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:

• Lewis Morris Collection, Libraries of Early America.
• Libraries of Early America project, LibraryThing.com.
• Biographies of Lewis Morris III from the National Park Service and Wikipedia.
• Biographies of Lewis Morris I from Wikipedia, and in the Guide to the Lewis Morris Papers, New Jersey Historical Society. See also Eugene R. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 1671-1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse University Press, 1981).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

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).

John Cowell's The Interpeter, or Booke Containing the Signification of Words was the most respected English law dictionary of the 17th century, despite the controversy that greeted its appearance in 1607. It went through eight editions between 1607 and 1727, testimony to its popularity and usefulness.

However, the early editions have an interesting quirk. The entry for "Testament (testamentum)" directs the reader to "See Will", but when you turn to the W's, there is no entry for "Will"! Cowell has sent his readers down a blind alley, or what librarians and indexers call a "blind reference."

This is a particularly surprising error given the author. John Cowell (1554-1611) was a doctor of civil law, or a "civilian" in the nomenclature of English law, in contrast to the practitioners of the English common law who practiced in the common law courts. Civilians practiced in the ecclesiastical courts of England, and thus wills and estates were part of the bread-and-butter of their practice. For a civilian like Cowell to completely omit any coverage of testaments and wills is odd, to say the least.

Even odder is that for decades no one bothered to fix the error. The 1637 and 1658 editions of The Interpeter were basically reprints of the 1607 edition. Finally, in 1672, Thomas Manley of the Middle Temple published an enlarged edition with a half-column definition for "Testament" and a brief paragraph for "Will."

Thanks to my friend Mr. Harold I. Boucher of San Francisco for calling to my attention the case of Cowell's missing "will." Mr. Boucher, a retired attorney, has himself published both on Cowell (King James's Suppression of The Interpreter and Denouncement of Dr. Cowell, 1998) and on the history of wills (California Living Trusts and Wills: What You Must Know Before You Make a Will, 1994; How to Live and Die with California Probate, 1970).

The image of the title page from the 1607 edition of The Interpreter comes from the John Cowell page in the Law Dictionary Collection website provided by Rare Books & Special Collections, Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin. It appears here with their permission and with my thanks to Elizabeth Haluska-Rauch, Head of Special Collections.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Robert F. Blomquist surveyed 426 law professors who have taught legal history for his paper, Thinking About Law and Creativity: On the 100 Most Creative Moments in American Law (Valparaiso University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-04, May 2008). Below I've extracted the books and articles that appear in Blomquist's top 100. I provide links for those books that are in the Yale Law Library's online catalog, MORRIS. Legislation and court cases make up the majority of the list, and I did not include these, although arguably The Federalist (1788) is a component of the #1 creative moment, "The Constitution of the United States (1787) and the ratification debates (1787-1788)."

You can find a brief critique of Blomquist's paper on Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog.

Most Creative Books in American Law...

15. James Kent, Commentaries on American Law (1826-30).
16. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833).
17. Christopher Columbus Langdell’s initiation of the case method of study at Harvard Law School initiated by his casebook, A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts (1871).
18. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (1881).
27. Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921).
43. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962).
44. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949).
46. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (1970).
54. Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (1973).
55. Hart & Sacks, The Legal Process (1958).
68. Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
79. The Politics of Law (1982).

Most Creative Law Review Articles in American Law...

45. Justice Douglas’ dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton (1972) (citing Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?--Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, 45 Southern California Law Review 450 (1972).
75. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, Right to Privacy, 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

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