Lewis Morris Collection joins Libraries of Early America
Our Lewis Morris Collection is now part of the Libraries of Early America project on LibraryThing.com. As described by Jeremy Dibbell of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the coordinator of the Libraries of Early America Project, "Using the book-cataloging website LibraryThing.com, scholars from institutions around the country (including Monticello, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society and others) have begun the process of creating digital catalogs of early American book collections - the project covers anyone who lived in America and collected primarily before 1825."
LibraryThing provides powerful tools for analyzing Morris's library. The tag cloug, drawn from the subject headings in our catalog records, shows the subject strengths within the Morris Collection. You can also see how Morris's library compares with other libraries, both early and modern. In addition, there is a biographical sketch and portrait of Morris.
Lewis Morris III (1726-1798), a 1746 graduate of Yale, was a prominent New York lawyer and statesman and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His law library, consisting of 113 titles in 104 volumes, was donated to the Yale Law Library in 1960 by three of Lewis Morris' descendents: A. Newbold Morris (Yale Law School Class of 1928), Stephanus Van Cortlandt Morris, and George L. Kingsland Morris. Over half the books in the collection are also inscribed by Morris' grandfather, Lewis Morris I (1671-1746), who was chief justice of New York (1715-1733) and governor of New Jersey (1738-1746).
Libraries of Early America will soon add another of our collections, the John Worthington Collection. Worthington (1719-1800) was a wealthy and influential lawyer practicing in 18th-century Springfield, Mass., who served for many years as king's attorney of western Massachusetts and high sheriff of Hampshire County.
Thanks to Jeremy Dibbell and his Libraries of Early America collaborators!
Links:
MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
Legal history on the web
A quick round-up of new sources for legal history on the web...
From Prof. Robert C. Palmer, University of Houston: "The Anglo-American Legal Tradition website now has available the acquisitions from Spring 2008. The site contains about 2.1 million frames of documents from the U.K. National Archives from the years 1218 to 1650. If you have not used the site in the last few months, you will find it much more user-friendly ... The main document series on the site are CP40 (court of common pleas plea rolls), KB27 (court of king's bench plea rolls), KB26 (king's bench and common pleas plea rolls from Henry III), E159 and E368 (exchequer memoranda rolls), C33 (chancery orders and decrees), CP25(1) (feet of fines), DL5 (duchy decrees and orders), and REQ1 (court of requests orders and decrees) ... The AALT website runs through the O'Quinn Law Library at the University of Houston under a non-commercial license from the U.K. National Archives."
http://aalt.law.uh.edu
Legislación Mexicana, offered by the Biblioteca Daniel Cosio Villegas of the Colegio de México, is a project to digitize the contents of an essential work for the legal history of 19th-century Mexico, Legislación mexicana: ó, Coleccion completa de las disposiciónes legislativas expedidas desdé la independencia de la República [1821-1906] / ordenada por Manuel Dublán y José María Lozano (42 vols.; México, 1876-1912). Thanks to the Philobiblos blog for the heads-up.
http://www.biblioweb.dgsca.unam.mx/dublanylozano/
The 1582 edition of the Corpus Juris Canonici has been put online by UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library. This edition is known as the "Correctores Romani" edition, because it was prepared by a Vatican-appointed panel of editors charged with ridding the text and gloss of corruptions that had crept in over the centuries. The site also features corrected, expanded and searchable versions of indexes to the Liber Extra and its gloss.
http://digidev.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw-dev/
From Vicenç Feliú, Paul M. Hebert Law Center Library, Louisiana State University: "On the occasion of the Bicentennial of the Louisiana Digest of 1808, the Paul M. Hebert Law Center’s Center for Civil Law Studies has published an electronic version of the Digest of the Civil Laws now in Force in the Territory of Orleans (enacted on March 31, 1808) on its Civil Law Online website ... The original French and the English translation can be viewed separately or together on the same screen ... In addition, the manuscript notes of 1814, attributed to Louis Moreau-Lislet who, with James Brown, drafted the Digest, are available on this website. These notes are extracted from the De la Vergne Volume, a copy of the Digest bound in 1808 with interleaves between the English text on the left and the French text on the right. The manuscript notes on the interleaves give reference mainly to Roman and Spanish laws, but also mention French sources, such as Domat and Pothier ... This volume belonged to the de la Vergne family for generations, and is presently in possession of Mr. Louis V. de la Vergne." I add my congratulations to my good friend Louis de la Vergne for helping make this project possible.
http://www.law.lsu.edu/index.cfm?geaux=civillawonline.mainclohome
From the University of Georgia: "The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia."
http://publish.crdl.usg.edu/voci/go/crdl/home/
English Medieval Legal Documents AD 600 - AD 1535: A Compilation of Published Sources. Prepared by Hazel D. Lord, Senior Law Librarian, University of Southern California School of Law: "The goal of this project is to create a collaborative database on the published sources of English medieval legal documents, and to provide links to the growing number of online sources currently being developed."
http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php
MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
Recommended reading
There are several articles of interest to legal historians and legal bibliographers in the latest issue of The Green Bag (N.S. vol. 11, no. 2, Winter 2008). These include Michael Hoeflich's "Law Blanks & Form Books", part of Hoeflich's ongoing interest in legal ephemera (see also his blog, TheLegalAntiquarian. In addition, there's a reprint of an extremely useful 1961 bibliographic essay, "History of the Printed Archetype of the Constitution of the United States of America" by Denys P. Myers. This article is preceeded by "Which is the Constitution?" by Ross E. Davies, discussing the issue of determining the authoritative text of the Constitution, an issue which has come up in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on gun control, District of Columbia v. Heller.
On a different front, Fabio Arcila, Jr. demonstrates the usefulness of early American justice of the peace manuals in his new article, "In the Trenches: Searches and the Misunderstood Common-Law History of Suspicion and Probable Cause," University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 10:1 (Dec. 2007), 1-63. Librarians and rare law book enthusiasts will want to check the bibliography of American j.p. manuals that Arcila includes as an appendix.
MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
