy-looking individuals, children included. Those on the sighted side of Justice personify largely negative qualities, such as the two labeled Argentum (Money) and Favor (Favor). Blindfolded Justice faces figures labeled Despectus (Contempt), Miseria (Misery), and Paupertas (Poverty). The legend below suggests the children (one of whom is disabled) are Innocentia (Innocence) and Veritas (Truth).

This imagery is accompanied by more than a dozen explanatory pages, beginning with a quote from Cicero: "Justice is the virtue, by which is granted to each what is his own." Through this mélange of images and text, Damhoudere detailed his views on both divine and human justice. He explained that many turn to Justice, who is "repeatedly blind and deaf" to just causes." Justice is "two-faced" -- acting in a manner that appears even-handed but dissembling. Where she is "bound by a blindfold," her eyes are shut to "clemency." But the text has some ambiguity, for Damhoudere also commented that a "two-faced" Justice signified that she must "attend to each of the parties equally."

Damhoudere, Joost de. Practique iudiciaire et causes civiles (Antwerp: Iean Bellere, 1572). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Damhoudere, Joost de. Practycke in civile sacken (Rotterdam: Pieter van Waesberghe, 1660). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Alciati, Andrea. Opera omnia (4 vols.; Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1582), vol. 4. Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Where might Ripa have gotten the blindfold? One possible source is Andrea Alciati, a professor of law. His friend Erasmus called Alciati a "shining light of Learning, not only the Law." Alciati's 1531 treatise, Emblemata, an anthology of moralizing epigrams to which his publisher added illustrations, was reproduced in some 150 editions. One of the "emblems" (a term he coined) is titled "The good Prince in his Council." The central figure is wearing a bandage obscuring part or all of his eyes, and his colleagues lack hands. The accompanying epigram reads:

These men without hands who are seated are those by whom justice is administered. They should have well-balanced sense; nothing is received from them in response to a bribe. Their prince, deprived of his sight, cannot see anybody, and he judges by due sentence according to what is said in his ear.

Both Ripa and Alciati likely knew the "Egyptian" allegory "transmitted by Plutarch and Diodorus Sicilus in which the chief justice was shown eyeless in order to illustrate his impartiality, while his colleagues had no hands with which to take bribes."

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Two codifiers of Renaissance iconography, Cesare Ripa and Andrea Alciati, generated compendia of icons and emblems, replayed by didactic invocations in art and literature, in politics and theology, and in popular pastimes from tarot cards to the satirical press. Through these multiple forms, a host of Virtues and Vices became part of the common visual vocabulary in Europe.

Cesare Ripa's Iconologia marks the beginning of a shift in the meaning attributed to the blindfold. First published, without any pictures, in Rome in 1593, it was printed with images in 1603 and regularly thereafter, appearing in more than forty editions in eight languages.

Ripa detailed various kinds of Justice, each with her own set of attributes. One was Divine Justice ("Giustitia Divina") and the other six were variations on "Worldly" Justice. All were clear-sighted but one, and sight itself was specifically admired in the descriptions of various Justices. For example, Ripa's "Justice According to Aulus Gellius" -- from the Padua Ripa of 1625 -- is said to have "piercing eyes" and to wear a necklace where "an eye is portrayed" because "Plato said that Justice sees all and that, from ancient times, priests were called seers of all things." "Divine Justice" (from the 1698 Amsterdam edition), was similarly clear-sighted, with scale, sword, and a dove in a halo above her head to invoke the Holy Spirit.

The sole version Ripa described as blindfolded was called Justice (or sometimes Earthly Justice). As a 1611 edition explained:

This is the type of Justice that is exercised in the Tribunal of judges and secular executors. She is wearing white because judges should be without the stain of personal interest or of any other passion that might pervert Justice, and this is also why her eyes are bandaged -- and thus she cannot see anything that might cause her to judge in a manner that is against reason.

Ripa, Cesare. Iconologie (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1644). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Ripa, Cesare. Iconologie (Amsterdam: Adrian Braakman, 1698). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Ripa, Cesare. Della novissima iconologia (Padua: Tozzi, 1625). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

"The Fool Blindfolding Justice" was not the only image of that era deploying a blindfold as a warning against judicial error, as can be seen from the 1508 and 1580 editions of an illustrated volume, Die Bambergische Halsgerichtsordnung. The volume, setting forth the criminal law and municipal ordinances of the city of Bamberg, included some twenty woodcuts.

In the woodcut called "The Tribunal of Fools," a presiding judge (marked by his rod of office, the collar of his robe, and his place of honor on the throne) sits with his four colleagues. All are blindfolded and wear jesters' caps. The legend on the scroll above their heads reads: "Out of bad habit these blind fools spend their lives passing judgments contrary to what is right." Once again blindness is equated with error. Blindfolds could also be found on other readily recognized Renaissance icons -- Synagoga, representing the Old Testament, was bent and blindfolded (blind to the "light" of Christianity), while Ecclesia, standing ramrod straight and clear-eyed, embodied the New Testament. Similarly, Fortuna, and Eros were also shown blindfolded, exemplifying that the loss of sight leads one astray.

Bambergische Halssgerichts Ordenung (Metz: Johann Schöffer, 1508). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Bambergische peinliche Halszgerichtszordnung (Bamberg: Johann Wagner, 1580). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The first image, known as "The Fool Blindfolding Justice" from Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, comes from the 1497 Basel edition and is sometimes attributed to Albrecht Dürer. The 1509 London edition offers a close copy. The woodcut was one of a hundred illustrations for this popular book, subsequently printed in many languages.

The scene is one of the earliest known to show a Justice with covered eyes. The deployment is derisive, evident not only from the fool but from the chapter that the illustration accompanied, which was entitled "Quarreling and Going to Court." Brant, a noted lawyer and law professor, prefaced the book with a warning against "folly, blindness, error, and stupidity of all stations and kinds of men." The 1572 version is all the more insistently negative; in this rendition, the fool has pushed Justice off her throne as he covers her eyes.

Brant, Sebastian. Stultifera navis (Basel: Johann Bergmann, de Olpe, 1497). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Brant, Sebastian. This present boke named the shyp of folys of the worlde (London: Richard Pynson, 1509). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Brant, Sebastian. Stultifera navis mortalium (Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1572). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The image of Justice, a remnant of the Renaissance, has had a remarkable run as a political icon. We can all "read" Justice because we have been taught to do so by political leaders of every stripe. Courthouse designers, artists, and cartoonists remain confident that a woman with scales and sword will be recognized as Justice, and not as a misplaced Roman deity or a warrior princess.

This exhibit, drawn from the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, 2011) by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, traces the roots of Justice iconography in books published in Europe between 1497 and 1788. Through these prints, we account for Justice's visual accessibility, making her image a part of today's popular knowledge when other European images of Virtues (and Vices), that were once as familiar as Justice, are lost to contemporary view.

The Justices depicted in Renaissance Europe had a diverse set of attributes -- cornucopias, fasces (or lictor rods), orbs and globes, books and tablets, and an odd lot of animals and birds, including dogs, snakes, ostriches, and cranes. Over time, as this exhibit documents, the depiction of Justice stabilized around a woman with scales and sword.

As this exhibit also details, pictorial representations aimed to denote something of the complex relationship between judgment, sight, knowledge, and wisdom. In the 1400s and 1500s, a blindfold on Justice signified her disability; today the blindfold is commonly valorized as both a sign of law's particular obligation to reason within confined parameters and of justice's impartiality and disinterest.

Image: Cesare Ripa, Iconologie (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1644), Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

How is it that the figure of a woman, draped, holding scales and sword, has been so widely recognized as a symbol of the law for more than 500 years?

This question is at the heart of the latest exhibit from the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection: "The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law." Using images from books printed between 1497 and 1788, the exhibit traces the roots of the iconography of Justice, a remnant of the Renaissance, that remains legible today. The exhibit features eleven volumes from the Law Library's Rare Book Collection, along with four emblem books on loan from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The shifting attributes of Justice, displayed in the exhibit, reflect the complex relationships between judgment, sight, knowledge, and wisdom. In the 1400s and 1500s, a blindfold on Justice signified her disability; today the blindfold is commonly understood as a sign of justice's impartiality.

The exhibit is curated by Judith Resnik (Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School), Dennis Curtis (Clinical Professor of Law Emeritus, Yale Law School), Allison Tait (Gender Equity & Policy Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Women Faculty Forum), and Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian). The exhibit draws heavily on Resnik's & Curtis' new book, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, 2011).

The exhibit is on display through December 16, 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily. The exhibit will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

We thank the following for their help and support in preparing this exhibit... Justin Zaremby & Mike Widener

• Stephen Parks, Librarian of the Elizabethan Club
• The Board of Incorporators of the Elizabethan Club
• Nadine Honigberg, The Elizabethan Club
• John H. Langbein, Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School
• S. Blair Kauffman, Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Yale Law School
• John Stuart Gordon, Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts, Yale University Art Gallery
• Shana Jackson, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Henry Granville Widener

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School. 

Francis Beaumont, 1584-1616. The masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inne (London, 1613). Collection of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University.

In addition to serving as centers of legal training, the Inns of Court provided social activities for students and their teachers, and training in the courtly arts. Students studied fencing and music, and engages in an ample amount of gaming and drinking. The performance of masques for special occasions was an important part of life at the Inns. Students elected masters of revels and learned dancing, particularly in the period following the rise of the Stuarts. This masque was staged by members of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn and was performed before King James I and Queen Anne.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Lancelot Andrewes, 1555-1626. A sermon preached before the kings maiestie, at Hampton Court, concerning the right and power of calling assemblies (London, 1606). Collection of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University; gift of Henrietta C. Bartlett.

When James I acceded to the throne he became Supreme Governor of the Church of England. In 1606, he asserted similar control over the Church of Scotland after a group of Presbyterian ministers claimed the authority to convene meetings of the Scottish church's General Assembly, in defiance of the King's wishes. James reacted by summoning eight of the dissenting Scottish ministers to Hampton Court where four ministers lectured them on the pointed question: "What the king may doe in maters ecclesiasticall, and whether or not he had wholly the power of Conveenning and discharging Assembleis?" Lancelot Andrewes, then Bishop of Chichester, and a favorite of James, defended the king's ancient right to control the Church of Scotland in this sermon. Andrewes would later defend James's persecution of Catholics following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and serve as Bishop of Ely, Bishop of Westminster, and dean of the Chapel Royal.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

John Selden, 1584-1654. The historie of tithes that is, the practice of payment of them (London, 1618). Collection of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University; gift of the daughters of Samuel Hart Selden, May 1922.

Early modern legal scholarship focused at great length upon the question of whether secular or ecclesiastical courts were supreme. Between 1605 and 1613, a series of ecclesiastical lawyers and scholars drew upon the interpretations of medieval canon lawyers and some historical evidence to make strident attacks upon lay ownership of tithes. John Selden's 1618 Historie of Tithes, a major work of legal history, responded to this controversy. He analyzed European laws and natural law theory to show that payment of tithes had always been a matter for local secular courts instead of being determined by the laws of God in ecclesiastical courts.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1634. Les reports de Edvvard Coke l'attorney generall le Roigne (London, 1601?). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1634. [Coke on Littleton] The first part of the Institutes of the lawes of England (London, 1633). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the Ford Motor Company Fund.

Edward Coke was called to the bar in 1578 and quickly gained renown for his trial skills. He successfully argued Shelley's Case (1581), which established an important rule regarding remainders in the transfer of real property by deed, and which bedevils beginning law students to this day. As Attorney General, Coke was responsible for the prosecutions of the Earl of Essex, following his unsuccessful coup d'etat, and Sir Walter Raleigh for treason. James I appointed Coke to be Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and later Lord Chief Justice of King's Bench. In that position he frequently clashed with the King and Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon over the extent of the King's prerogative and the power of the Chancery Court, asserting the right of judicial review. After being driven from the bench, he sat for multiple parliaments, playing an important role in drafting the 1628 Petition of Right, which asserted the independence of parliament in the face of the absolutism of Charles I.

In addition to his work as a lawyer and judge, Coke's legacy was established with the publication of his eleven volumes of law reports, which helped compile essential common law precedents. In 1628, Coke published his most important work, his Commentary upon Littleton. Coke's annotations of Littleton's Tenures, a fifteenth-century treatise on property, quickly became an authoritative text for common lawyers in England and later the United States.

One of the early annotators of the Coke on Littleton displayed here was Samuel Butler (1613-1680), author of Hudibras, an enormously popular and influential satire about the Puritans.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, 1561-1626. Essayes. Religious meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion. Seene and allowed (London, 1597). Collection of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University; gift of Alexander S. Cochran, December 1911.

Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, 1561-1626. The elements of the common lawes of England (London, 1630). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, had an illustrious career as a writer, philosopher, and politician. The son of Lord-Keeper Nicholas Bacon, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn. Through the patronage of the Earl of Essex, Bacon entered parliament, but, due to his outspoken criticism of Queen Elizabeth, failed to secure prize appointments, with his life-long rival Edward Coke instead being appointed Elizabeth's Attorney General. His opportunities improved under James I, when he was appointed Solicitor General and later Lord Chancellor.

As Lord Chancellor Bacon argued strenuously for the King's prerogative, claiming at times that such prerogative came not from the common law, but instead from absolute right. Following his defense of prerogative in the face of parliamentary discontent, and allegations of bribery, Bacon was ultimately impeached. Because of his published works, Bacon ranks among the most important early modern philosophers.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

William Cecil, First Baron Burghley, 1520/21-1598. The execution of justice in England for maintenance of publique and Christian peace (London, 1583). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the Yale Law Library Patrons Fund.

Lord Burghley served as Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State and eminence grise. Trained as a lawyer, much of his public career was dedicated to ensuring the stability of the Queen's reign in the face of numerous crises, among them being the lack of a clear successor to the throne and Catholic conspiracies to overthrow Elizabeth. In his 1583 work on The Execution of Justice, Burghley, masquerading as a loyal Catholic, defended the persecution of Catholics as a matter of state policy. Following the excommunication of the Queen in 1570, and the Pope's demand that all loyal Catholics deny her legitimacy, Burghley claimed that the Queen could, according to political need, persecute Catholics. The work was translated into Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Edmund Plowden, 1518-1585. A treatise proveinge that if or soveraigne ladye Elizabeth ... should dye without issue, that the Queene of Scotte is nott disabled by the lawe of England, to receyue the crowne of Englande by descent [before 1676]. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

Edmund Plowden rose to prominence as a lawyer under the reign of Queen Mary and became well-known as a law reporter. In 1566, probably in response to a request from the Duke of Norfolk, Plowden wrote this defense of Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne as Elizabeth's successor. He based his claim on the fact that the English throne passed by inheritance and that because the maxims of the common law, which applied to natural bodies, did not apply to political bodies, Mary's foreign birth did not invalidate her claim to the throne. Moreover, he noted that Mary's accession would not lead to English subjugation by the Scots given the traditional homage shown by the Scots to the English. His argument was proven correct when, as he foresaw, the Stuart kings chose to rule from England, instead of from Scotland.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Abraham Fraunce, 1559-1592/93. The lawiers logike, exemplifying the praecepts of logike by the practise of the common lawe (London, 1588). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; gift of Mary Kane Blair in memory of Waring Roberts, Law 1940.

Abraham Fraunce was called to the bar at Gray's Inn and practiced law in Wales, but is better known as a minor poet and rhetorician. A member of Sir Philip Sidney's circle, his works summarized classical and continental writers for English readers. In The Lawyers Logike, Fraunce applied French understandings of rhetoric and logic to the practices of English common lawyers to show that law and logic, when properly applied, could work together. In the introduction to the text he wrote:

If Lawes by reason framed were, and grounded on the same;
If Logike also reason bee, and thereof had this name;
I see no reason, why that Law and Logike should not bee
The nearest an the dearest friends, and therefore best agree.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

William Lambarde, 1536-1601. The duties of constables, borsholders, tythingmen, and such other lowe ministers of the peace (London, 1584). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

William Lambarde, 1536-1601. Eirenarcha, or Of the office of the iustices of peace, in foure bookes (London, 1599). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

William Lambarde, 1536-1601. The dueties of constables, borsholders, tythingmen, and such other lowe and lay ministers of the peace (London, 1599). Collection of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University; gift of Henry H. Anderson, Jr. in memory of Wilmarth S. Lewis, December 1983.

The attourney of the Court of Common Pleas: or his directions and instructions concerning the course of practice therein, with sundry observations thereupon, &c. / written by G.T. of Staple Inne, gent. (London, 1642). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

Institutions or principall groundes of the lawes and statutes of England (London, 1570). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

William Lambarde's Eirenarcha, or, The Office of the Justices of Peace (1582), was printed twelve times before 1620 and served as a standard authority on county administration. After being called to the bar in 1567, Lambarde dedicated his professional life to jobs ranging from commissioner of the peace to master of chancery and deputy keeper of the rolls. His scholarly writings also included his Archaionomia (1568), the second book to print Old English, which collected and paraphrased Anglo-Saxon laws and treaties, together with the laws of Edward the Confessor and William I. Lambarde may have sat for parliament under Elizabeth, at which point he famously disobeyed the Queen's 1566 demand that parliament no longer discuss the possibility of her marriage.

With the advent of the printing press, standardized legal procedures continued to evolve. Numerous printed guides provided practicing lawyers and county administrators with model oaths as well as explanations of various aspects of the common law. Printed guides also helped to spread knowledge of the law. For example, in the 1570 Institutions or Principall Grounds of the Laws and Statutes of England, published by the famed Elizabethan printer Richard Tottel, the author called for a clear understanding of the laws such that men may not say of the English that "we make very goodly and profitable laws but we use them not."

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Jonas Adames. The order of keeping a court leete, and court baron (London, 1593). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund.

As early as the thirteenth century, sheriffs and stewards could turn to a series of manuscripts that explained the procedures of local courts. While legal treatises by figures such as Bracton and Glanvill offered larger discussions of the common law, these smaller treatises were focused on practical matters. Following the invention of the printing press, the ease with which these guides were distributed helped standardize judicial institutions across the country. Adames's 1593 guide is the earliest of such manuals to appear in English instead of Latin. His guide reflected changes to the judicial system under the Tudors, explaining details of both common law and statutory law.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Sir John Fortescue, 1533-1607. A learned commendation of the politique lawes of England (London, 1599). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Sir John Fortescue served as Lord Chief Justice under Henry VI and was a loyal partisan of the Lancastrian cause during the War of the Roses. He went into exile after the victory of the Yorkists, during which time he wrote this treatise on English laws, probably to instruct the young Prince of Wales. In this work he praised the advantages of English common law over Roman law, noting that in England “the regal power is restrained by political law.” Fortescue's work contrasted the limited rule of English kings with the despotism of French kings. Later jurists such as Sir Edward Coke would look to Fortescue to justify constitutional limitations on the power of the English monarch. His work gained wide readership after the publication of its first printed edition in 1545/46.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

Christopher St. Germain, 1460-1540/41. [Doctor and Student] The Dialogue in English, betweene a doctor of divinitie, and a student in the lawes of England (London, 1593). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the Judah P. Benjamin Fund.

Christopher St. Germain's Doctor and Student first appeared in English in 1530. The work consists of two dialogues conducted between a doctor of divinity and a student of the common law. They discuss the place of equity and conscience in the law. St. Germain's work was published at a time at which chancery courts, which had previously been led by ecclesiastical chancellors, began to be controlled by common lawyers. Doctor and Student helped instruct common lawyers in the ways of their predecessors so that they could better understand the relationship between law and equity.

    -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a series of important legal debates in England. Under the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and the first two Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, lawyers, parliamentarians, and members of the court argued over the relationship between common law courts and equity courts, and the extent of the monarch's prerogative. The further development of printed law books and law reports helped standardize the law and its enforcement throughout the country. Leading members of the English judiciary -- Edmund Plowden, Sir Francis Bacon, and Sir Edward Coke -- rose to prominence and published works whose influence continues to the present day.

This exhibit displays highlights of this period in English law using the holdings of the Lillian Goldman Law Library's Rare Book Collection and the Elizabethan Club of Yale University. The Elizabethan Club was founded in 1911 by Alexander Smith Cochran, a member of the Yale College Class of 1896. Cochran established the Elizabethan Club to provide a place for daily conversation between students and faculty members. In his founding gift, Cochran donated a remarkable collection of early modern texts. For the last 100 years the Club has added to its collection. While the Club's library is well known because of its early editions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, it contains a number of important legal works, as well. The occasion of the Club's Centenary provides the opportunity to bring together two impressive collections of early modern texts at Yale to illustrate a rich moment in English legal history.

     -- Justin Zaremby

"Life and Law in Early Modern England," an exhibition marking the Centenary of the Elizabethan Club, is curated by Justin Zaremby with Mike Widener, and is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale Law School.

English law not only underwent deep changes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but also played a leading role in politics and culture. "Life and Law in Early Modern England," a new exhibit from the Lillian Goldman Law Library and Yale's Elizabethan Club, illustrates this period with works drawn from the rare book collections of both institutions.

The exhibit is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm weekdays, 10am-10pm weekends. It will also be available online, here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

The exhibit was curated by Justin Zaremby, a 2010 graduate of the Yale Law School, assisted by Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Life and Law in Early Modern England" is part of the year-long Centenary celebration of the Elizabethan Club, founded in 1911 as a meeting place for conversation and discussion of literature and the arts. The Club's website has a calendar of Centenary events.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Law Library and Elizabethan Club are sponsoring a public lecture by Professor Josh Chafetz (Law '07) of Cornell Law School, entitled "'In the Time of a Woman, Which Sex Was Not Capable of Mature Deliberation': Late-Tudor Parliamentary Relations and Their Early-Stuart Discontents." The lecture will take place February 24 at 6:15pm in Room 127 of the Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street.

In his introduction to the exhibit, Zaremby writes, "The occasion of the Club's Centenary provides the opportunity to bring together two impressive collections of early modern texts at Yale to illustrate a rich moment in English legal history." The books and manuscripts on display date from 1570 to the 1670s. They include guides to legal practice, textbooks, a play performed at an Inn of Court, and works dealing with church-state relations, legal philosophy, court jurisdiction, and the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. Among the authors included are several of the era's leading figures, such as Francis Bacon, Francis Beaumont, Lord Burghley, Edward Coke, and John Selden.

Illustration: Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Les reports de Edvvard Coke l'attorney generall le Roigne (London, 1601?). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library; acquired with the Ford Motor Company Fund.

Edward Gordon, my esteemed co-curator for our Fall 2009 exhibit, "Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," has published an article based on the exhibit:

Edward Gordon, Grotius and the Freedom of the Seas in the Seventeenth Century, 16 WILLAMETTE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW & DISPUTE RESOLUTION 252 (2008).

Gordon's article is a much-expanded version of the introduction and captions he produced for the exhibit, which marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of Grotius' Mare liberum. He writes,

"Mare liberum has become something of an icon in international law, not only for providing the first effective argument for the freedom of the seas in modern times, but in combination with Grotius's more mature work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625), for reinvigorating the natural law of ancient times as a transcendent legal regime in the service of the common good."

Gordon has provided a thorough, concise, and lively account of the origins of Grotius's Mare liberum, the learned and passionate debates it engendered throughout Europe, and its continuing legacy in international law. Thanks, Ed!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

At right: Portrait of Hugo Grotius from volume 1 of an anonymous commentary on Grotius, Hugonis Grotii, Belgarum phoenicis, manes ab iniquis obtrectationibus vindicati (Leipzig, 1727). The artist has placed Mare liberum just below the portrait on the right.

A video of Mark Zaid's exhibit talk, "Superheroes in Court! Law, Lawyers and Comic Books," is now available here, in the Yale Law Librarians channel at Vimeo.com. Zaid's 52-minute presentation, recorded on Sept. 30, 2010, gives a brief overview of the history of comic books, and then delves into the various ways law and lawyers have been depicted in comics, as well as the influence of law on the comic book industry in areas such as copyright, trademark law, and censorship. Thanks to Dan Griffin of Yale Law School's Information Technology Services, the video includes Zaid's PowerPoint images. The video can also be viewed via the Law Library's online catalog, MORRIS.

An report on Zaid's talk is available in Scoop, a free e-newsletter for comic book collectors.

If that's not enough, you can also listen to an interview with Mark Zaid, Dale Cendali (an intellectual property law attorney and comic book collector), and myself that aired on WNPR-FM's "Where We Live" on October 4. Many thanks to the host, John Dankowsky, and the program's producer, Josie Holtzman.

The exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books," is on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Mexico Celebrates its Bicentennial: 1810-2010" is an exhibit in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 - Oct. 15). It was curated by my colleague Teresa Miguel, Associate Librarian for Foreign & International Law, with some help from me, and includes several items from the Rare Book Collection. It is on display in the wall case just outside the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room, on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

If you can't drop by to view the exhibit, you can see it on the Yale Law Library Foreign and International Law Blog. Below is one of the items in the exhibit, Juan Eugenio de Ochoa, Manual del abogado americano (Arequipa, Peru, 1830).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

  "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books" was curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and coordinated by Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian. It is on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The illustration: Detective Comics no. 240 (Feb. 1957). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Thanks to the following individuals for their help in making this exhibit a success:

• Terry Allen
• Arnold T. Blumberg, Geppi's Entertainment Museum, Baltimore
  
• Janet Conroy, Public Affairs, Yale Law School
• John Dankosky, WNPR/Connecticut Public Radio
• The Hon. Mark Dwyer (Yale Law School '75), Court of Claims, Supreme Court of the State of New York
  
• Jackie Estrada, Exhibit A Press
• Brent Frankenhoff, Comic Buyers' Guide
• Paul Herman, The Robert E. Howard Foundation
• Josie Holtzman, WNPR/Connecticut Public Radio
  
• Shana Jackson, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Louis James
• Thomas C. King, DC Comics
• Steve Korte, DC Comics
• Liliane McClenning, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Steven McClenning, graphic designer
• John Schwartz, New York Times
• Fred Shapiro, Lillian Goldman Law Library
  
• Daniel Sisgoreo, Yale Daily News

Thanks also to all the blogs and online periodicals who spread the word about our exhibit, including:

• 06520: the news blog of the Yale Alumni Magazine
• 3 Geeks and a Law Blog
  
• ABA Journal
  
• Americana Exchange
• Arts Beat - New York Times
• Bad at Sports: Contemporary Art Talk
• Before It's News
• The Bunburyist
• Clancco Art and Law
  
• Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
• Comicdom
  
• Comics Alliance
• ComicsDC
• Comics Cavern
  
• Edinburgh Legal History Blog
• Engl 386: The Graphic Novel
• Fastcase
  
• Fine Books Blog
• Graphic Policy
  
• iurisdictio-lex malacitana
• Law Librarian Blog
  
• Legal History Blog
• LISNews
• Major Spoilers
  
• Margeaux Taylor's Blog
• Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog
  
• Philobiblos
• PLI Librarian
  
• P.S. Practice Source
• Seattle University Law Library Blog
• Washington Lawyers for the Arts
  

For further reading...

• William H. Hilyerd, Hi Superman, I'm a Lawyer: A Guide to Attorneys (& Other Legal Professionals) Portrayed in American Comic Books: 1910-2007, 15 WIDENER LAW REVIEW 159 (2009). Available online via SSRN.
  

Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman, just might be a graduate of Yale Law School. On page 16 of Detective Comics no. 439 (March 1974), one can see a framed "Diploma of Law" from Yale University on the wall of Bruce Wayne's study, on the right side of the panel:

Here is an enlarged detail of the diploma:

The diploma seems to have been granted by "Yale University at Gotham."

You can judge for yourself, by visiting our exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books." We have acquired a copy of Detective Comics no. 439 and added it to the exhibit, along with an enlargement of the diploma. We welcome your theories on Bruce Wayne's alma mater.

Thanks to the Hon. Mark Dwyer, Judge of the Court of Claims (Supreme Court of the State of New York) and a 1975 graduate of the Yale Law School, for bringing this to our attention.

 "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., is on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Invites you to an exhibition talk...

SUPERHEROES IN COURT! LAWYERS, LAW AND COMIC BOOKS

By Mark S. Zaid, Esq., Guest Curator

Thursday, September 30, 2010
1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Room 129, Sterling Law Building
127 Wall Street

By day, Mark S. Zaid, a Washington, D.C. attorney, is a nationally recognized expert on national security law and freedom of information issues. He has made hundreds of appearances as a guest commentator on TV and radio, and testified before Congress. Like his comic-book heroes, Zaid has an alter-ego as a comic book collector and dealer. He is also an advisor to the Overstreet Comic Book Price & Grading Guides and a co-founder of the Comic Book Collecting Association.

Almost all the items in the Law Library's current exhibition, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books," are from Zaid's personal collection. The exhibition was recently featured in the New York Times, and is on display until December 16 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In the early days of comics, publishers sought to secure trademark protection for their titles through "ashcans". Only a few examples would be created with the title's logo, some existing cover art and possibly some interior pages, and a copy would be submitted to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for registration. These two rare examples of Flash Comics reflect the importance of timing as DC Comics fended off its rival by just one month thereby forcing Fawcett Publications to have its flagship character "Captain Marvel" star in Whiz Comics.

Flash Comics no. 1 (DC Comics, Dec. 1939). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Flash Comics no. 1 (Fawcett, Jan. 1940). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Most publishers properly sought copyright protection for their respective works. Unlike "ashcans", which were specially created and not meant to survive, one example of a published comic, such as this Clown Comics Book no. 1 (1945), would be filed with and stamped by the Library of Congress' Copyright Office. Though the Library still retains most of†these "Copyright Deposit Copies," some copies were discarded as excess or even stolen over the years.

Clown Comic Book no. 1 (1945). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Led by a growing hysteria of anti-comic crusades during the 1940s and 1950s that alleged comic books, particularly those depicting crime and horror, caused juvenile delinquency, and a rash of laws throughout the country such certain comics, the United States Senate began its own investigation. Advocates lined up on both sides to battle, and ultimately the industry, which suffered near collapse, agreed to police its own to stave off government regulation.

U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency (1955). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

American Civil Liberties Union, Censorship of Comic Books (1955). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

In response to an increasing outcry for censorship of comic books, the industry created the Comics Code Authority to ensure conformance with self-adopted standards. The Code prohibited comics from promoting "distrust of the forces of law and justice" and, among other things, required "in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds." Distributors refused to disseminate comics lacking the official seal of approval and hundreds of titles ceased to exist. By the publication of this 20th anniversary booklet in 1974, the Code's influence had waned significantly, although it remains in effect today.

Americana in Four Colors: Twenty Years of Self-Regulation by the Comics Magazine Industry (New York: Comics Magazine Association of America, 1974). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

When Mad Magazine entered the scene in October 1952 it did not take long for the comic to gain a loyal and large readership. Many enjoyed its parodies of well-known characters in other comic books. It was published by Educational Comics (EC), acompany both applauded and derided for its impact on the comic book community. Led by Bill Gaines, EC epitomized the morality battle over whether comics were destroying the youth of America and its titles, which focused on horror, crime and science fiction, were directly linked to the formation of the Comics Code Authority.  Because the Code banned the use of "horror", "terror" and "crime" from titles, EC was faced with ceasing publication altogether or ceding to the authority of the Code, neither of which Gaines was willing to do. So that Mad could continue its satire, including of the Code, Gaines modified it from a comic book to magazine format so as to fall outside of the organization’s de facto censorship authority. Mad no. 24 (July 1955) was the first of the new format. The magazine has existed ever since and is now owned by DC Comics.

Mad Magazine no. 24 (July 1955). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The successful appearance of a new type of comic book character by Detective Comics, Inc. (now D.C. Comics) – a "Superman" – in Action Comics no. 1 (June 1938) sparked the dawn of the Golden Age of comic books. It also spawned copycat creations by competitors such as Bruns Publication, Inc. which published Wonder Comics no. 1 featuring "Wonderman" in May 1939. An injunctive victory for copyright infringement ensured "Wonderman" would never appear again. Detective Comics, Inc., v. Bruns Publications, Inc., 28 F.Supp. 399 (S.D.N.Y 1939), aff'd, 111 F.2d 432 (2d Cir. 1940). This copy of Action Comics no. 5 (Oct. 1938) was used in the litigation to prove "Wonderman" had infringed upon the Man of Steel.

Action Comics no. 5 (Oct. 1938). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

This telegram from Jack Liebowitz, owner of Detective Comics, Inc., instructed Jerome "Jerry" Siegel, the co-creator of "Superman", to be present in New York to testify in the "Wonderman" infringement trial. This telegram has a dual legal significance as the top markings also denote it as a defendant's trial exhibit in the 1947 lawsuit in which Siegel challenged D.C.'s ownership of "Superman" and "Superboy." Although Siegel entered into a settlement in 1948, he sued again in 1969 in federal court and lost. Due to changes in the Copyright Act which allowed creators and their heirs/estates to recapture creations under certain circumstances, regardless of whether the rights were signed away in prior agreements, Siegel's heirs sued in 2004 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and in decisions issued in 2008 and 2009 regained some of the rights. The litigation continues today more than 60 years after it began.

Telegram, Jack Liebowitz to Jerry Siegel, 3 Apr. 1939, From a private collection.

Now operating as National Comics Publications, Inc., D.C. found itself squaring off with Fawcett Publications, Inc. in a 1941 lawsuit challenging publication of "Captain Marvel" (now known as "Shazam"). It took several court decisions, a 1948 trial and 13 years of litigation before "Superman" ultimately prevailed in 1954 when Fawcett agreed to settle amidst a decision to leave the comic book business altogether. This copy of Whiz no. 91 (Nov. 1947) was one of many exhibits introduced during the trial.

Whiz Comics no. 91 (Nov. 1947). Personal collection of Mark Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd began taking on their macabre clients in a weekly strip in The Brooklyn Paper in 1979. Creator Batton Lash took his inspiration from the gothic law offices along Brooklyn's Court Street, the hub of The Brooklyn Paper's readership. From 1983 to 1997 the Wolff & Byrd strip ran in The National Law Journal, and the firm got their very own comic book in 1994, with story titles like "It Stalks the Public Domain," "Juristic Park," and "Lawyers in Hell," where Wolff and Byrd literally met a client in hell. Exhibit A Press still publishes the comic today under the title Supernatural Law, along with 16 compilations and an ongoing web comic. The Lillian Goldman Law Library has a complete collection of Wolff & Byrd comics.

Wolff & Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre no. 3 (Sept.1994). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Young Lawyers was yet another comic book television adaptation issued by Dell Publishing. This two-issue title from 1971 was based on the Golden Globe nominated ABC drama series that aired 24 episodes over one season in 1970-71. The story featured a group of young and idealistic law students in Boston who ran the “Neighborhood Law Office” in an effort to represent the poor, apparently as a forerunner of today’s legal clinics. Since as law students they were obviously not yet admitted to the bar, an established Boston lawyer served as their mentor.

Young Lawyers no. 2 (Apr. 1971). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Defenders was a popular television courtroom drama series which aired from 1961–1965. It starred E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed (later of Brady Bunch fame) as father-and-son defense attorneys who handled complex cases. The series addressed topics that still resonate for attorneys nearly a half-century later including capital punishment, custody rights of adoptive parents, the insanity defense, immigration quotas, and visa restrictions. Dell Publishing produced only these two issues of a comic book adaption of the same title in 1962-1963.

The Defenders no. 2 (Feb.-Apr. 1963). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Mr. District Attorney was a popular radio show created by former law student Ed Byron which aired from 1939 to 1952. It featured a crime-fighting crusading D.A. inspired by Thomas E. Dewey's campaign against racketeering which helped lead to his election as governor of New York. The show's popularity led to a quick comic book appearance in The Funnies no. 35 (Sept. 1939) and the issuance of one of the few non-funny early issues of Four Color by Dell Publishing in 1942. This issue is also one of the earliest examples of a lawyer gracing a comic book cover. The title was later picked up by D.C. Comics and ran for a respectable 67 issues from 1948 to 1958.

Mr. District Attorney was a popular radio show created by a former law student which aired from 1939 to 1952. It featured a crime-fighting crusading D.A. and the show's popularity led to a quick comic book appearance in The Funnies #35 (Sept. 1939). This issue of Four Color is one of the earliest examples of a lawyer gracing a comic book cover. The title was later picked up by D.C. Comics and ran for a respectable 67 issues from 1948 to 1958.

Four Color Comic no. 13 (1942). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

The storyline of Mr. District Attorney no. 12 began with this introduction:

In this land of ours, under our laws, a person is innocent until proven guilty. And it is my duty as District Attorney not only to prosecute the guilty but to make certain that the innocent go free! And it is my duty, too, to make certain that society shares the guilt and responsibility of a criminal that society, itself, had created! That is why... "I DEFENDED THE MONKEY MAN!"

Mr. District Attorney no. 12 (Nov.-Dec. 1949). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Teen-Age Temptations no. 5 (Dec. 1953). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Young Romance no. 196 (Dec. 1973). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Secrets of Sinister House no. 17 (May 1974). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

The Witching Hour no. 51 (Feb. 1975). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Crime Detective Comics no. 8 (Jay-June 1949). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Crime Exposed no. 2 (Feb. 1951). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

From the exhibit, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books", curated by Mark S. Zaid, Esq., and on display Sept. 4-Dec, 16, 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Comic books have been around in modern form now for nearly 80 years and throughout their existence the influence of lawyers, laws and courts has been significant in the development and continuation of the industry. While oftentimes operating behind the scenes, whether as characters in comic book stories or in reality helping craft decisions that lead to the rise or fall of publishing companies, lawyers have repeatedly been recognized as part of this community, as seen in these varied examples of court-room covers published during the 1940s – 1970s.

Action Comics no. 263 (Apr. 1960). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Adventure Comics no. 281 (Feb. 1961). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Batman no. 163 (May 1964). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Blackhawk no. 208 (May 1965). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Detective Comics no. 281 (July 1960). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Incredible Hulk no. 153 (July 1972). Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

Lawyers have played both fictional and real-life roles in the 80-year history of the comic book industry. Their story is told in an exhibition, "Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books," now on display in the Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The guest curator for the exhibition is Mark S. Zaid, Esq., a Washington, D.C. attorney who specializes in national security law. Much like his comic-book heroes, Zaid has an alter-ego as a comic book collector and dealer. He is also an advisor to the Overstreet Comic Book Price & Grading Guides and a co-founder of the Comic Book Collecting Association.

Almost all of the items on display come from Zaid's personal collection. The comics covers show Superman on trial for murder, and one of the earliest comic books to feature a lawyer on the cover ("Mr. District Attorney", 1942). Other items document the legal battle over rights to Superman, efforts to censor comic books in the 1950s, and copyright issues.

The exhibition is on display Sept. 6 to Dec. 16, 2010, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library in the Yale Law School (127 Wall St., New Haven CT). The exhibition is open to the public. Highlights of the exhibition will appear in installments here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

In addition, Mark Zaid will give an exhibition talk on Sept. 30 at 1:00pm in the Yale Law School.

Action Comics no. 359 (Feb. 1968).
Personal collection of Mark S. Zaid, Esq.

On April 22 the Rare Book Collection hosted 84 4th-grade students from Ridge Road Elementary School in North Haven, CT. They toured our current exhibit, "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings." They posed plenty of perceptive questions. It was a delight to have them.

They also got a kick out of our display of Supreme Court Bobbleheads...

Thanks to Ridge Road Elementary's librarian, Lydia Westerberg, for organizing this visit, to the other Ridge Road Elementary teachers and parents who accompanied the students, and to my library colleagues Cesar Zapata and Kathy Eow for their help.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Over 40 members of the Medieval Academy of America attended our open house on March 19, as part of the Academy's 2010 Annual Meeting at Yale. The occasion was our current exhibit, "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings."

After a brief presentation from the exhibit's lead curator, Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, we set them loose to the exhibit, and an additional 40 volumes in our reading room. We provided forms for them to contribute information about the fragments; a parlor game for medievalists. One of them used his iPhone to show us where a musical fragment fits into the medieval liturgy. Several told us "you should email Professor X about this fragment."

Those who generously contributed information included Elizabeth Brown (CUNY), George Brown (Stanford), Lisa Fagin Davis (Simmons College), Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia University), Dennis Dutschke (Arcadia University), Joseph Dyer (University of Massachusetts-Boston), David Ganz (King's College London), Susan L'Engle (St. Louis University), William Mahrt (Stanford University), Hope Mayo (Harvard), Richard Rouse (UCLA), Matthew Salisbury (University of Oxford), Alison Stones (University of Pittsburgh), Rod Thomson (University of Tasmania), Linda Voigts (University of Missouri-Kansas City), and Mary Wolinski (Western Kentucky University). I am adding the information they provided to the online version of the exhibit.

Thanks to all who attended for making the open house a resounding success. One senior paleographer said, "I won't remember a single paper that I hear at this conference, but I'll remember this event."

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, the exhibit's lead curator, introduces the exhibit to Medieval Academy of America members.

Medieval Academy of America conferees studying our exhibit, "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings."

Let the games begin! Medievalists examining some of the additional volumes with medieval manuscripts in the bindings, set out for them in the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room.

Photographs by Ty Streeter, Office of Public Affairs, Yale Law School.

The Yale Daily News published an excellent feature on the Rare Book Collection, "Amid legal scholarship, some wacky stacks", on the front page of its March 26, 2010 issue. Thanks to reporter Danny Serna and photographer Joseph Breen for the considerable time and skill they invested. They were especially intrigued by our illustrated legal materials, such as the Supreme Court bobbleheads, law-related comic books, and the Morris Cohen Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection. Not many rare book collections are chacterized as "wacky." They meant it as a compliment and I take it as a compliment. Wacky is good!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Books from the Morris Cohen Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection. Photograph by Joseph Breen, Yale Daily News.

The Green Bag, "An Entertaining Journal of Law," has selected the Lillian Goldman Law Library to be the official archive of its Supreme Court Bobbleheads. To mark this momentous event, the Rare Book Collection has put a selection of Supreme Court Bobbleheads on display, on Level L2 of the Law Library, in the wall case at the entrance to the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room.

Adam Liptak, the New York Times reporter who covers the U.S. Supreme Court, published an excellent article on the exhibit, "Relax, Legal Scholars: Bobbleheads Are Safe at Yale", in the March 17, 2010 issue of the New York Times.

The Green Bag began issuing its Supreme Court Bobbleheads in 2003 with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Subsequently, the bobbleheads have come out roughly in order of seniority, with Justice David H. Souter being the most recent of the sitting Justices (issued shortly before his retirement from the Court).

The bobbleheads have a sophisticated iconography, as Ross E. Davies, editor-in-chief of The Green Bag, explained in the New York Times article: "The bobbleheads are, not to overstate it, a little bit more than toys. They're portrayals of the work and character of these judges." See "The Annotated Bobblehead: Justice John Paul Stevens," at right, for an example.

So far, The Green Bag has issued bobbleheads of seven modern Justices (in order of appearance they are William H. Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Harry A. Blackmun, and David H. Souter) and two historic Justices (Louis D. Brandeis and Benjamin Curtis, author of a famous dissent to the Dred Scott decision). Forthcoming are small bobbleheads of the first Supreme Court Justices (John Jay, William Cushing, and John Rutledge).

Yale's Supreme Court Bobblehead Collection also includes dozens of "draft" bobbleheads, reflecting earlier stages in their design.

The Green Bag bobbleheads are not the first bobbleheads in the Rare Book Collection. That honor goes to the bobblehead of Yale law professor and Dean Emeritus Harold Hongju Koh, which was issued in 2006 as a fundraiser for the Yale Law School chapter of the American Constitution Society.

Thanks to Ross Davies and The Green Bag for making this acquisition possible, and to Fred Shapiro, our Associate Librarian for Collections & Access, who had the inspired idea of contacting The Green Bag.

The Supreme Court Bobblehead exhibit will be on display through the summer.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Thanks to the following individuals for their assistance in the preparation of this exhibit:

Moshe Bar Asher
Academy of the Hebrew Language

Binyamin Elizur
Academy of the Hebrew Language

Ezra Chwat
National Library of Israel

Margot Fassler
Yale University

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Ivan Marcus
Yale University

Laura Saetveit Miles
Yale University

Michael Rand
Academy of the Hebrew Language

Anders Winroth
Yale University

 Thanks also to our colleagues in the blogosphere who helped spread the word about the exhibit, including:

• Archivalia
• BibliOdyssey
• Book-Aesthete
  
• Edinburgh Legal History Blog
  
• Grafosphera
• Iurisdictio-lex malacitana
• Legal History Blog
• Medieval News
  
• PECIA: Le manuscrit médiéval - The medieval manuscript
  
• PhiloBiblos
  

Finally, thanks to all the members of the Medieval Academy of America who attended an open house for the exhibit on March 19, 2010, during the Academy's 2010 Annual Meeting, and especially to those who provided additional information on the manuscripts on display: Elizabeth Brown (CUNY), George Brown (Stanford University), Lisa Fagin Davis (Simmons College), Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia University), Dennis Dutschke (Arcadia University), Joseph Dyer (University of Massachusetts-Boston), David Ganz (King's College London), Susan L'Engle (St. Louis University), William Mahrt (Stanford University), Hope Mayo (Harvard University), Richard Rouse (UCLA), Matthew Salisbury (University of Oxford), Alison Stones (University of Pittsburgh), Rod Thomson (University of Tasmania), Linda Voigts (University of Missouri-Kansas City), and Mary Wolinski (Western Kentucky University).

-- Benjamin Yousey-Hindes & Mike Widener, curators

 "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Unknown
Date: c.1475-1525
Found in: Caccialupi, Giovanni Battista. De pesionibus tractatus uere aureus. Rome: F. Minizio Calvo, 1531.

The vast majority of medieval manuscript fragments found in the Law Library's bindings are in Latin, but not all of them. In addition to the two Hebrew fragments elsewhere in this exhibit, there is a large, later fragment in what appears to be a form of German, and two very late fragments in French. All three of these fragments are awaiting definitive identification. One of the French fragments (perhaps a deed of sale for a piece of property?) is seen here being used as a "wrapper," a means of protecting a printed text without applying a hard cover.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Maimonides's Mishneh Torah / Vidal of Tolosa's Maggid Mishneh
Date: c. 1300-1500
Found in: Milan (Duchy). Constitutiones dominii mediolanensis. Novara: Francesco Sesalli, 1567.

Between 1170 and 1180 the famous rabbi, physician, and philosopher Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) compiled a comprehensive compendium of Jewish law (halakha) that he named the Mishneh Torah. While many people opposed the Mishneh Torah when it first circulated, Maimonides defended it as a necessary distillation of existing legal reasoning into a practical code. Regardless of the attacks, the Mishneh Torah rapidly became one of the core texts within Jewish law.

Binyamin Elizur, Head of the Department of Ancient Hebrew at the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, informs us that the small text on the left of the leaf comes from Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. The portion visible here is from the section on "Financial Damages" (Nizke Mammon), chapter 1, subsection 9. The larger writing to the right is the corresponding passage from the Maggid Mishneh, an exegetical commentary on the Mishneh Torah written by the Catalan rabbi Vidal of Tolosa (1283-1360). According to Elizur, the noteworthy and unusual thing about this fragment is that Vidal's commentary is written in large letters, while Maimonides's text is written in small letters on the side. He speculates that the leaf may have originally contained only the commentary, and that passages from the Mishneh Torah were added in the margin later. He notes that the script, both large and small, appears to be Sephardic semi-cursive from the 14th or 15th century.

Dr. Ezra Chwat of the Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Israel, notes that the publication date of the host volume, 1567, "is precisely on the spike of redeployment of Jewish manuscripts" as they were confiscated by the Inquisition in Italy; see Mauro Perani & Enrica Sagradini, Talmudic and midrashic fragments from the Italian Genizah: reunification of the manuscripts and catalogue (Firenze: Giuntina, 2004), pp. 124-125.

Dr. Chwat has added this fragment to the online catalog of Hebrew manuscripts maintained by the Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Israel; the record (in Hebrew) can be viewed here.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Sextus liber decretalium (Bologna or Padua)
Date: c. 1320-1330?
Found in: Bologna (Italy). Statutorum inclytae civitatis ... Bononiae, vol. 2. Bologna: Giovanni Rossi, 1569.

Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) held a doctorate in canon and civil law and, like Gregory IX seventy years earlier, sought to update and expand the body of canon law jurisprudence. He did so by commissioning a new collection of decretals, which he sent to the universities in 1298 with instructions that it be incorporated into the canon law curriculum. The Sextus liber decretalium (the Sixth Book of Decretals, often simply called the Liber sextus) thus took its place beside the Decretum and the Decretales Gregorii IX as a core element of the Corpus iuris canonici. The standard gloss of the Liber sextus was written by Giovanni d'Andrea in the early 1300s.

In the fragment of the Liber sextus seen here (from Book 5, Title 2, Chapter 20) Boniface himself discusses techniques for questioning suspected heretics. Giovanni d'Andrea's gloss surrounds the main text. The manuscript was probably copied in Bologna as the script is characteristic of Bolognese gothic book hands.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Richard Rouse (UCLA) assigns an Italian origin to the manuscript and calls attention to the line fillers, which look like exclamation points. Susan L'Engle (Saint Louis University) believes the manuscript is from Bologna or Padua, 1320-1330?, and notes the "Italian script, text keyed to gloss by letters of alphabet, an Italian practice."

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Decretales Gregorii IX, with gloss (Bologna or Avignon)
Date: c. 1240-50
Found in: Massa, Antonio. De usuris. Rome: Valerio Dorico, 1557.

The landscape of medieval jurisprudence changed radically in the 12th century, when the monk Gratian's revolutionary collection of canons and decrees known as the Decretum began to circulate, quickly becoming the core textbook for canon law. During the decades that followed, scholars and students identified many issues that current canon law was unable to resolve, and because of this, more and more bishops sent queries to the papacy seeking guidance for cases in their diocesan courts. The letters that the popes sent back to these bishops were known as "decretals." Since there was no system of court reporting, jurists who wished to keep abreast of the law would copy any decretal they came across. These informal private collections rapidly gave way to more systematic compilations that found their way into the canon law curriculum. Concerned by the lack of an "official" body of updated canon law, Pope Gregory IX instructed the canonist Raymond of Peñafort to assemble an authoritative supplement to the Decretum. The Decretales Gregorii IX (commonly referred to as the Liber extra) was made official canon law in September 1234.

The fragment visible here contains the end of Book 1, Title 14 and the beginning of Book 1, Title 15 in the second column, along with the standard academic commentary on that passage (known as the "gloss") in the first column. The standard gloss for the Decretales Gregorii IX was written by the jurist Bernard of Parma in the 1260s. The beginning of Title 15 (on anointing the sick) is marked by illuminated initials in both the gloss and the main text. Inside the front cover of the wrapper (not visible here), a medieval reader has carefully marked a passage (from X 1.14.14) using a drawing of a small hand (a notation called a manicula). The passage reads, in translation, "For it is preferable, especially in the ordination of priests, to have a few good ministers than many bad ones, for if a blind man leads another blind man, both will fall into the pit."

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Richard Rouse (UCLA) believes the manuscript originates in Italy or Avignon; Susan L'Engle (Saint Louis University) believes the manuscript is from Bologna and dates it 1240-1250.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Codex Iustiniani (Italy, probably Bologna)
Date: c. 1275-1325
Found in: Savoy (Duchy). Statuta Sabaudie. [Turin: Bernardus de Sylva, 1530.]

It was probably not mere coincidence that a leaf of the Corpus iuris civilis was used to cover this volume of legal statutes from the Duchy of Savoy. After all, Roman law as represented in the Corpus iuris civilis was the most influential source of legal thinking for medieval and early modern lawmakers. The Corpus iuris civilis was issued in three parts (the Codex, the Digest, and the Institutes) under the Emperor Justinian in 529-534. Issued from Constantinople at a time when the Roman Empire no longer had control over most of Western Europe, Justinian's laws were introduced in Italy in the 550s, but fell out of use over the following decades. Late in the 11th century the Corpus iuris civilis was rediscovered and students in Bologna began to learn about the law of ancient Rome. The sophistication and scope of Roman law made it hugely popular, and along with canon law it was quickly adopted as the European common law (the ius commune).

The fragment displayed here is from the Codex Iustiniani, which was a collection of all the surviving imperial legislation issued since the time of the emperor Hadrian (d. 138). It contains all of Book 11, Title 1-3 and the beginning of Title 4. These passages contain regulations pertaining to the compulsory transport of public property by private ship-owners. Like the Bible (no. 2), the Liber extra (no. 17), and the Liber sextus (no. 18), the Corpus iuris civilis was heavily glossed in the Middle Ages. The gloss here has not been identified, but may be that of the Italian jurist Accursius (d. 1263) who compiled the most well-known gloss of the Corpus iuris civilis in the 1220s.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment, and to Susan L'Engle (Saint Louis University) for the following: "Very little gloss, so probably pre-glossa ordinaria. Initials are blue, stroked in red, typical of Italy/Bologna. Sentence capitals in 1-line red."

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Cicero's "Dream of Scipio" (Italy)
Date: c. 1275-1325
Found in: Jame, Pierre. Aurea et famosissima practica. [Lyons: A. Dury, 1527.]

The parchment used to cover this volume features a portion of Cicero's "Dream of Scipio" ("Somnium Scipionis"), the sixth book of his De re publica (completed in 51 BCE). Cicero wrote De re publica as a Roman version of Plato's Republic, and the "Dream of Scipio" is the only substantial piece of the work to survive. In the dream, the grandfather of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus appears and tells Scipio about the composition of the heavens, the fleeting nature of worldly fame, and the immortality of the soul (the latter two topics are mentioned in the visible fragment).

The "Dream of Scipio" survives because the late-antique Neo-Platonist philosopher Macrobius (fl. 395-423) wrote a commentary on the dream, to which an early copyist appended a complete copy of Cicero's text. Macrobius's commentary - which contained an elaborate system of dream classification - was highly respected in the Middle Ages. It served as one of the most important avenues of transmission for Platonist ideas, and as a foundational source for the Scholastic movement and medieval science in general. The "Dream of Scipio" is mentioned in the French dream-poem the Roman de la rose (13th century) as well as Geoffrey Chaucer's dream-poems (14th century). Approximately fifty manuscripts of Macrobius's commentary are known.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Aquinas's Commentary on the Metaphysics
Date: c. 1375-1475
Found in: Barbier, Jean. Viatorium utriusque iuris. [Strassburg: Johann Pruss, 1493.]

The philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1226-1274) lived at a time of great intellectual development in European society. The works of Aristotle were being translated into Latin and widely disseminated at the same time that the first Christian universities were being founded. The nature of the relationship between reason and faith was being explored and debated across the continent, and Aquinas would ultimately become one of the most influential thinkers on this topic. Born in southern Italy, Aquinas entered the University of Naples before joining the Dominican Order and travelling to northern Europe where he studied under Saint Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), a pioneer in the application of Aristotelian philosophy to Christian thought. Late in his life, Aquinas wrote commentaries on twelve of Aristotle's works.

The manuscript leaves used as pastedowns at the front and rear of this volume contain part of Aquinas's Commentary on the Metaphysics (Book 7, Lecture 13) written in the early 1270s. Excerpts from Aristotle are underlined in red, and the rest of the text is Aquinas's detailed discussion of that passage. The radically abbreviated 15th-century script employs many symbols (sigla) that stand in for groups of letters or even entire words. At the left edge of the fragment we can see small "pricking holes," between which the scribe would have ruled parallel lines to help him write the text straight across the page. The Commentary on the Metaphysics was first printed in Paris in 1480, then again in Venice in 1493.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Sermon (Italy or Germany)
Date: c. 1325-1475
Found in: Bottoni, Bernardo. Casus longi super quinque libros decretalium. [Basel: Michael Wenssler, not after 1479.]

Preaching was an important part of Christian life throughout the Middle Ages. Early saints preached to the non-believers, communities listened to sermons from their priests on Sundays, monks and nuns heard sermons in their convents, and friars preached in the streets. In the words of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), "Among the many ministries that belong to the pastoral office, the virtue of holy preaching is the most excellent."

The main text of the fragment seen here is from an as-yet unidentified collection of sermons. The passage on top is about the "tears of Christ" (lachrimae Christi), a common topic for medieval sermons. The large, red capital "D" near the bottom of the page begins a new sermon with Luke 18:10: "Duo homines ascenderunt in templum ut orarent: unus pharisaeus et alter publicanus," that is, "Two men went up into the temple to pray: one a Pharisee, and the other a publican." If you look carefully at these sermons, you may be able to see that the text has been "pointed," marked with very fine strokes to indicate places to breathe and pause. The fact that the text is pointed confirms that, as we might expect, the sermon was meant to be read aloud.

At the top of the fragment is another interesting feature: a late-medieval inscription. According to this note, this printed book was given to the Carthusian monastery of St. Albans near Trier by "Frater Paulus de Muntzdail." We know from other sources that Brother Paul held a doctorate in canon law and that, before moving to Trier to become a Carthusian, he served as the provost of the Church of Saint Mary in Flanheim, and the rector of the parish church in Kreuznach near Mainz. He died in 1487.

    -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Unknown (Italy)
Date: c. 1350-1450
Found in: Corpus iuris civilis. 12 vols. Lyons: Guillaume Rouillé, 1581.

Each of the twelve small volumes of this 1581 edition of the Corpus iuris civilis is neatly covered in parchment featuring passages from a single unidentified work. The most noticeable feature of the text is the nearly constant citation of passages from different books of the Bible, including Kings, Daniel, Proverbs, Tobias, Ecclesiastes, and Chronicles (Paralipomenon).

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Legendary (Italy)
Date: c. 975-1075
Found in: Rolandinus, de Passageriis. Flos testamentorum. Padua: Matheus Cerdonis, 1482.

From the earliest days of Christianity, the faithful (and not-yet-faithful) were inspired by the words and deeds of particularly holy people, many of whom came to be regarded as saints. Hagiography (stories about the lives of the saints) was a popular genre of literature throughout the Middle Ages, and the Divine Office even contained daily readings about the Church's early martyrs.

Among the oldest and most beautiful fragments in the Yale Law Library's collection, the pastedowns of this incunable are taken from a manuscript recounting the lives of early saints. At the front (not displayed) we find part of the "Fabulous Deeds" ("Acta fabulosa") of the apostle Saint Bartholomew, written by the Pseudo-Abdia Babylonio, probably in the early 10th century. At the rear, we find the end of the "Acta fabulosa" and the beginning of "The Passion of Saint Alexander, Pope and Martyr" ("Passio Sancti Alexandri martyris papae"). Looking out from his inhabited initial, a beautifully-rendered Saint Alexander gestures towards his tale with an outstretched hand. Note that the beginning ("CUM OMNIUM") is also marked off by a special "display script," in this case an all-capital script called Uncial, which after the 8th century was generally only used for headings like this one.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment. From Elizabeth A. R. Brown (CUNY), Hope Mayo (Harvard University), Alison Stones (University of Pittsburgh), and David Ganz (King's College London): "Hope Mayo says [the fragment] could go as late as [the 12th century], but probably earlier. [The fragment is from a] Legendary. Could be a big book -- one needs to see verso + the fragment at the beginning [of the volume]." Here are images of the verso of the fragment shown above and of the companion fragment in the front pastedown of the volume.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Unknown
Date: 1350-1425
Found in: Repetitiones decem legum. [Paris: André Bocard for Jean Petit, 1507.]

The nature of the fragments used here as pastedowns is not entirely clear. The front pastedown (the first of the two images above) contains a list of benediction prayers for the Mass, some for the feast of the Virgin Mary (also known as the feast of the Assumption), and others more commonly associated with the feast of All Saints. Looking for clues on the other side of the leaf we find that the half-page of text there is severely effaced and of little help. Meanwhile, the rear pastedown (the second image) is a page from a completely unrelated manuscript (it appears to be a prayer book of some kind). We can say, however, that the front manuscript fragment is written in a low-quality version of the cursive book hand known as Anglicana, and appears to be English in origin. This judgment is supported by the fact that the title page bears an early inscription by "Cuthberti Shirbroke de Rockeland," a cleric and doctor of canon law from a noted Norfolk family.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Mahzor
Date: c. 1300-1500
Found in: Parsons, Robert. Elizabethae reginae Angliae edictum promulgatum Londini 29. Novemb. anni M.D. XCI. [Rome?: s.n.], 1593.

Alongside the many pieces of the Christian liturgy preserved in the Law Library's bindings, we find a reminder that medieval Europe was home to many vibrant Jewish communities as well. Michael Rand, of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, has identified the fragment seen here is a folio from a mahzor, a Jewish service book used on the high holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and the pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot). According to Rand, the folio features a liturgical poem (piyyut) of a type called yotzer. This yotzer was used to celebrate Shavuot (which falls seven weeks after Passover and corresponds to the Christian feast of Pentecost). It is titled "Ayelet Ahevim Matnat Sinai" and deals with the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. The yotzer bears the name "Shim'on" in the acrostic, which has led some scholars to speculate that it was composed by the 10th-century poet Shim'on bar Yitshaq of Mainz. Rand points out that this particular poem was employed in the Ashkenazic, Roman (i.e. Italian), and Romaniote (i.e., Byzantine) prayer rites, and the formal script found here (called "square script") appears to be Italian.

This fragment has been added to the online catalog of Hebrew manuscripts maintained by the Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Israel; the record (in Hebrew) can be viewed here. Thanks to Dr. Ezra Chwat of the National Library of Israel for cataloging the fragment and providing additional information about it.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Breviary (England)
Date: c. 1225-1325
Found in: [Year Books, Edward III.] Regis pie memorie Edwardi Tertii a quadragesimo ad quinquagesimum. London: Richard Tottell, 1565.

Here we find a good example of how 15th- and 16th-century bookbinders used fragments of medieval manuscripts as "strengtheners." Strengtheners are strips of parchment or paper that were wrapped around the inner edge of the first and last sections of a book in order to protect them at the point where the paper might otherwise rub against rough portions of the binding. The Law Library has about twenty-five early books with visible fragments of medieval manuscripts used as guards in this way. While most are not large enough to be displayed well, some of the fragments can be identified. As we learn more about the bookbinding trade in the first several decades of print, even small fragments will become valuable pieces of evidence about the distribution of manuscripts in the late Middle Ages.

The strengthener seen here is from a breviary with both sides featuring elements of the Divine Office for Holy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter). On the left side we see a decorated initial "A" beginning the first reading for the service of Matins (Lamentations 1:1-2). On the right side we see pieces of the music and text for short liturgical chants called "antiphons," which were used to introduce the Psalms during Lauds. Notice how the initials in the antiphons have been lightly decorated with little faces.

   -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Breviary (Germany)
Date: c. 1150-1200
Found in: Mascardi, Alderano. Communes i. v. conclusiones, ad generalem quorum cunque statutorum interpretationem acommodatae. Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter, 1609.

The fragment of a breviary seen here was cut in half to make the cover for this book, and it remained in place for almost four hundred years, accented by decorative pieces of stamped leather. When a bomb exploded in the Law School in May 2003, the book got wet, causing parts of the cover to come unglued. When the book was repaired, the cover was removed completely, allowing us to see both sides of the fragment. What we find is a portion of the service for Lauds on the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost. The end of the reading (from Proverbs) is followed by the lesson (attributed to the theologian Bede around 700), and an antiphon based on the Gospel passage that forms the subject of that lesson (Luke 8:10-13). The neumes here are of the Messine variety, arranged on a four-line staff with the F-line in red.

   -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment, and to George Brown (Stanford University) for correcting the identity of the text and its attribution to Bede.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Antiphonal (Italy)
Date: c. 1050-1150
Found in: Denari, Odofredo. Refugium advocatorum. Milan: Giovanni Giacomo da Legnano, [1522].

The unassuming example presented here is one of the more unusual medieval items in the Law Library's collection. Originally, this 16th-century book was covered with a piece of parchment from a medieval antiphonal with music for the divine office on the feast of Saint Paul (January 25). At some point the parchment fell off or was removed, leaving behind a remarkably clear ink transfer of the music and text on the board beneath. Although the writing appears in reverse as a result of the transfer, it is possible to make out the text as well as a series of musical notes (called "neumes"). These neumes are arranged around a single red line which, according to letter-clefs in the margin, marks the F-line. Approximately fifteen different styles of medieval neumes have been identified, and this fragment has characteristics of the Beneventan and Messine varieties. Much of our understanding of the history of medieval musical notation has relied on fragments found in localized bindings.

   -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Missal (France?)
Date: c. 1150-1225

Found in: La Pape, Guy de. Lectura subtilis et aurea ... Guidonis Pape. [Lyons: for Simon Vincent?, 1517.]

The parchment cover for this 16th-century book is made from a medieval missal. The folio visible here contains the chants, prayers, and readings for celebrating Mass on the first Sunday after Easter, the Octava Paschae. The service opens with the introit (introitus), an antiphon sung as the priest approached the altar. Here the text is accompanied by neumes (early musical notes) that appear to be of the German or Saint Gallen variety. Next comes the collect (oratio), the prayer said before the Epistle reading, which here begins "Presta quaesumus omnipotens…" The Epistle reading is 1 John 5:4-10, and it is followed by the Gospel reading, which starts with John 20:24. Along the deteriorating spine of the book you may be able to see that additional manuscript fragments were used as linings.

    -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Gradual (Italy)
Date: c. 1425-1525

Found in: Naples (Kingdom). Capitula regni una cum apparatu, ac utilissimis, et necessariis prioribus. [Campagna: Domenico Nibbio], 1561.

This cover is made from an Italian gradual and features part of the tract (tractus) from the Mass on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. Tracts replaced the alleluia chants during Lent and other penitential times of the liturgical year. Early tracts consisted of verses from a single psalm, but this later example is based on Matthew 21:33. In its entirety, the tract reads, "Et maceriam circumdedit et circumfodit et plantavit vineam Soreth et hedificavit turrim in medio ejus." That is, "And he enclosed it with a wall, and surrounded it by a trench; then he planted a vineyard of Sorec grapes, and he built a tower in the middle of it."

While most of the manuscript fragments in this exhibit were recycled into bindings centuries ago, this one was probably used fairly recently, perhaps early in the 20th century (the Law Library acquired this volume in 1947). It was not uncommon for booksellers to use the large pages from manuscript graduals and other choir books to re-cover volumes as a way to make early books more attractive. In fact, some German monastic libraries had been doing the same thing since the 17th century.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment, and to William Mahrt (Stanford University) for the following: "The text is an Old Testament canticle (I think from Isaiah), Matthew is only quoting it. Tracts are Psalm texts, but for Holy Saturday, the pieces are on canticles (from other books of the O.T.); they are set to the same kind of melodies as mode-eight tracts of Lent, and so are sometimes called tracts, but are more properly called canticles. Their melodies are the simplest usage of the tract formulae, simpler than the other tracts. The incipit of the canticle is 'Vinea facta est'."

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Epistolary (Northern France)
Date: c. 1175-1250

Found in: Bartolomeo, da Brescia. Casus Decretorum. Basel: Nicolaus Kessler, 1489.

The parchment used here as a pastedown comes from an epistolary and shows the epistle readings for two Masses. The first reading is 1 Peter 1:1-7, which was for the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter in Antioch (Cathedra Sancti Petri in Antiochia) on February 22. Originally this feast, commemorating Saint Peter as the first bishop of Antioch, was probably a Christianization of the ancient Roman holiday known as Caristia, when families gathered together to honor the dead and settle feuds. The second column features part of the reading for the feast of Saint Mathias the Apostle on February 24 (Acts 1:15-26). Note the red and blue pen-flourished initials used to mark the beginnings of the readings.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The liturgy of the Church in medieval Europe was built around two core elements: the Mass and the Divine Office. The Mass was a once-daily celebration of the sacrament of Holy Communion. The Divine Office was a sequence of eight services that made up the devotional prayers of the canonical hours (Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline). Each day members of the clergy were supposed to attend or celebrate Mass and recite the entire Divine Office, though surely some priests found the process onerous and focused on the major services: Matins (a combination of Vigils and Lauds), the Mass, and Vespers. Laypeople were encouraged to attend Mass at least every Sunday (as well as on special feast days), but did not say the Divine Office (though lay devotional books based on the canonical hours did emerge in the 12th century).

The Christian liturgy was elaborately structured and changed from day to day, week to week, and season to season throughout the liturgical year. Furthermore, there were numerous regional variations. As a result, priests and clerics relied on service books to guide them through their local liturgy.

In the early Middle Ages, a "solemn" or "high" Mass was typically celebrated by a priest accompanied by a group of assisting ministers and a choir. They used four separate books: a sacramentary (the prayers), an epistolary (the Epistle readings), an evangelary (the Gospel readings), and a gradual (the sung elements). As demand increased for "private" or "low" Masses celebrated by a priest alone (primarily for the commemoration of the dead), the four books were combined into a single, more manageable volume. The "missal," as this was called, almost completely replaced the separate service books by the early 13th century.

The story was similar for the Divine Office. Prior to the 11th century, several books were needed for its celebration, including an antiphonal (the musical elements), collectar (the prayers), lectionary (the scripture readings), martyrology (readings on the lives of the saints), and psalter (the Psalms). Eventually these were combined into a single volume, called a "breviary." The popularity of breviaries grew rapidly in the early 13th century as the itinerant lifestyle of Franciscan and Dominican friars demanded a more portable service book.

It is possible that this consolidation rendered some sacramentaries, antiphonals, and other older service books obsolete, allowing their expensive parchment pages to become a source of durable bookbinding materials.

      -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Fragment of a Breviary, c. 1225-1325, found in Regis pie memorie Edwardi Tertii a quadragesimo ad quinquagesimum. London: Richard Tottell, 1565. Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Bible (Italy)
Date: c. 1100
Found in: La Pape, Guy de. Singularia Guidonis Papae. [Lyons: Jacob Giunta], 1540.

This example illustrates nicely one of the most common uses for medieval manuscript fragments in 15th- and 16th-century bindings: spine linings. Linings were used to reinforce the spines of books before their covers were applied, and the strength and flexibility of parchment made it an attractive choice for this duty. The Law Library has over thirty books with damaged covers that allow one to see medieval manuscript fragments used as linings; many other fragments no doubt remain hidden.

On these linings we see part of a Bible, in particular elements of Luke 1:39-40 and 1:46-47 along with both interlinear and marginal notations. These notations, known as the "gloss" (from the Latin glossa, meaning "glossary"), were assembled by scholars from a variety of commentaries on the Bible. By about 1170, manuscripts of glossed Bibles show enough similarities that one can speak of a standard or "ordinary" gloss. This ordinary gloss was an important tool for scholars and students working with scripture. As we can see elsewhere in this exhibit, glosses were also written for the core texts of Roman and canon law.

      -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Richard Rouse (UCLA) for clarifying the dating and origin of the manuscript fragment.

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Fragment: Bible
Date: Before c. 1100
Found in: Constitutiones marchie anconitane noviter emendate. [Perugia:] Franciscus Baldassaris, 1502.

Early Latin-speaking Christians used several versions of the books of the Bible, which had been translated piecemeal from Greek and Hebrew. Between 382 and 405, the scholar and theologian Saint Jerome translated anew the entire Old and New Testaments. Jerome was born in the Balkans, educated in Rome, and spent much of his life living in seclusion in the Levant. His new Latin translation—now referred to as the Vulgate—was highly influential and by the 13th century was effectively the standard text of the Bible.

The leaf of the Bible seen here is from a manuscript most likely produced in the 11th century, though possibly earlier, making it one of the oldest texts in the Law Library's collection. The outside of the folio features most of chapters 38 and 39 from the Book of Ezekiel. While the visible portion of the fragment is quite plain, the text on the underside is marked by two colored initials. Note how an early owner of the Constitutiones marchie anconitane, not planning carefully enough when labeling it, was forced to create a unusual ligature of "M" and "A" within the abbreviation for "marchie."

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In 15th- and 16th-century Europe, reusing and recycling was second nature. Linen rags were turned into paper, human urine was used to create lye, iron was melted down and refashioned. Bookbinders, for their part, cut apart discarded medieval manuscripts and reused the strong, flexible parchment in their bindings. Untold numbers of these fragments have survived until the present day, some completely hidden and others strikingly obvious. Each of these slips of parchment can help historians recover a bit more information about the distribution and popularity of medieval texts, the evolution of scripts, and the history of printing and binding.

The Yale Law Library houses nearly 150 early printed books whose bindings incorporate visible pieces of medieval manuscript. These fragments range in size from tiny scraps that can barely be seen, to entire sheets used to cover large volumes. Regardless of their size, each fragment offers both a keyhole peek into the medieval world, and a glimpse of Europe as it encountered the power of print.

In this exhibit we have tried to display books that reflect the diversity of medieval material that can be found in the Law Library's bindings. As you explore, note the many styles and grades of medieval script, and the way scribes organized information and decoration on the page. Also, mark how bookbinders used the fragments, and the range of medieval texts to which they had access. (Bear in mind that books were often bound far from the city where they were printed.)

Only a small portion of the Law Library's medieval material is featured in this exhibit. In addition to the many fragments, the Rare Book Collection holds 21 complete medieval legal manuscripts, and 136 books printed before 1500. If you would like to make use of these materials for your own research or teaching, please contact the Rare Book Librarian.

     -- Notes by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Stanford University

Fragments from a liturgical service book, ca. 1225-1325, bound in a volume of Year Book reports for the reign of Henry VI (London, 1500?-1547?). Larger versions of this and other images are available from the Medieval binding fragments gallery of the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. If you can provide additional information about the manuscript fragment displayed here, you are invited to send an email to <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

"Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings" is curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes and Mike Widener, and is on display through May 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Nearly 150 early printed books in the Yale Law Library have bindings that incorporate visible pieces of medieval manuscript. A number of these books are featured in the latest exhibit from the Law Library's Rare Book Collection, "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings." The exhibit is on display through May 2010 in the Law Library.

In 15th- and 16th-century Europe, recycling was second nature. Bookbinders, for their part, cut apart discarded medieval manuscripts and reused the strong, flexible and expensive parchment in their bindings. These scraps reveal information about the distribution and popularity of medieval texts, the evolution of scripts, and the history of printing and binding. A precious few of them preserve the only surviving fragments of long-lost texts.

The exhibit reflects the diversity of medieval material in the Law Library's bindings. The Bible and liturgical manuscripts are well represented, some with early forms of musical notation. Four of the law books contain legal texts in their bindings. Other examples include a sermon, a fragment of Cicero, and two Hebrew manuscripts. One of the fragments is the oldest item in the Law Library's collection, dating from around 975-1075.

While most of the fragments are identified and tentatively dated, a couple remain mysteries. The exhibit coincides with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, March 18-20 at Yale University. Conference attendees will be invited to try their hand at identifying the fragments.

The exhibit was curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The Rare Books Exhibition Gallery is located in the lower level of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room. For those unable to visit the exhibit in person, it will appear in installments here on the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog. Additional images are available in the Law Library's Flickr gallery.

The January 12, 2010 issue of the Yale Daily News has an excellent article on our "Images of Justice" exhibit, curated by my intern Seth Quidachay-Swan of Southern Connecticut State University. Thanks to the reporter, Alison Greenberg, for a well-written piece.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Images of Justice" is an exhibit prepared by Seth Quidachay-Swan, who recently completed an internship in the Lillian Goldman Law Library as part of his work toward a Master's in Library Science from Southern Connecticut State University. Seth will receive his M.L.S. in January 2010, and he also has a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (2008).

In his research for the exhibit, Seth drew on Images of Justice, 96 YALE LAW JOURNAL 1727 (1987), by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis of the Yale Law School. This article has evolved into a book that will be out soon: Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: From Renaisance Town Halls to 21st Century Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2010).

The exhibit is on display on Level L2 of the Law Library, in the wall case to the left of the door to the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room.

IMAGES OF JUSTICE

The image of Justice has been around for over 2000 years. Her lineage traces back to Egypt, Greece and Rome, in depictions of the goddesses Ma’at, Themis, Dike and Justitia. During the medieval period, Justice was adopted by Christian iconography as a representation of ancient virtue. Images of Justice were also common in Renaissance art and texts. Even today, Justice remains recognizable. Her image adorns many modern government buildings and court houses.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (Amsterdam, 1735).

Today, Justice is most recognizable as a blindfolded woman with a sword and scales. However, earlier depictions of Justice displayed a wide array of allegorical meanings. Justice’s iconic scales measure the strength of a case. Images of a dog and snake with Justice are thought to represent friendship and hatred that could corrupt judgment. Sometimes, Justice’s sword is replaced with a fasces, the Roman symbol of a judge’s power to punish. Two-faced depictions of Justice sought to dispel fears of blind justice morphing into blind fury by prudently leaving one face unblindfolded to carefully wield her sword in meting out judgments and one face blindfolded to show her impartiality in judging the merits of cases.

Joost de Damhoudere, Praxis rerum civilium (Antwerp, 1567).

Renaissance iconography often depicted Justice with her sister virtues: Prudence (looking into a mirror), Temperance (holding a bridle and water jug), and Fortitude (wearing a lion skin or carrying a broken column). This artistic tradition continued into the 17th and 18th centuries, but is rarely used today.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (Frankfurt, 1699).

Why is Justice so recognizable? Perhaps because Justice represents an idealized model of the legal system, with which political leaders and thinkers throughout history have sought to align themselves. For example, an image of Justice adorns a 1766 edition of Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments). In this seminal work on criminal justice, Beccaria argued that punishments should be based on the injury caused to society, and that the prevention of crime was more important than its punishment. The text’s portrayal of Justice underscores Beccaria’s argument: Justice turns away from the barbaric and arbitrary punishments of medieval times in favor of a more enlightened penal code.

Cesare Baccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Haarlem, 1766).

 -- SETH QUIDACHAY-SWAN, Southern Connecticut State University

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance in preparing this exhibit:

David Warrington
Librarian for Special Collections
Harvard Law School Library

Kathryn James
Assistant Curator, Early Modern Books and Manuscripts
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Christine McCarthy
Chief Conservator
Yale University Library

Tara Kennedy
Preservation Field Services Librarian
Yale University Library

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Benjamin Yousey-Hindes
Stanford University

The portrait of Hugo Grotius is from: Hugo Grotius, Inleydinghe tot de Hollandsche rechtsgheleerdheydt (Haarlem, 1636). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 8

For the 17th century Mare liberum and Mare clausum were the centerpieces of the debate between advocates of exclusive and inclusive uses of ocean space. In England, Mare clausum reigned supreme as the authority on all questions of sovereignty at sea, although its authority on more mundane legal issues of maritime law yielded late in that century to Charles Molloy's De jure maritime et navali, or, A Treatise of Affaires Maritime, and of Commerce (1676), which dealt with mercantile questions such as bills of exchange, insurance and maritime loans.

Molloy, Charles (1646-1690). De jure maritimo et navali (London, 1682).
This popular work went through 12 editions between 1676 and 1778.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Neither Welwood nor Selden dealt decisively with the question of how far out to sea a sovereign’s territorial sea could extend: Welwood seemed to suggest one hundred miles, but left the issue open; Selden finessed it entirely.  In time, British maritime power rendered such matters moot: as an old saw had it, "Britannia rules the waves – and waives the rules."

But by the end of the century, support was growing elsewhere for some limitation to the seaward extent of territorial waters. What emerged was the so-called "cannon shot rule", which deferred in theory to the idea that property rights could be acquired by actual occupation, and in practice to the effective range of shore-based cannon: about three nautical miles. The rule has long been associated with Cornelis van Bijnkershoek (1673-1743), a Dutch jurist who, especially in his De dominio maris (1702), advocated a middle ground between the extremes of Grotius and Selden, accepting both the freedom of states to navigate and exploit the resources the of the high seas and a right of coastal state to assert wide-ranging rights in a thus limited territorial sea.

Bijnkershoek, Cornelis van (1673-1743). De dominio maris (The Hague, 1703).
Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library.

Viewed in historical perspective, what emerged from the 17th-century debate were not just these two legal regimes, but a more inclusive one – international law – to govern humanity's common interest in the use of shared space and shared resources, interest as to which the future may well offer exhibits of its own.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 7

In supporting his case with a massive showing of state practice, Selden was able to draw upon historical research done by the Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, Sir John Borough, whose work, The Sovereignty of the British Seas Proved by Records, History, and the Municipall Lawes of the Kingdome, written in 1633, was published only posthumously in 1651.

Borough, John (d. 1643). The soveraignty of the British seas (London, 1739).
The third edition.
Collection of Edward Gordon.

Grotius, too, was able to draw upon earlier work. Some of his arguments had been anticipated by the writings of Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), an Italian émigré who became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, and at least as prominently, an admiralty lawyer in London, representing the king of Spain. Gentili died before the publication of Mare liberum, but in his notes in defense of Spanish claims, published posthumously in 1613 as Hispanicae advocationis, he organized the issues far more systematically than the youthful Grotius had been able to do in Mare liberum.

Like Grotius, Gentili said that under Roman law, consistently with natural law, the open sea was common property. But he recognized the gap between principle and practice, bridging it by distinguishing dominium (ownership) from jurisdictio (jurisdiction) – the latter, unlike the former, being applicable to the high seas. He also distinguished coastal waters from the high seas, insisting, however, that a coastal state’s right to control its territorial seas did not justify closing them to foreign navigation.

His ideas anticipated those of De jure belli ac pacis as well. In his use of phrases like ius inter gentes and societas humana, for example, Gentili may be said to have initiated the liberation of the law of nations conceptually from both Roman law and the guardianship of theology. Not until the late 19th century, however, was the extent of influence on Grotius recognized by scholars. Only then did Gentili's reputation as a founder of modern international law begin to rival that of Grotius himself.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Gentili, Alberico (1552-1608). Hispanicae advocationis libri duo (Hanover, 1613).
Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 6

William Welwood's work eventually drew a response from a Dutch lawyer, Dirck Graswinckel, entitled Mare liberi vindiciae adversus Gulielmum Welwodum (1653), but its relative obscurity today owes more to the publication in 1635 of Mare clausum, by John Selden (1594-1654), an English jurist, scholar and polymath whose erudition rivaled that of Grotius himself. Selden had begun researching and writing a refutation of Mare liberum soon after its publication, even before Welwood's two treatises appeared. He had completed it by around 1618, by which time, however, a coup d'etat had taken place in the Netherlands, Grotius had been imprisoned, and relations between England and the new government were unsettled. King James was reluctant anyway to provoke a dispute with Denmark, which had extensive claims of its own in the North Atlantic. Under the circumstances, the moment seemed inauspicious for a verbal assault on Grotius and the freedom of the seas – and James refused to publish Mare clausum.

Selden apparently abandoned the project for nearly seventeen years. By then, Grotius, having escaped from prison in 1621 and living in exile in France, had published his more mature and celebrated masterpiece, De jure belli ac pacis (1625), later translated into English as The Rights of Warre and Peace (1654), in which he toned down some of the extravagant positions he had taken in his youthful defense of the seizure of the Santa Catarina, constructing instead a more sophisticated basis for a law of nature and nations independent of empire or religious guardianship that was, not coincidentally, notably less lenient in justifying the resort to armed force.

By then, Selden's personal status had changed, too. Having become embroiled in parliamentary politics, he himself had been imprisoned and was now ensconced in the Tower of London. James meanwhile had been succeeded by Charles I, whose maritime policy was more aggressive than that of either of his two predecessors. In returning to his attack on Mare liberum, therefore, Selden was faced not only with the task of exposing weaknesses in Mare liberum, as Welwood had done and as he himself presumably had already done in his 1618 draft, but also with the more demanding one of taking into account the comprehensive legal regime Grotius had subsequently presented in De jure belli ac pacis. And he had to do both in a way that ingratiated himself with Charles.

Selden's treatise, like Grotius's, is remarkable for its erudition, too much so for modern readers, who tend to see in both works an excess of pedantry, but decisively impressive to the two men's own contemporaries. Selden conceded the innocence of harmless navigation and commerce, but maintained that restrictions on them do not necessarily violate the law of nature and the law of nations. He purported to show that the open sea is not everywhere common, is capable of appropriation, and in fact from time to time had been appropriated and occupied. As to the Spanish and Portuguese claims, whose legitimacy England continued to deny, Selden said that, while on general principles they could be valid, in actual practice neither of the two countries ever acquired valid title or command to the areas they claimed.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Selden, John (1584-1654). Mare clausum (London, 1635).
The first edition of Selden’s Mare clausum is also famous as the first use of Arabic type in England. The map depicts what ancient geographers called "the British sea."
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Selden, John (1584-1654). Mare clausum: the right and dominion of the sea (London, 1663).
The second edition of the English translation of Mare clausum.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). Of the law of warre and peace (London, 1655).
The second English edition, appearing only a year after the first. The portrait bears Grotius's motto, "Ruit Hora" ("Time flies"), reflecting his busy and productive career as a jurist, diplomat, and author.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 5

England's own claims to maritime sovereignty ran counter to both Spain and Portugal's and to Holland's. Even during the reign of Queen Elizabeth – and notwithstanding her rebuke to the Spanish ambassador – England claimed sovereign rights seaward. During her reign these rights extended to the waters immediately adjacent to its coast, but her successors extended them out into the Atlantic, from Cape Finisterre in Spain around the British Isles, and in the North Sea to the coast of Norway.

The first British treatise on the law of the sea appeared in 1590. Written by William Welwood (fl. 1566-1624), a professor of mathematics and then law at St. Andrews (Scotland), The Sea Law of Scotland defended royal dominion over the seas out to a distance of eighty miles off the Scottish coast. The work pleased the king of Scotland, James VI, who had objected strongly, though ineffectively, to what he regarded as the intrusion of the Dutch herring fleet into Scots waters, and who happily rewarded Welwood for lending legal support to his cause.

When James succeeded to the crown of England, following Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, he issued a proclamation claiming all fisheries along the British and Irish coasts, and prohibiting foreign vessels from fishing in these waters without a royal license. To support his position, he asked Welwood to refute Mare liberum directly.

This Welwood did in two treatises: An Abridgement of All the Sea-Lawes (1613) and, in an amplified Latin version inspired in part by James's wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, De dominio maris (1615). Quoting extensively from biblical sources and Roman lawyers, Welwood rejected Grotius's claim that the waters of the world had always been regarded as indivisible; and defended the right of a coastal state to fish and to navigate – and to impose taxes with respect to either – in the waters adjacent to its coasts. Welwood is said to have been the first to clearly enunciate a coastal state's authority over living resources adjacent to its shores. What is more, and of more than passing interest, he based his argument, at least in part, upon the risk of exhaustion of fisheries posed by otherwise unregulated promiscuous use.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Welwood, William (fl. 1578-1622). An abridgement of all sea-lawes (London, 1613).
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 4

As it happens, the publication of Mare liberum came too late to influence negotiations with Spain. It served instead to ignite a fierce debate over the freedom of the seas that continued throughout the 17th century – what later scholars were to call the "Battle of the Books." Grotius contended that nature and public utility alike forbid the acquisition of property rights in the sea. Unlike land, the sea (and the air) cannot in practice be occupied, demonstrating that nature intended it to be free to all to use. Being inexhaustible in use, moreover, it is not susceptible of occupation, which is necessary when the utility of things can be preserved only if they become private property.

The defense of Portugal's imperial claims in the East Indies fell initially to Seraphim de Freitas, a Portuguese theologian-jurist, professor at the University of Valladolid, in a treatise published in 1625 under the name De iusto imperio Lusitanorum Asiatico (On the Just Empire of the Portuguese in Asia). Vastly larger and longer than Grotius's mere pamphlet, De iusto imperio was highly critical not only of the youthful Grotius's arguments, but of its factual inaccuracies and misleading references and inferences as well.

Freitas contended that the right to free trade and navigation, whatever its roots in natural law, had never become a part of the law of nations. A sovereign could exclude foreigners from his territories or commerce and could forbid his subjects to trade with them. He conceded that the pope lacked an abstract right to accord dominion over newly discovered territories and peoples, but insisted that his authority as the spiritual dominus mundi entitled him to grant an exclusive right to spread the Christian faith and civilization. Since, to be effective, this right necessarily involves both trade and limited conquest, the pope had the authority to grant Portugal-Spain the right to exclude other powers from the east.

De iusto imperio was expanded upon four years later by a Spanish jurist named Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575-1655), in a treatise entitled Disputationem de Indiarum iure. Scarcely known or written about by English-speaking scholars, De Indiarum iure is regarded by some Spanish scholars as the most systematic juridical formulation of the legitimacy of Spain and Portugal's 17th century claims. Unlike Freitas, Solórzano Pereira said that, regardless of the legitimacy of the 15th century papal grants on which they were said to be based, Portugal's actual control and occupation of the new territories were sufficient in themselves to satisfy the requirements for retrospective ownership (prescription) recognized in both Roman and customary law.

Neither Freitas's nor Solórzano Pereira's treatise had as much influence in the 17th century as their intellectual content warranted, perhaps because they were too learned and too long, but in any event because the center of intellectual interest and political power was shifting from Spain to England.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Solórzano Pereira, Juan de (1575-1655). De Indiarum jure (Lyons, 1672).
This work became the definitive treatise on the laws governing Spain’s overseas colonies.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 3

The tension generated by Spanish and Portuguese claims to maritime dominion intensified at the start of the 17th century. An exponential growth in world trade and, especially, aggressive efforts by the Dutch East India Company to protect its right to engage in it, brought the issue to a head. The Company was organized by the Dutch government in 1602 with a view to expanding the capital base, and enhancing the collective security, of the individual ship owners and captains who up to that point had had to fend off Spanish and Portuguese naval vessels on their own.

The stage was set for a dramatic confrontation. It took place in February 1603, when a small fleet belonging to the Company attacked and overwhelmed a richly laden Portuguese vessel, the Santa Catarina, near Singapore. The captured vessel and cargo were brought back to the Netherlands, where a Dutch court ordered the proceeds of its sale distributed to the Company, the admiral of the fleet and his crew. A furious row erupted over the legality of the seizure, which struck many as immoral – in fact, scarcely distinguishable from outright piracy.

The case presented complex legal issues. The need to defend its right to participate in the East India trade had arisen in the course of the young Dutch republic's war of independence against Spain, which by then held dominion over Portugal and regarded the Dutch as no more than rebellious subjects. Moreover, as some of the Company's dissident shareholders themselves pointed out, the Company had been organized as a private mercantile enterprise, not as a vehicle for engaging in an aggressive war, much less for enriching itself in the process.

Some of the shareholders threatened to withdraw their capital, to form a new enterprise in competition, even to make common cause with a French company projected by Henry IV. The Company’s very existence was thought to be at risk – and with it the future of the young republic's burgeoning overseas commerce.

To win over popular support, the Company turned to Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), then only twenty-one years old and too new to the practice of law to have been hired to handle the Santa Catarina litigation itself, but already renown throughout Europe for his prodigious erudition, his knowledge of the wisdom and practices of nations from biblical and classical times. Henry IV himself had greeted Grotius's arrival in France as a fifteen-year-old diplomatic attaché by having a medal struck in his honor, declaring the young man to be nothing less than "the miracle of Holland." In effect, Grotius's defense of the Company's position was tantamount to a celebrity endorsement, as valuable to the Company in this respect as by the persuasiveness of whatever legal argument he could muster in support of its actions.

Grotius immediately set about preparing a treatise that would portray the Company's action in the context of a comprehensive theory of the law of prize. But before he could finish it, it had already been overtaken by events. The dissident shareholders had made good on their threat, to the extent of withdrawing their capital, but had failed to organize another company or to persuade the French to do so. Just as important, the Company’s commercial success had precipitated a change in public sentiment, effectively silencing critics of its aggressiveness. Moreover, and perhaps even more critically, an end was in sight to Holland's decades-old war of independence from Spain. The moment, perforce, was inauspicious for a verbal assault on Spain and Portugal's claims to a global monopoly. Grotius's monograph, substantially completed by 1604, went unpublished – for the time being.

Grotius seems to have been dissatisfied with the work, anyway. In a letter written in November 1606, he says: "My little work on Indian affairs is finished, but I do not know whether it ought to appear in its present form, or only those parts which relate to the general law of war and prize."

By 1608, however, events had taken another turn. The Company was becoming increasingly alarmed over reports that, in pursuit of a truce with Spain and of obtaining its recognition of Dutch independence, the Dutch government was prepared to concede Spain’s right to'exclude the Dutch from the eastern seas. At the Company's urging, Grotius returned to his manuscript, rewriting the introduction and expanding the conclusion of one of its chapters, Chapter XII – the one in which he dealt specifically with the legal basis of the freedom of the seas.

This one chapter, entitled Mare liberum, was published the following spring, by itself, as a pamphlet. No mention was made of the identity of its author (although the fact that it was none other than the celebrated Grotius quickly became known locally and in England). The rest of the monograph was consigned to Grotius's personal papers. Though alluded to in his private correspondence, its existence was practically unknown until a manuscript copy was discovered nearly three centuries later and published, in 1868, under the title De jure praedae (On the Law of Prize).

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). De jure praedae commentarius [facsimile] (New York, 1952).
A facsimile of the manuscript Grotius completed in 1604, showing Chapter XII, which was published five years later as Mare liberum.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). De jure praedae commentarius (The Hague, 1868).
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). Mare liberum (Leiden, 1618).
The 2nd edition of Mare liberum, and the first to bear Grotius’s name.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). Hugo Grotius Mari libero et P. Merula De maribus (Leiden, 1633).
This edition includes a related work on maritime affairs by the Dutch scholar Paulus Merula.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). Vrye zeevaert (Haarlem, 1636).
An early Dutch translation of Mare liberum.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum
Part 2

Early efforts to codify maritime law did little to resolve claims growing out of acrimonious political disputes over rights to trade with the Americas and the East Indies. The most extensive of these claims were ones made beginning in the mid 15th century by Spain and Portugal, respectively, following the discoveries of the New World and maritime trade routes to Asia. Initially based upon papal grants, the claims were said to have been established by an award made by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, perfected the following year in the Treaty of Tordesillas. Together they purported to justify the exclusion of other states not only from sharing in dominion over the newly discovered lands, but from navigating the trade routes and carrying on profitable trade with their inhabitants, as well. The two countries’ rival claims were resolved by fixing a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, with Spain receiving all the lands west of the line, Portugal those to the east. Portugal then claimed sovereignty over the Indian Ocean and the south Atlantic, Spain over the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

The pope's authority to grant these rights did not go uncontested, even within Catholic Spain itself. As early as 1564, in Illustrium controversiarum, a prominent Spanish jurist named Fernando Vázquez Menchaca (1512-1569) attacked Venice and Genoa's claims to dominion over parts of the Mediterranean, defending freedom of the seas itself. Other European states rejected Spain and Portugal's claims even more energetically, not only because, as had quickly become apparent, the logic underlying the line purportedly dividing their dominions had been undercut by the realization that it could be approached both from the east and the west, but for the practical reason that the two countries were manifestly unable to enforce them.

Even Queen Elizabeth of England, while herself demanding that foreign vessels entering waters claimed by England strike their topsails and take in their flags in recognition of Britain’s sovereign jurisdiction, declared that the exclusion of foreign merchants from Indian commerce was contrary to the law of nations. "The use of the sea and the air is common to all," she told the Spanish ambassador, "neither can any title to the Ocean belong to any people or private man, forasmuch as neither Nature, nor regard of the public use and custom permitteth any possession thereof."

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Vázquez Menchaca, Fernando (1512-1569). Controversiarum usu frequentium libri tres (Barcelona, 1563).
Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library.

"Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law," curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum
Part 1

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645). Mare liberum (Leiden, 1609).
Grotius launched his illustrious career in international law with this little book that initially did not bear his name.
Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library.

This exhibit marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Hugo Grotius’s Mare liberum, a short work, originally published as a pamphlet, which produced the first effective argument for the freedom of the seas and, with Grotius’s more mature work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625), lent substance and prestige to the idea of an international law in the service of the common good.

In principle, the Roman Civil Law had already established that navigation on the high seas was open to all. But in practice the principle was frequently disregarded  – even by Rome itself, when its naval power was at its height, and by others after its decline. With the growth of maritime commerce, especially in the later Middle Ages, maritime powers asserted dominion over wide areas of ocean space: Venice to dominion over the Adriatic Sea (Guido Pace, De dominio maris Adriatico, 1619); Genoa the Ligurian (Pietro Battista Borgo, De dominio serenessimae Genuinsis Reipublica in mari Liguria, 1641); Sweden, Denmark and Poland to all or parts of the Baltic.

Early efforts to codify maritime law, such as the 12th century Laws of Oleron and the Consolat de Mar (ca. 1484) had codified admiralty law on a range of subjects, including, for example, ship ownership, discipline and punishment of crews, and salvage.

-- Notes by Edward Gordon

Pace, Giulio (1550-1635). De dominio maris Hadriatici desceptatio (Lyons, 1619).
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Libro llamado Consulado de mar (Valencia, 1539).
A translation from the original Catalan into Spanish of “The Book of the Consulate of the Sea,” the basis for much of Europe’s maritime law.
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

“Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law,” curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

New exhibit...

Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law

October 2009 - January 2010
Rare Book Exhibition Gallery
Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library
Yale Law School

In 1609, a little pamphlet touched off a big debate that shaped modern international law. The Lillian Goldman Law Library marks the 400th anniversary of this event with its exhibition, "Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law." It will be on display through January 2010 in the Yale Law School.

At the dawn of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company commissioned a young prodigy named Hugo Grotius to prepare a legal argument rejecting Spanish and Portuguese claims of dominion over the oceans around their overseas empires. His essay, Mare Liberum ("On the Freedom of the Seas") touched off a "Battle of the Books." What eventually emerged was a regime of international law to govern humanity's common interest in shared resources.

At the center of this battle was Grotius and England's leading legal scholar, John Selden. The exhibition documents their contributions and those from other European jurists, with books from the Rare Book Collection of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Harvard Law School Library, and the private collection of Edward Gordon.

The exhibition was curated by Edward Gordon, Yale Law School Class of 1963, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian. Gordon, past President of the American Branch of the International Law Association, was formerly professor of international law at Albany Law School, and has also taught at Rutgers, George Washington University, American University, Wellesley College, and the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

The Rare Books Exhibition Gallery is located in the lower level of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room.

For those unable to visit the exhibit in person, it will appear in installments here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, phone Mike Widener at (203) 432-4494 or email him at <mike.widener@yale.edu>.

The illustration:
Hugo Grotius Mari libero et P. Merula De maribus (Leiden, 1633). Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The following select bibliography includes the sources consulted in the preparation of this exhibit. The image is of the opening leaf of the Liber Assisarum, a collection of Year Book cases from the reign of Edward III (manuscript in Law French, ca. 1450).

English law reports

• Abbott, L. W. Law Reporting in England 1485-1585. London: Athlone Press, 1973.
• Baker, J. H. "Coke's note-books and the sources of his reports." Cambridge Law Journal 30:1 (Apr. 1972), 59-86.
• Baker, J. H. "Records, reports and the origins of case-law in England," in Judicial Records, Law Reports, and the Growth of Case Law (J. H. Baker, ed.; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 15-46.
• Bolland, William Craddock. A Manual of Year Book Studies. Cambridge [England]: University Press, 1925. [Reprinted Holmes Beach, Fla.: Wm. W. Gaunt & Sons, 1986.]
• Fox, John Charles. A Handbook of English Law Reports from the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century to the Year 1865, with Biographical Notes of Judges and Reporters. London : Butterworth & Co., 1913.
• Heard, Franklin Fiske. Curiosities of the Law Reporters. Boston: Lee & Shepard ; New York: Lee, Shepard, & Dillingham, 1871. [2nd ed.: Boston: Soule and Bugbee, 1881.]
• Luther, Peter. "The Year Books." Law Librarian 13:2 (Aug. 1982), 19-22.
• Matthews, Elizabeth W. Seventeenth Century English Law Reports in Folio: Description of Selected Imprints. Buffalo: W.S. Hein, 1986.
• Plucknett, T. F. T. "The genesis of Coke's Reports." Cornell Law Quarterly 27:2 (Feb. 1942), 190-213.
• Powell, Damian. "Coke in context: early modern legal observation and Sir Edward Coke's reports." Journal of Legal History 21:3 (Dec. 2000), 33-53.
• Stebbings, Chantal, ed. Law Reporting in Britain. London: Hambledon Press, 1995.
• Veeder, Van Vechten. "The English Reports, 1292-1865." Harvard Law Review 15:1 (May 1901), 1-25; 15:2 (June 1901), 109-117.
• Wallace, John William. The Reporters: Arranged and Characterized with Incidental Remarks. 4th ed. Boston: Soule & Bugbee, 1882. [Reprinted Buffalo, N.Y.: W.S. Hein, 1995.]

American law reports

• Aumann, Francis R. "American law reports: yesterday and today." Ohio State University Law Journal 4:3 (June 1938), 331-345.
• Briceland, A. V. "Ephraim Kirby: pioneer of American law reporting, 1789." American Journal of Legal History 16 (Oct. 1972), 297.
• Duffey, Denis P., Jr. "Genre and authority: the rise of case reporting in the early United States." Chicago-Kent Law Review 74:1 (Winter 1998), 263-275.
• Harrington, William G. “A brief history of computer-assisted legal research.” Law Library Journal 77:3 (1984-85), 543-556.
• Joyce, Craig. "The rise of the Supreme Court Reporter: an institutional perspective on Marshall Court ascendancy." Michigan Law Review 83:5 (Apr. 1985), 1291-1391.
• Joyce, Craig. "Wheaton v. Peters: the untold story of the early reporters." Yearbook (Supreme Court Historical Society) 1985, 35-92.
• LaPiana, William P. "Dusty books and living history: why all those old state reports really matter." Law Library Journal 81:1 (Winter 1989), 33-39.
• Surrency, Erwin C. "Law reports in the United States." American Journal of Legal History 25:1 (Jan. 1981), 48-66.
• Young, T. J., Jr. "Look at American law reporting in the 19th century." Law Library Journal 68 (Aug. 1975), 294-306.

General works

• Holdsworth, William Searle. A History of English Law. 17 vols. London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1966-72.
• Langbein, John H., Renée Lettow Lerner, & Bruce P. Smith. History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions. Forthcoming 2009, Aspen Publishers.
• Simpson, A.W.B., ed. Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law. London: Butterworths, 1984.
  
• Woxland, Thomas A., & Patti J. Ogden. Landmarks in American Legal Publishing: An Exhibit Catalog. [St. Paul, Minn.?:] West Publishing Co., [1989?].

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

John B. West & Co., The Syllabi, vol. 1, no. 1 (Oct. 21, 1876; reprint ed.; St. Paul, Minn., 1991).

John B. West & Co., The Northwestern Reporter, vol. 1 (1st ed.; St. Paul, Minn., 1879).

After the Civil War, the number of cases being reported rose astronomically. However, these case reports were still very slow to reach print; delays of months or years were not uncommon. Select reports sometimes appeared in newspapers but, as they were aimed at the general public, these were not always accurate. In 1876, John B. West began publishing The Syllabi, a weekly newsletter aimed at practicing attorneys in his home state of Minnesota. Its goal was to "furnish the legal profession of the state, with prompt and reliable intelligence." It lasted for six months before evolving into book format, and then being renamed The Northwestern Reporter.

The Northwestern Reporter was the first of the National Reporter System case reporter series published by West Publishing Company. By 1887, eight years later, West reporters would cover every state jurisdiction. In addition to being timely and accurate, West reporters were the first to feature editorial enhancements such as summaries of court opinions. Although not present in this first volume, later volumes also incorporated Key Numbers from the new West Digest system.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Report of the Copy-Right Case of Wheaton v. Peters: Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States: with an Appendix, Containing the Acts of Congress Relating to Copy-Right (New York, 1834).

Henry Wheaton had been unofficial reporter of U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1816-1827. Although his Reports were considered comprehensive and accurate, they were also quite expensive, being swollen with Wheaton's lengthy annotations. When Richard Peters took the post of court reporter, he took it upon himself to condense the reports of his three predecessors and to sell these condensed volumes for a tidy sum. Wheaton promptly sued. In this landmark copyright case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Peters and held that "no reporter has or can have any copyright" in the Court’s opinions.

Although not named, Peters is the likely publisher of this report. The dedication to Chief Justice Marshall, "due to your unequalled ability and usefulness; to the greatness of your character; the purity of your motives; and the kindness of your judicial deportment," has the ring of a grateful litigant.

This volume is part of the Walter Pforzheimer Collection of copyright law.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Alexander James Dallas (1759-1817), Reports of Cases Ruled and Adjudged in the Several Courts of the United States, and of Pennsylvania, Held at the Seat of the Federal Government, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1798).

In 1790 (one year after Ephraim Kirby began publishing Connecticut reports), Alexander Dallas began publishing Pennsylvania reports. The same year, the U.S. Supreme Court began operating out of Philadelphia. Dallas included a few of those reports in the second volume of his reports, and so he is considered the first U.S. Supreme Court reporter. Dallas produced only four volumes of case reports and they were often derided for being incomplete, inaccurate, and tardy. The Supreme Court reports were at least five years old when they appeared. Shown here is the first page of Supreme Court reports, where the Court began to organize itself and adopt its first rules. It was not until the August Term, 1792, that the Court rendered its first substantive decision, in Georgia v. Brailsford (2 Dallas 402). After Dallas, the unofficial post of reporter to the Supreme Court was held in turn by William Cranch, Henry Wheaton, and Richard Peters.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

William Johnson (1769-1848), letter to John Wells Esq., (Albany, NY, October 23, 1819).

William Johnson was Chief Justice Kent’s handpicked successor to George Caines as official reporter for the New York Supreme Court. During his tenure, Johnson produced 20 volumes of Johnson's Reports, covering the period from 1806 to 1823. Johnson later added the post of Chancery Court reporter to his duties. Johnson's Chancery Reports, covering the years 1814-1823, were the only specialized American equity reports of their time, greatly contributing to their influence in other states.

In the letter displayed here, Johnson mentions the case of Percival v. Hickey, which he reported in vol. 18 of his New York Supreme Court reports, and discusses the tribulations of a reporter's work. The letter reads in full:

John Wells Esq.
Counsellor at Law
New York

Albany October 23rd 1819

My dear friend,
     The motion to bring on the case of Percival & Hickey was made today by Mr. Sedgwick, & accordingly I moved for the postponement of the arguments until the next term, which was granted. The plaintiff was here, & complained loudly of his Counsel Mr. E. [T.A. Emmet]. Mr. Strong forgot to send the points with the cases, which might have created a difficulty had the case been ordered on.
     The court have business, from the middle & northern Counties, sufficient to occupy them until Wednesday of next week. I hope to be able to leave here on that day, so as to have a short time in N.Y. before the Court of Errors.
     My Reports must fall greatly in arrears if so much of my time is passed in this place, of which every year, I become more & more tired.

     Yours truly,

     Wm. Johnson

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

George Caines (1771-1825), Cases Argued and Determined in the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and Correction of Errors, in the State of New-York (New York, 1805).

There was no formalized system of reporting in the U.S. until 1804, when both the New York and Massachusetts legislatures provided for official reporters with paid stipends. George Caines was appointed the first official law reporter for the New York Supreme Court. However, Chief Justice James Kent ousted Caines after only one year, complaining that "his work is too full of mistakes."

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Ephraim Kirby (1757-1804), Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of The State Of Connecticut, from the Year 1785, to May 1788 (Litchfield, Conn., 1789).

Although American courts were producing a small number of written opinions after the Revolutionary War, those opinions failed to be collected or published in any systematic manner. Kirby's Reports, a collection of Connecticut Superior Court cases published in 1789, was the first volume of law reports published in America. Ephraim Kirby was educated at Yale University and practiced law in Litchfield, Connecticut before being appointed the first Superior Court Judge of the Mississippi Territory by President Jefferson.

This volume is from the library of Simeon E. Baldwin, the professor credited with saving the Yale Law School in the late 19th century. It previously belonged to his father, Roger Sherman Baldwin, one of the attorneys for the Amistad captives.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

W. T. S. Daniel (1806-1891), A Letter to Sir Roundell Palmer ... on the Present System of Law Reporting, Its Evils, and the Remedy (London, 1863?).

W. T. S. Daniel was active in many areas of law reform, and in 1863 he began working for a better system of law reporting. There was wide dissatisfaction with the existing system. The authorized reports were tardy and expensive, prompting competition from weekly legal newspapers. Daniel outlined his solution in this open letter to his ally, Attorney General Sir Roundell Palmer. His efforts resulted in the creation of the Incorporated Council for Law Reporting, which began issuing an official series of reports under the auspices of the bar, which continues to this day.

Daniel presented this copy to "Th. Carlton", and also amended the title.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir James Burrow (1701-1782), Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench ... (5 vols.; London, 1766-80).

Burrow's Reports established the modern pattern of what a law report should contain: the reporter’s statement of the facts, a summary of the arguments of counsel, and the court’s judgment.

Burrow had collected notes on King’s Bench cases for some time, and was prompted to publish them after being subjected to "continual interruption and even persecution by incessant application for searches into my notes, for transcripts of them, sometimes for the note-books themselves (not always returned without trouble and solicitation), not to mention frequent conversations upon very dry and uninteresting subjects, which my consulters were paid for considering, but I had no sort of concern in."

"Burrow's Reports, therefore, may, in their department, fairly be called 'works of art,' -- ... case, arguments, and opinion – going out to the bar separate in form as distinct in nature, each from the other; each complete in itself, but having, one with all, exact and reciprocal adaptation, and presenting so a full, harmonious, but never redundant whole." -- John W. Wallace, The Reporters Arranged and Characterized (4th ed. 1882).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir John Popham (1531?-1607), Reports and Cases Collected by the Learned, Sir John Popham, Knight, Late Lord Chief-Justice of England (London, 1656).

Popham’s Reports is but one of “the flying squadrons of thin reports” published in the mid- to late 17th century, and exemplifies their shortcomings. Popham himself can’t be blamed because he died a half-century before their publication, and probably never intended for them to be published. They were taken from a manuscript of unknown quality, and supplemented with a number of later cases. They were among many case reports translated (often badly) into English following the Commonwealth’s ban on the use of Law French in the courts. Many judges rejected them as having no authority, and banned their citation in court.

Sir John Popham was one of the most colorful of the law reporters, if the stories about him can be believed. As a child he was supposedly kidnapped and raised by gypsies, and worked his way through law studies at the Middle Temple as a petty thief. As a barrister, however, Popham rose through the ranks. By 1581 he was speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney General, and in 1592 he was made Chief Justice of King’s Bench. He was known as a strict but fair judge, and presided over the trials of the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. He was also one of the promoters of the Jamestown colony in Virginia.

“Indigested crudities”

“A multitude of flying reports (whose Authors are as uncertain as the times when taken, and the causes and reasons of the Judgements as obscure, as by whom judged) have of late surreptitiously crept forth; whereby ... we have been entertained with barren & unwarranted Products ... which not only tends to the depraving of the first grounds & reason of our Students at the Common Law, & the young practitioners thereof, who by such false Lights are misled, ... but also to the contempt of our Common Law itselfe, and of divers of our former grave and learned Justices and professors thereof, whose honored and revered names have in some of said Books been abused and invocated to patronize the indigested crudities of those plagiaries.” -- Sir Harbottle Grimston, preface to The Reports of Sir George Croke (1657)

“See the inconveniences of these scambling reports, they will make us to appear to posterity for a parcel of blockheads.” -- Holt C.J., Slater v. May, 2 Raymond 1072 (1704)

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir Edmund Saunders (d. 1683), Les Reports du Tres Erudite Edmund Saunders ... des Divers Pleadings et Cases en le Court del Bank le Roy (2 vols.; London, 1686).

Edmund Saunders authored the best law reports of the late 17th century, known for their accuracy and clarity. They set out the pleadings and give concise summaries of the facts, issues, arguments, and judgment. The overriding focus of the reports is with the law of pleading, at which Saunders was the acknowledged master. Later on, Saunders' Reports was translated and annotated and became a classic textbook on pleading, although Saunders' own text had largely disappeared by its last edition in 1871.

"Within the first decade after the Restoration there are several new reports, extending for the most part over the remainder of the Stuart period. Chief among them is Saunders (1666-73), who is universally conceded to be the most accurate and valuable reporter of his age. His work is confined to the decisions of the King's Bench between the eighteenth and twenty-fourth years of the reign of Charles II. Saunders participated as counsel in most of the cases, and he reports them with admirable clearness. In general his reports resemble Plowden's; but they are much more condensed. He gives the pleadings and entries at length, and follows in regular order with a concise statement of the points at issue, the arguments of counsel, and a clear statement of the grounds of the judgment. The work was subsequently enriched by the learned annotations of Sergeant Williams." -- Van Vechten Veeder, "The English Reports, 1292-1865," 15 Harvard Law Review 1, 15 (1901).

Edmund Saunders' life is one of the few rags-to-riches stories of English law. Born into abject poverty, he taught himself to be a clerk and eventually entered the Middle Temple. His skill as a special pleader earned him a lucrative practice, but he lived simply. A contemporary, Roger North, described him as a heavy drinker and "a fetid mass that offended his neighbors at the bar in the sharpest degree." He was kind, witty, honest, and idolized by law students: "I have seen him for hours ... with an audience of students over against him, putting of cases and debating so as suited their capacities and encouraged their industry."

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir Francis Moore (1558-1621), Cases collected and reported by Sir Francis Moore (manuscript in Law French, 2 vols., 1621).

________, Cases Collect & Report per Sir Fra. Moore Chevalier, Serjeant del Ley ... (2nd ed.; London 1688).

Sir Francis Moore was a prominent English barrister during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. This manuscript, completed by Moore the year he died, contains notes of significant cases he and others observed in the Courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, and Chancery between 1512-1621. The first page of the manuscript proclaims Moore’s authorship: “Ex Libro Francisci Moore Militis Servieu ad Legem script p[ro]pria manu ipius,” which roughly translates as “Manuscript of Francis Moore, Sergeant of Law, written by his own hand.”

Although printing was widespread by this time, it remained expensive. As a result, books with a limited audience continued to be distributed in manuscript form. Moore’s reports circulated widely in manuscript before they were first published in 1663.

This manuscript once belonged to the noted jurist Sir Matthew Hale (whose signature appears on an interior page to indicate ownership), and is among the 21 manuscript volumes from Hale’s library now in the Yale Law Library’s rare book collection. Hale’s second wife was Moore’s granddaughter.

The printed volume on display belonged to Samuel Hitchcock (whose signature appears on the title page), one of the founders of Yale Law School. It was part of the original collection of the Yale Law Library, and forms part of the Founders’ Collection.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

William Tothill (1560-1627), The Transactions of the High Court of Chancery, Both by Practice and President (London, 1671).

Although reports of Chancery cases had occasionally appeared in manuscript Year Books and various printed case reports, Tothill's Transactions of the High Court of Chancery (1st ed. 1649) was the first printed collection devoted exclusively to Chancery cases. Van Vechten Veeder described them as "extremely brief and unsatisfactory, often giving merely a bare statement of the facts of a cases and the final decree, without any indication of the grounds of the judgment" ("The English Reports, 1292-1865," 15 Harvard Law Review 1, 112 (1901)). Decent Chancery reports did not appear until the dawn of the 18th century.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Les Reports de Edvvard Coke l’Attorney Generall le Roigne ... (London, 1600?).

Sir Edward Coke's Reports are perhaps the most influential reports in the history of English law, so much so that they are cited simply as "The Reports." Their authority rests mainly on the high reputation of their author, and not on their accuracy or objectivity. Coke was not shy about inserting his own views, and set out not only to report the law but also to teach it. His vast learning spills out, rendering reports that are often disorderly.

The first volume of Coke's Reports appeared in about 1600 (shown here), and met with such success that ten more volumes appeared in the next fifteen years. Legal historian T.F.T. Plucknett believes Coke may have been the first to report cases with the intent of publishing them soon after. When Coke was dismissed as a judge of King’s Bench in 1616, his political enemies (of which he had many) launched an investigation into alleged errors in the Reports, effectively halting his law reporting.

Coke on his Reports

"And now that I have taken upon myself to make a report of their arguments, I ought to do the same as fully, truly, and sincerely as possibly I can ; howbeit, seeing that almost every Judge had in the course of, his argument a particular method, and I must only hold myself to one, I shall give no just offense to any if I challenge that which of right is due to every Reporter, that is, to reduce the sum and effect of all to such a method as, upon consideration had of all the arguments, the Reporter himself thinketh to be fittest and clearest for the right understanding of the true reason and causes of the judgment and resolution of the case in question." -- Sir Edward Coke, Calvin's Case, 8 Rep. 4a

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Edmund Plowden (1518-1585), Les Commentaries, ou Reportes de Edmunde Plowden un Apprentice de le Comen Ley (London, 1571) [with] La Second Part de les Reports, ou Commentaries ... (London, 1610).

Edmund Plowden's Commentaries was the first of the "nominative reporters," reports cited by the reporter's name. His reports claim many other "firsts." They were the first to include the names of the parties in the headings, providing a citation method that lawyers follow to this day. Plowden was the first reporter to prepare his reports for the press. His was the first collection of leading cases, "annotated by an editor at the head of the profession, which by including the pleadings … enabled them to be studied in the context of litigation" (Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law). Reprinted numerous times, they were required reading for law students. In terms of their accuracy, organization, and balance, they were unsurpassed for centuries.

Highly respected and successful as a lawyer, Plowden was kept from the bench by his loyalty to the Catholic faith.

The copy on display is the first edition of 1571. An early hand altered the publication date to 1599, the date of the fourth printing; perhaps it was a bookseller “refreshing” his stock.

Commentaries on Plowden’s Commentaries

"In almost all of the Cases which I have undertaken to report, before they came to be argued, I had Copies of the Records, and took Pains to study the Points of Law arising thereupon, so that oftentimes I was so much Master of them, that if I had been put to it, I was ready to have argued when the first Man began; and by this Method I was more prepared to understand and retain the Arguments and the Causes of the Judgments. And besides this, after I had drawn out my Report at large, and before I had entered it into my Book, I shewed such Cases and Arguments, as seemed to me to be the most difficult, and to require the greatest Memory, to some of the Judges or Sergeants who argued in them, in order to have their Opinion of the Sincerity and Truth of the Report." -- Edmund Plowden, preface to his Commentaries

"What Coke was to hail as those 'exquisite and elaborate' Commentaries were thus quite unlike anything that had previously been produced. It was not just that they were the first reports which had been carefully prepared for the press and published in the reporter’s lifetime, … nor even that they included only cases that had been brought to final judgment… For the Commentaries was also a book of leading cases, annotated by an editor at the head of the profession, which by including the pleadings (previously collected only in books of entries) enabled them to be studied in the context of litigation." -- Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Year Book, 27 Henry VIII.] De termino Pasche anno regni Regis Henrici Octaui. XXVII (London, 1556).

Printers began publishing Year Book cases in the 1480s. Two and a half centuries of Year Book reporting came to an end with the cases from 27 Henry VIII (1535), shown here. Lawyers, judges and students did not stop reporting cases. The transition from Year Book reports to our modern case reports was gradual, and coincided with a shift from oral to written pleadings.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

[Year Books, 20-45 Edward III.] Liber Assisarum (manuscript in Law French, ca. 1450).

The origin of our case reports lies in the late 13th century, with what are now called the "Year Books." The Liber Assisarum, shown here, is a collection of Year Book cases in the court of King’s Bench in 1347-1372.

The Year Books are quite different from modern case reports. They say little or nothing about the facts, or who won. What interested the anonymous reporters was the debate between advocates and judges, a sort of tentative oral pleading that has been compared to lightning chess. The Year Books seem to have had some connection (still unclear) with legal education at the Inns of Court, but they were also used by bench & bar.

As more or less verbatim records of legal debates between named individuals, the Year Books are virtually the only historical sources that capture voices from the Middle Ages.

Maitland on the Year Books

"Today men are reporting at Edinburgh and Dublin, at Boston and San Francisco, at Quebec and Sydney and Cape Town, at Calcutta and Madras. Their pedigree is unbroken and indisputable. It goes back to some nameless lawyers at Westminster to whom a happy thought had come. What they desired was not a copy of the chilly record, cut and dried, with its concrete particulars concealing the point of law: the record overladen with the uninteresting names of litigants and oblivious of the interesting names of sages, of justices and serjeants. What they desired was the debate with the life-blood in it: the twists and turns of advocacy, the quip courteous and the countercheck quarrelsome." -- Sir Frederick Maitland, 17 Selden Soc. xv.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Case reports are a fundamental source for the study and practice of law in the Anglo-American common law system. "Landmarks in Law Reporting," the Spring 2009 exhibition from the Lillian Goldman Law Library's Rare Book Collection, illustrates the development of law reporting from the Middle Ages to modern times.

The exhibit begins with a manuscript collection of cases from the reign of Edward III, copied in about 1450. Also on display are first editions of the reports of Edmund Plowden (1571), considered the first modern-style reports) and Sir Edward Coke (1600), perhaps the most influential reports). Other "firsts" include the first American case reports (Ephraim Kirby's 1789 reports of Connecticut cases) and the first U.S. Supreme Court reports (Dallas' Reports, 1798).

Recurring themes in the exhibition include the gradual transformation from manuscript to print, the growth of legal publishing, the connections between law reporting and legal education, and the growing demands by lawyers for timely, well-organized reports.

The Rare Books Exhibition Gallery is located in the lower level of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room. For those unable to visit the exhibit in person, stay tuned to the following postings here on the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the following for their assistance and advice in the research and preparation of this exhibit:

• Morris L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School
• John H. Langbein, Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School
• Sabrina Sondhi, Special Collections Librarian, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University

Additional help in mounting the exhibit came from Brian Mendez and Fred Shapiro (Lillian Goldman Law Library), Joanne Kittredge (Yale Law School), and Emma Molina Widener (University of New Haven).

"Landmarks of Law Reporting" is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Image: Volume 2 of Alexander James Dallas, Reports of Cases Ruled and Adjudged in the Several Courts of the United States, and of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1798), containing the first reports of U.S. Supreme Court cases.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the following for their assistance and support (in alphabetical order):

• Oriana Bleecher, History Department, Yale University
• Kathy Colello, Office of Public Affairs, Yale Law School
• Margot Curran, Exhibits Conservator, Yale University Libraries
• Arthur Hobson Dean Purchase Fund in International Law, Yale Law School
• Renata Ferraro, President, Fondazione Gabriele Berionne
• John A. Hoober Fund, Yale Law School
• Shana Jackson, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Joanne Kittredge, Computer Services, Yale Law School
• Harold Hongju Koh, Dean, Yale Law School
• S. Blair Kauffman, Librarian & Professor of Law, Yale Law School
• Christine McCarthy, Chief Conservator, Yale University Libraries
• Liliane McClenning, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Brian Mendez, Lillian Goldman Law Library
• Alfredo Serangeli, Director, Archivio Storico “Innocenzo III”
• Pamela Sims, Alumni Affairs, Yale Law School
• Richard Tuske, Librarian, Association of the Bar of the City of New York
• Albert S. Wheeler Fund, Yale Law School
• Anders Winroth, Professor, History Department, Yale University
• Paula Zyats, Assistant Chief Conservator, Yale University Libraries

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Illustration: Statuta augustae Perusiae (Perugia, 1523-1528).

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

One of the main reasons for organizing this exhibit is to encourage students and scholars to use the Yale Law Library's outstanding collection of early Italian statutes. All of the volumes in the collection are represented in our online catalog, MORRIS. Feel free to contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian; see the Rare Books homepage for contact information.

Below is a selective list of online resources, bibliographies, and publications on early Italian statutes.

Online resources

• The Biblioteca del Senato della Repubblica "Giovanni Spadolini" (the library of the Italian Senate) houses the world's most extensive collection of early Italian statutes. The introduction to the site is also provided in French and English. See especially the description of the catalogues, which contain a wealth of information on Italian legal history and local history, The entire Catalogo della raccolta di statuti (8 volumes so far) is available online, as well as updates to the earlier volumes.
• Kenneth Pennington, professor of ecclesiastical and legal history at Catholic University, provides an concise overview of Italian legal history from the Middle Ages to the present, including a critical guide to the literature. See also his Roman and Secular Law in the Middle Ages.
• De Statutis is the website of the Comitato Italiano per gli Studi e le Edizioni delle Fonti Normative (CISEFN). The site is in Italian. See the Bibliografia Statutaria Italiana for an extensive bibliography of scholarship, mainly in Italian, on early Italian statutes, divided into a general section and sections on regions.
• Statuti della Liguria is a project of the Società Ligure di Storia Patria, with support from the Faculty of Jurisprudence, University of Genoa, to catalog and digitize statutes from the Liguria region, 12th-18th centuries. The site is in Italian and includes an extensive bibliography and a searchable database.

Bibliographies

• Biblioteca del Senato della Repubblica (Italy). Catalogo della raccolta di statuti, consuetudini, leggi, decreti, ordini e privilegi del comuni, delle associazioni e degli enti locali italiani, dal medioevo alla fine del secolo XVIII (Roma: Tipografia del Senato, 1943- ). Eight of the nine volumes have been published so far, and when it is complete it will be the most comprehensive bibliography of early Italian statutes. The entire set is available online at the website of the Biblioteca del Senato, along with updates to the earlier volumes. The Yale Law Library has a copy, which is currently shelved in the Rare Book Librarian's office.
• Leone Fontana, Bibliografia degli statuti dei comuni dell' Italia superiore (3 vols.; Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1907). The Yale Law Library has a copy.
• Luigi Manzoni, comp., Bibliografia statutaria e storica italiana (2 vols. in 3; Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1876-1892). Volume 1 covers statutes; volume 2 (which our library lacks) covers local histories. The Yale Law Library's copy is currently shelved in the Rare Book Librarian's office.
• Statuti italiani: riuniti ed indicati dal conte Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani (2 vols.; Pavia: Prem. Tipografia successori fratelli Fusi, 1907). This entire collection is now in the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and it is probably the only early Italian statute collection in the U.S. that rivals the Yale Law Library's collection. The catalogue is available online, but stops with entries for the letter M.

Books and articles

• Mario Ascheri, "Beyond the Comune: The Italian City-State and Its Inheritance," in The Medieval World (Peter Linehan & Janet L. Nelson eds.; London: Routledge, 2001), 451-468. "[T]he sections of statutes relating to public law have every right to be treated as constitutional history, even if their wide dispersion, mutability and multiplicity make them difficult to study. Paradoxically, it is their very richness that is responsible for the comparative neglect they have suffered. ... The city-states were the precursors of the majoritarian principle. In order to delimit the activities of different governmental agencies they introduced systems of checks and balances. They pioneered measures designed to depoliticise judges and the administration of justice and to moderate the excesses of their officials."
• George Bowyer, A Dissertation on the Statutes of the Cities of Italy (London: Richards and Co., 1838). Although 170 years old, it is so far the only full-length book in English on early Italian municipal statutes. The Yale Law Library has a copy in its collection, and it is also online in Google Books.
• Carlo Calisse, A History of Italian Law (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1928). Translated by Layton B. Register, with introductions by Frederick Parker Walton and Hessel E. Yntema. Volume 8 in the Continental Legal History Series. The book is a translation of parts of Calisse's Storia del diritto italiano, and was described in a contemporary review as "a long and complicated book." The Yale Law Library has a copy.
• Kenneth Pennington, "Law Codes: 1000-1500," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages 7 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986), 425-431.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Illustration: Perugia (Italy), Statuta augustae Perusiae (Perugia, 1523-1528).

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

“The outstanding acquisition of the year”

The Yale Law Library owes its superb collection of early Italian statutes to a generous alumnus, an opportunistic librarian, and a “learned Italian lawyer.”

John A. Hoober (Law 1891), an attorney and industrialist in York, Pa., led a fund drive that raised a hefty acquisitions endowment for the Yale Law Library in 1942, much of it from Hoober’s own pocket. When legal historian Samuel Thorne took over as Law Librarian three years later, he had an ample book budget and a buyer’s market in war-torn Europe. Thorne’s report for the 1945-46 academic year included the following under the heading “Notable Purchases”:

"The outstanding acquisition of the year was the notable collection of Italian statuta, numbering almost nine hundred volumes, purchased from a learned Italian lawyer who had brought it, over a period of fifty years, to its present completeness. It contained fifty-two manuscripts of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, nine incunabula, and many sixteenth-century editions, more than a few unknown to Luigi Manzoni whose ‘Bibliografia statutaria e storica italiana’ is the standard bibliography of the class."

Efforts to discover the identity of the “learned Italian lawyer” who sold his splendid collection to Yale have so far come up empty.

The collection has been supplemented by two major acquisitions from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Their Roman-Canon Law Collection, placed on permanent loan at the Yale Law Library in 2006, included twenty-two volumes of Italian treatises and judicial opinions. An additional sixty volumes were acquired in Fall 2008 as part of the Bar’s Foreign Law Collection. In addition, book dealers in the U.S. and Europe have supplied individual volumes of statutes for Ancona, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Monteregale, Novara, Riviera di Salo, Sicily, Rome, Trento, and Vicenza.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Illustration: Statuta provisiones et ordinamenta magnificae civitatis Ferrariae (2nd ed.; Ferrara, 1534).

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Papal States. Gli statuti dell’agricoltura con varie osservazioni, bolle, decisioni della S. Ruota, e decreti intorno alla medesima (Rome 1718). Acquired with the Albert S. Wheeler Fund, May 2008.

(View the Papal States on a map: "Stato Pontificio".)

The agricultural statutes of Rome were first collected during the pontificate of Gregory XII in the early 1400s, and underwent several revisions and reforms before they were promulgated for the last time in 1848. Yale Law Library owns six different editions of this wide-ranging collection of regulations and advice of use to lawyers, agriculturalists (agronomo), and rural merchants in the Papal States. The 1718 edition shown here was the first to be translated from Latin to Italian, and includes a twenty-six page illustrated treatise on locusts.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Rovito, Scipione. Decisiones supremorum tribunalium regni Neapolitani (Naples, 1687). Acquired from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, September 2008.

(View the Kingdom of Naples on a map: "Regno di Napoli".)

The most recent addition to the Yale Law Library’s collection of early Italian materials is not a body of statutes, but rather an extensive set of rulings written by the jurist Scipone Rovito (1556-1636) as a member of the highest court in the Kingdom of Naples. In this rare 1687 edition the rulings are accompanied by commentaries and summaries written by the Neopolitan jurist Blasio Altimaro (1630-1713). The Yale Law Library’s collection of municipal statutes is complimented by a large—and growing—number of early commentaries and treatises on Italian law like this one.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Montefortino (Italy). Statutum Montisfortini in Campanea [with] Statuto e tassa de mercedi che si devono al governatore, mandatario, e barigello di Montefortino in Campagna (manuscript, Montefortino, 1685). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Montefortino, today named Artena, on a map.)

The present-day city of Artena, southeast of Rome, was known as Montefortino from the Middle Ages until 1873. We owe the following description of our manuscript to Alfredo Serangeli, Director of the Archivio Storico “Innocenzo III” in Segni, Italy, and present it here with his permission and our thanks:

The Montefortino Statutes are the regulations for an essentially feudal municipality. Everything belonged to the feudal lord “in dominio et iurisdictione”, while vassals had broad rights for grazing, gathering wood and working the land. In fact, the statutes gave the feudal lord the right to one-fourth of all agricultural production, including wheat, barley, beans, spelt, millet, hemp, chick peas, and wine. This right was his in all cases, regardless of how the land was owned and worked.

The community, whose life was regulated in detail, was concerned that the feudal lords and governors should also respect the statutory rules. In fact, in a 1559 petition to the Colonna princesses (Tuzia, Porzia, Claudia and Virginia, owners of Montefortino at that time), concerning the reconstruction and reestablishment of normal conditions after the destruction of the castle in 1557 (during the Campagna War that the Papacy and France waged against Spain), Montefortino's inhabitants asked that their governor respect the statutes. In the notary’s act produced when Prince Ascanio Massimo took possession of the castle on February 12, 1595, the prince's oath to obey and enforce the Statutes is specifically mentioned.

The original manuscript is composed of 38 parchment folia, 16 x 24 cm., and was produced in 1468 by Antonio son of Luca, one of the most important notaries in Montefortino during the 15th century. The manuscript held in the Lillian Goldman Law Library is a copy of the revised statutes of 1606.
    -- Alfredo Serangeli, Director, Archivio Storico “Innocenzo III”

Incidentally, Alfredo Serangeli is from the same family as Stefano Serangeli, the scribe who produced the Yale Law Library's manuscript in 1685.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Honoring the Hon. Guido Calabresi (Law ’58)

The Yale Law School has marked the 50th anniversary of the Hon. Guido Calabresi’s graduation by acquiring a significant collection of 60 early Italian law books for the Law Library’s Rare Book Collection from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The Lillian Goldman Law Library is pleased to join with the Law School by dedicating this exhibit of Italian statutes to Judge Calabresi.

Judge Calabresi is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. He was born in Milan, Italy and graduated at the top of the Yale Law School Class of 1958. He also earned a B.S., summa cum laude, from Yale College in 1953, a B.A. degree with First Class Honors from Magdalene College, Oxford University, in 1955, and an M.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University in 1959. He joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1959 and served as Dean from 1985 to 1994, when he was appointed Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton (Law '73).

“Every schoolboy knows that the Italian universities, and especially Bologna, were the great centers of nonreligious law throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Indeed, there may well have been no break at all between the ancient Roman law schools in Bologna and the University of Bologna. What is not generally known, however, is how modern law was in Italy at that time, at least in contrast to what was happening in England.” — Guido Calabresi, “Two Functions of Formalism: In Memory of Guido Tedeschi,” 67 University of Chicago Law Review 479, 481 (2000).

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Illustration: Title page from a compilation of statutes for Judge Calabresi's hometown, Milan, Constitutiones dominii mediolanensis (4th ed.; Novara, 1597).

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Trento (Italy). Libro de Statuti et Ordini delli Signori Sindici della Magnifica Communità, & Città di Trento (Trent, 1640). Acquired with the Arthur Hobson Dean Purchase Fund in International Law, January 2008.

(View Trento on a map.)

This recent acquisition is a first edition of the city laws of Trento, which were issued under the authority of Cardinal Carlo Madruzzo in 1640. Madruzzo oversaw the revision of statutes that had been issued originally by Cardinal Bernhard von Cles in 1528. This copy is originally from the library of the very same Cardinal Madruzzo and bears his signature on the title page.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Milan (Duchy). Constitutiones dominii mediolanen. cum ordinibus excell. Senatus (4th ed.; Novara, 1597). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, April 1948.

(View the Duchy of Milan on a map: "D. di Milano".)

Following a panegyric treatise “On the Origins of the Law of Milan” by Francisci Crassi, this volume contains the constitutions of 1541 divided into five books. Here we see the beginning of the statutes that govern the Consuls of Merchants, who had jurisdiction over “all cases turning between traders, or merchants, or their agents, and contracts between them.” It appears that the notes in the margins were made in the middle of the seventeenth century. Note the “little hand,” or manicula, at the top of page 145, used since the Middle Ages as a common way to mark important passages in the text.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Pesaro (Italy). Statuto del danno dato della mag. città di Pesaro, Libro quarto (Pesaro, 1579). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1947.

(View Pesaro on a map.)

Città di Castello (Italy). Statuta, et reformationes super dannis datis a R. Cam. Ap. Confirmata. M. Comunitatis civitatis Castelli (Perugia, 1582). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, February 1947.

(View Città di Castello on a map.)

The municipal codes of both Pesaro and Città di Castello were originally printed in Latin in the 1530s (Yale Law Library has both). The two small volumes displayed here deal with matters of property damage. The selection from Pesaro contains a complete set of reformed and emended statutes on the subject, translated into Italian. The selection from Città di Castello, on the other hand, only contains reforms of the legal process for addressing property damage. Despite the title page and preface being in Latin, the actual text of the Città di Castello reforms is also in Italian.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Sant’Elpidio a Mare (Italy). Statutorum ecclesiasticae terrae Sancti Elpidii (Macerata, 1571). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, September 1947.

(View Sant’Elipido a Mare on a map.)

Yale Law Library’s copy of the statutes of the small city of Sant’Elipido was once owned by Leopoldo Armaroli, whose signature is on the flyleaf. Born in the nearby provincial capital of Macerata in 1766, Armaroli earned a degree in civil and canon law at the local university. He held various senior roles within the justice systems of central and northern Italy, and in 1831 was even elected Minster of Justice of the short-lived United Italian Provinces (Provincie Unite Italiane)—an important early step towards Italian unification. In his later years, Armaroli published a book about the abandonment of children.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Alessandria (Italy). Codex statutorum magnifice communitatis atque dioecaesis Alexandriae ad respublicae utilitatem noviter excusi (Alessandria, 1547). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Alessandria on a map.)

The statutes of the “magnificent” city and diocese of Alessandria feature one of the most striking title pages in Yale Law Library’s large collection of Italian civil codes. Beneath the municipal arms (the red cross of Saint George) and the watchful eyes of its patron saints we find a dramatic depiction of the city and its bustling port on the River Tanaro. Only a handful of early Italian municipal codes feature a cityscape rather than an elaborate version of the municipal arms. Note as well the ornate printer’s mark of Francesco and Simone Moscheni of Bergoni at the bottom of the page. These brothers went on to print collections of madrigals and various pieces of propaganda related to English relations with the Papacy.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Papal States. Aegidiane constitutiones recognitae, ac novissime impressae cum privilego Pauli PP. III Pont. Max. (Rome, 1543). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, January 1947.

(View the Papal States on a map: "Stato Pontificio".)

For over a thousand years (754-1870) a large portion of the central Italian peninsula recognized the pope not only as a spiritual leader, but as the highest civil ruler as well. This area has traditionally been referred to as the Papal States, and within them regions regularly shifted between two different political systems. Some lands were "immediate subjects" of the pope, meaning that a papal representative resided there and administered the territory. Other lands were "mediate subjects, " meaning that public power was exercised by a feudatory of the pope without direct papal involvement.  Local municipal codes were kept in place under both systems, but they all were supposed to operate within a framework laid out in the Constitutions of the Holy Mother Church. The Constitutions were drafted in 1357 and laid out the political and juridical structure for the region.

In the example seen here, the Constitutions of the Holy Mother Church are called by their more common name, the “Egidian Constitutions,” in honor of their compiler, cardinal Álvarez Carillo Gil de Albornoz, known in Italian as Egidio Albornoz. This edition contains the additions made by Cardinal Rodolfo Piu di Carpi, a famous humanist and patron of the arts who served as papal legate to the March of Ancona in the 1540s, and whose coat-of-arms appears on the title page.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Ferrara (Italy). Statuta provisiones et ordinamenta magnificae civitatis Ferrariae (2nd ed.; Ferrara, 1534). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Ferrara on a map.)

This is the second edition of the statutes of the city of Ferrara, the first having been published in 1476. According to a note written on the title page, this book was owned and annotated by a Ferrarese attorney named Hieronymus Rasorio. A list of what appear to be legal engagements written in the back of the book suggests that he was active in the 1560s. Here we can see the way a practicing attorney utilized the text of the statutes. In this example, Hieronymus has made extensive annotations to a statute concerning prescription (the acquisition of rights or property by extended, honest, and uninterrupted possession or use).

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Pesaro (Italy). Statuti del Collegio mercantile de la Città di Pesaro (Pesaro, 1532). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Pesaro on a map.)

While the majority of Yale Law Library’s Italian statutes are comprehensive municipal codes, the collection also contains sets of regulations pertaining to more specific matters, such as merchants and trade, agriculture, fishing, tolls, or taxation. The volume displayed here concerns Pesaro’s mercantile court, or Collegio mercantile. The Collegio was a group of twenty-four magistrates—none of whom were merchants—who rendered justice in commercial disputes arising between merchants.

The Law Library’s copy once belonged to Walter Ashburner (1864-1936), a noted professor of jurisprudence, book collector, and co-founder of the British Institute of Florence.

Note the unusual text facing the title page. The bookbinder used pages from Publio Francesco Modesti’s poem Venetias for the flyleaves. Published just up the coast from Pesaro at Rimini in 1521, the work celebrates the history of Venice and its citizens.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Sicily (Kingdom). Capitula regni Sicilie (Messina, 1526). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View the Kingdom of Sicily on a map: "Regno di Sicilia".)

Ever since the twelfth century, powerful families and royal dynasties of western Europe had competed to control southern Italy—a region made up of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples. Building upon the Constitutions of Melfi promulgated by Emperor Frederick II in 1231 (the Law Library has a manuscript copy from 1324), the legal system of the region was comparatively centralized, with law-making power residing primarily with the ruling monarchs. An example of this can be seen in this volume of the laws of the Kingdom of Sicily, in which the statutes are arranged not by subject, but based on the ruler who issued them. By the early 1530s new editions of these laws began appearing with more practical subject arrangements.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Perugia (Italy). Statuta augustae Perusiae (Perugia, 1523-1528). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Perugia on a map.)

Early in the sixteenth century, the leaders of Perugia decided it was time to reform, expand, and print the city’s statutes. Here we see the result of that project. A group of lawyers and jurists were appointed—one of each for each section of statutes—and given the task of bringing the code up to date. The four pairs of reformers completed their tasks at different times between 1523 and 1528.

On display here is the beginning of the fourth book of statutes, where we find a striking woodcut of the printer Girolamo Cartolari presenting the finished volume to Malatesta Baglioni, the ruler of Perugia.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Crasciana (Italy). Statuta, decreta, et ordinameta communis et hominum Crascane (manuscript, Crasciana, 1519-1576). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Crasciana on a map.)

This manuscript is from Crasciana, a small village outside Lucca in Tuscany, and displays many interesting features. The first half was written by the notary Franco Inporino in 1519, and is followed by additions from at least eight other notaries up to the late 1570s. In some cases these notaries have added or emended statutes, in others they have simply certified that the laws were still in force. The pages presented here were written by “Andrea Paullecti, public notary and citizen of Lucca” in 1527. On the left are two laws pertaining to the keeping of pigs within the commune’s boundaries, and on the right is a statute concerning the penalties assessed for illegally harvesting timber on public land.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Venice (Republic). Institutio Phederici Reynerii in dignitatem rectoris civitatis Canee in insulae Cretea ab Leonardo Laurendano duce Venetiarum (manuscript, Venice, 22 Sept. 1507). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, June 1956.

(View the Republic of Venice on a map: "Rep. di Venezia".)

 In this fascinating manuscript the Doge of Venice, Leonardo Laurendano, names Federico Reynerio as Venice’s governor in the region of Chania on the northern coast of Crete for two years –“unless your successor arrives earlier.” Organized and presented much like the municipal statutes in this exhibition, the manuscript lays out over one hundred and eighty different instructions for the new governor to follow. Note how Federico’s name and coat-of-arms have been written over earlier erasures. Perhaps he was not the first recipient of this manuscript? This is one of six similar manuscripts held by the Yale Law Library.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Bergamo (Italy). Statuta magnificae communitatis Bergomi (Brescia, 1491). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Bergamo on a map.)

The city of Bergamo was part of the Venetian Republic from 1426 to 1797, but like many of Venice’s territories it was allowed to maintain its own municipal statutes. The volume displayed here is the first printed edition of those statutes, and one of thirteen incunables (books printed before 1500) in Yale Law Library’s collection of Italian civil codes. Here we see an excellent example of the coexistence of print and manuscript, as the statutes printed in 1491 are supplemented by thirty-three pages of “reformationes et correctiones” from 1492, and eight pages of material added between the 1570s and 1610s.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Montebuono (Italy). Statuti communis et hominum terre Montis Boni (manuscript, Montebuono, middle or late 15th century). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, May 1946.

(View Montebuono on a map.)

The statutes from the town of Montebuono (about thirty miles north of Rome) were collected and revised by the notary Eusebius Angeli of Narni as part of a reform program in 1437. The manuscript you see here was copied out by a scribe named Maximus Vincentius several years later. The statutes are organized into four sections: the first deals with city government; the second with damages to property; the third with civil, social, and legal matters; and the fourth with violent crimes and perjury. Luckily, one statute prohibited the throwing of dead animals or other filth onto people walking along the public road.

Yale Law School’s rare manuscript is attracting attention in modern-day Montebuono, now a village of about a thousand residents. Renata Ferraro, president of the Fondazione Gabriele Berionne, wrote an article about the Yale manuscript in the August 2008 issue of Montebuono Spazio Comune. The issue is available as a PDF file, at the Montebuono On Line website, and Ferraro's article is on pages 6 and 8. The article is based on a detailed study of the manuscript authored by Yale graduate student Oriana Bleecher.

If you are interested in learning more about the rich history of Montebuono, see Montebuono e il suo territorio: storia, architetture e restauri inizia la ricerca (Mariasanta Valenti, ed.; Rome: Fondazione Gabriele Berionne, 2007), shelved in the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room. We thank Renata Ferraro and the Fondazione Gabriele Berionne for the gift of this splendidly illustrated volume.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Introduction

Beginning in the eleventh century, scholars in what is today northern Italy began to rediscover the Roman legal tradition as expressed in the Emperor Justinian’s sixth-century Corpus iuris civilis. In the centuries that followed, jurists, merchants, clergymen, and civic leaders all across the Italian Peninsula pragmatically integrated Roman law with the long-held customary laws of their own towns and cities. Over time a new and dynamic system of civil law emerged, one which continues to evolve to this day. The works featured in this exhibition are simultaneously examples of—and evidence for—the flourishing of Italian civil law in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The Yale Law Library’s collection of early Italian city statutes contains codes from over three hundred and eighty municipalities—including major cities such as Milan, Bologna, Rome, and Venice as well as tiny villages like Bellosguardo, Crasciana, and Montebuono. Regardless of their size, all of these municipalities took pride in their laws, and looking at the title pages one can sense the important role that these codes played in defining a municipality and its citizens.

As you explore the exhibition in the posts that follow, note the ways that the books’ owners marked and annotated them; the coexistence of printed and hand-written statutes; and the transition from the Latin of jurists and scholars to the Italian of merchants and politicians.

The Law Library’s Italian statute collection provides a rich resource not only for legal history, but also for the history of reading, print culture, manuscript culture, bookbinding, Italian social history, political history, and much more. In addition, the books are fascinating cultural artifacts. We welcome you to make use of them.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Image at right: Sicily (Kingdom). Regni Sicilie constitutiones per excellentissumum j.v.d. do. Andream de Isernia (Naples, 1533).

Now on exhibit...

Oct. 2008 – Feb. 2009
Rare Book Exhibition Gallery
Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library
Yale Law School

An exhibition highlighting the Lillian Goldman Law Library's outstanding collection of early Italian city statutes inaugurates the Law Library's new, state-of-the-art exhibition gallery. The exhibition, "The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library," debuts during the Yale Law School's annual Alumni Weekend, Oct. 3-4, 2008.

The Law Library's collection of Italian "statuta" is rivaled by few other U.S. libraries and surpassed by none. These municipal codes governed the dozens of Italian city-states that arose in the Middle Ages and persisted until the reunification of Italy in the late 19th century. The collection contains over 900 volumes of printed books and 60 bound manuscripts, dating from the 14th to 20th centuries, and representing over 380 municipalities and jurisdictions. In their mixing of Roman law, local law, and pragmatic innovations, the Italian municipal statutes became the prototype of European civil law.

The new Rare Books Exhibition Gallery is located in the lower level of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room. The exhibition cases are climate-controlled and protect the exhibit items from damage by ultra-violet light.

The exhibition was curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, doctoral candidate in medieval history at Stanford University, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian.

For those unable to visit the exhibit in person, the exhibit will appear in installments here on the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, phone me at (203) 432-4494 or email me at <mike.widener[at]yale.edu>.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The new exhibit cases for the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection arrived on Thursday, September 25. The two state-of-the-art exhibit cases measure slightly over 8 feet wide and 3 feet deep. They were built by SmallCorp of Greenfield, MA, the same company that recently built new exhibit cases for the Yale University Art Gallery. Humidity levels are controlled by silica gel tiles, and the plexiglass tops filter out harmful ultraviolet light.

The cases are located at the entrance to the Paskus-Danziger Rare Books Reading Room, on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Thanks go out to all the folks who helped: Joseph Chadwick (Project Manager, Yale University Facilities), Femi Cadmus (Associate Librarian for Adminsitration, Lillian Goldman Law Library), Bonnie Collier (former Associate Librarian for Adminsitration, Lillian Goldman Law Library), Clark Crolius (Installations Manager, Yale University Art Gallery), Professor Blair Kauffman (Director, Lillian Goldman Law Library), Kevin Rose (Building Manager, Yale Law School), Van Wood (SmallCorp), Maria Zawadzki (H2Z Design), Paula Zyats (Assistant Chief Conservator, Yale University Libraries).

The inaugural exhibition is now being installed, and will debut during Yale Law School's Alumni Weekend. Stay tuned for the announcement!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Kevin Rose, Joe Chadwick and the Physical Plant crew install the new exhibit cases.

Margot Curran (Exhibits Conservator, Yale University Libraries) installs
the new exhibit with (far left) Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, Rare Books intern
and guest exhibit curator.