Lewis Morris Collection joins Libraries of Early America

Mike Widener — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT

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 most creative books in American law

Mike Widener — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:26:00 GMT

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

Yale Law Library - Rare Books Blog : legal bibliography, American law

Lewis Morris Collection joins Libraries of Early America

The most creative books in American law