Bobbleheads Exhibit Open House: Wednesday, March 2

All are invited to an open house this Wednesday, February 2, for the opening of the Law Library's 2016 spring exhibit:

"Equal Caricature Under Law: Supreme Court Bobbleheads by The Green Bag"

Wednesday, March 2, in the Riesenfeld Center (N30, Sub Plaza Level)

Open House: 12 noon - 4:00 p.m.

Snacks and refreshments will be served through the day.     

Artful and highly collectible, the Supreme Court bobbleheads depict historical and current justices with witty references to the justices' notable cases.  The bobbleheads are produced in limited runs, and are typically obtained only by receiving and redeeming a sought-after certificate.  The Law Library is proud to hold the only complete institutional collection of the figurines, apart from a similar collection at the Yale Law Library.  

The exhibit includes over 30 historical volumes drawn from the Riesenfeld Center's Arthur C. Pulling Rare Books Collection.  From the Federalist Papers to Brandeis's famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, these volumes, and accompanying biographical information, highlight the featured justices' careers and their significant work.

2016 Spring Exhibit: "Equal Caricature Under Law: Supreme Court Bobbleheads by The Green Bag"

Bobbleheads of Justices Bader Ginsburg, Breyer,
Thomas and Scalia.

The University of Minnesota Law Library and Riesenfeld Center are pleased to announce the 2016 spring exhibits:

"Equal Caricature Under Law: Supreme Court Bobbleheads by The Green Bag"

"Equal Caricature Under Law: Supreme Court Bobbleheads by The Green Bag," showcases the complete set of Supreme Court bobbleheads produced by the entertaining (and scholarly) journal of law, The Green Bag.  Our collection was recently and generously donated by the Honorable James M. Rosenbaum ('69), Federal District Court Judge for the District of Minnesota (ret.).

Artful and highly collectible, the Supreme Court bobbleheads depict historical and current justices with witty references to the justices' notable cases.  The bobbleheads are produced in limited runs, and are typically obtained only by receiving and redeeming a sought-after certificate.  The Law Library is proud to hold the only complete institutional collection of the figurines, apart from a similar collection at the Yale Law Library.  

The exhibit includes over 30 historical volumes drawn from the Riesenfeld Center's Arthur C. Pulling Rare Books Collection.  From the Federalist Papers to Brandeis's famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, these volumes, and accompanying biographical information, highlight the featured justices' careers and their significant work.

In addition to the bobblehead exhibit, our gallery also features an exhibit of the personal and judicial papers of the Honorable David S. Doty ('61), Senior Federal District Court Judge for the District of Minnesota.  Judge Doty served for over twenty years as the arbitrator for the National Football League collective bargaining agreement, and has decided numerous important criminal and civil cases.

"Equal Caricature Under Law: Supreme Court Bobbleheads by The Green Bag," and the personal and judicial papers of Judge David S. Doty, are on display in the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center from this Wednesday, March 2, through August 1, 2016.  There will be a digital version of the exhibit to follow.

The exhibits were designed and curated by Barbara Berdahl, Special Collections Assistant Librarian, Pat Graybill, Digital Technology Specialist, and Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections.  

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

Clarence Darrow and Leopold and Loeb on PBS

Clarence Darrow at right, with defendants Leopold and Loeb
center (Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

The Riesenfeld Center holds the preeminent national collection of personal letters written by and to Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), as well as numerous books, pamphlets, and other writings by and about the great American trial attorney. The manuscript letters have been transcribed and digitized as part of the Law Library's award-winning Clarence Darrow Digital Collection. The Darrow Digital Collection is a full research portal that also includes a biography and timeline of Darrow's career, over two hundred images, a collection of important Darrow case materials and summaries, and a searchable Westlaw database of all Darrow cases and cases that refer to Darrow.

Last year, an associate producer at PBS contacted us to use one of our Darrow photographs in a documentary on the Leopold and Loeb "trial of the century." At the 1924 trial, one of the most controversial of Darrow's storied career, Darrow successfully mounted an insanity defense to save the lives of two wealthy young Chicagoans who murdered a boy simply, as they admitted, "for the thrill of it."

The PBS documentary on Leopold and Loeb, titled "The Perfect Crime," has now been broadcast as part of the PBS American Experience documentary series, and can be viewed online.  The film expertly captures the courtroom drama and describes Darrow's strategy on behalf of his doomed clients. The website for the documentary also features the Darrow Digital Collection as a source for further reading.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections, and Michael Hannon, Associate Director for Access Services & Digital Initiatives

New Rare Titles on U.S. Constitutional Law

A replica of Fulton's steamer Clermont (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) 

Recently we acquired several interesting works related to 19th-century U.S. constitutional law. The earliest of these, "The Right of a State to Grant Exclusive Privileges" (New York, 1811), by iconic inventor Robert Fulton and his partner Robert Livingston, is a rare and impassioned defense of their state-granted steamboat monopoly on the Hudson River in New York, which had been challenged by boat operators in Albany.

Several years after Fulton's pamphlet, steamboat operator Aaron Ogden - granted the same exclusive rights of navigation between New York and New Jersey - squared off in court against his former business partner Thomas Gibbons. At stake was the great question of whether Congress or the states could regulate interstate commerce. A historic 1824 Supreme Court decision, led by John Marshall and based on the Constitution's Commerce Clause, settled the issue in favor of Congress and paved the way for expanded federal regulation. The pamphlet of Fulton and Livingston provides excellent context for the issue, including arguments on concurrent jurisdiction, the Commerce Clause and states' rights.

Another pamphlet related to monopolies, "The Opinion of Mess. Binney and Chauncey, on the Acts of the Legislature of New-Jersey" (Trenton, 1834), defends the right of a legislature to extend exclusive corporate privileges by contract, and to restrict a subsequent legislature's ability to rescind those rights. Three years later, the noted Charles River Bridge case (1837) was settled by the Supreme Court, which rejected asserted monopoly rights in a charter granted to the Charles River Bridge Company for their Massachusetts bridge. The New Jersey pamphlet provides contemporary background for these early constitutional issues.

Abraham Lincoln, by Abraham Byers (1858)

Two others are also notable. "The Decision of Chief Justice Taney, in the Merryman Case" (1862), contains Taney's opinion on the controversy over Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Merryman, a Maryland militia member, had been arrested and imprisoned for treason, and his writ of habeas corpus was rejected by his Union army jailers. US Supreme Court Justice Taney, then sitting as a federal circuit court judge, declared that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln replied publicly that the Constitution was silent on whether Congress or the President had the authority to suspend habeas corpus in times of rebellion or invasion, and that with Congress in recess, he was compelled to act.

Finally, Samuel Bassett's 1854 pamphlet, "An Address Made to the People," on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, advocates state nullification of the Act and demands jury trials for alleged runaway slaves. Failure to fulfill that constitutional guarantee rendered the Act unconstitutional and void. The pamphlet was a particularly special find because there is only one other recorded copy in libraries.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections    

Rare Swedish and Norwegian Law

Den Norske Low-Bog (Copenhagen, 1604)

Among the interesting historical collections at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center are significant works of rare Swedish and Norwegian law. These books range from rare medieval law codes, to law dictionaries, to a British printing of Nazi documents seized on Norway's Lofoten Islands during WWII.

The Swedish collection comprises about 50 rare titles. The earliest volume, the Leges Suecorum Gothorumque (1614), is a collection of medieval Swedish law published in Stockholm early in the reign of King Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), the monarch who transformed Sweden into an early modern power. Another of the early volumes, the Lexicon Juris Sveo-Gothici (Uppsala, 1665), defines and traces Swedish legal terms with reference to Roman law, not unlike the De Jure Sveonum et Gothorum Vetusto (Stockholm, 1672), a work on civil and criminal procedure.

Sverikes rikes lagh-boker (Stockholm, 1666)

Many of the early Swedish books have bookplates, signatures and annotations. These important features recently gained the attention of Visiting Professor Eric Bylander, from Uppsala University, who undertook research on the collection this past fall. A rare book collector and expert in heraldry, in addition to his modern legal expertise, Bylander uncovered in our Swedish books interesting connections to noted jurists, families and booksellers, and has continued his research back in Sweden.

The Norwegian law collection contains slightly fewer volumes, though a number are also notable. Among these is the Magnus Lagabøters landslov, an important 13th-century collection of laws promulgated by King Magnus VI (or Magnus Lagabøte, the Law-Mender) of Norway. This past November, Professor Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde visited the Law School from the University of Bergen to lecture on this collection. As Sunde noted, it was one of the most comprehensive law codes in medieval Europe and remained in force for over four centuries. Sunde is currently preparing a critical edition of the text based on a large and complex manuscript tradition, as part of a project he leads at Bergen.  

Notes in Sverikes rikes lagh-boker

    
Although our collection lacks any manuscripts of the Magnus Lagabøters landslov, the Riesenfeld Center was recently able to acquire a work containing the first printed edition of the text to add to the collection.


   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections




        

Farewell to Magna Carta (and Edward Coke)

Frontispiece showing Coke, from his Institutes (1642)

As the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta (and our exhibit) draws to a close, we admire once more the impact of the Great Charter over eight centuries and across the world.  Magna Carta's original chapter 39, protecting person and property against abuse, remains the heart of its influence on the modern world.  Of course, Magna Carta has become an icon of the rule of law, and chapter 39 has assured the document's legacy as a charter of essential individual rights.

Although Chapter 39 is considered the core of Magna Carta, an often underappreciated part of its story deserves to be highlighted, as we say farewell to the charter and the long evolution of its influence.  This is the story of an early textual change that made Magna Carta's key clause what it is.

Among the original chapters or clauses agreed to by King John and his barons at Runnymede in June 1215, was the famous chapter 39 (though it was numbered later), which reads: no free man may be captured, imprisoned or lose his property - or be outlawed, exiled, destroyed or pursued  (i.e., like hunted down) - except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

That fierce clause took on a new aspect under King John's successor and young son, Henry III.  Henry and his regents altered and reissued the charter: when it was confirmed in 1225, after Henry came of age and faced pressure from his barons, it omitted, combined or restated a number of chapters, including chapter 39.  Chapter 39, now chapter 29, featured an interesting change:

"No free man may be captured or imprisoned or lose any freehold or any of his liberties or his free customs," or be outlawed, exiled, etc.  The chapter now also included the former chapter 40, that "to no one could right or justice be delayed or denied."  The new chapter 29 was enrolled as statutory law in England in 1297 and has been preserved as English law ever since: it is the text we find printed in the Riesenfeld Center's collection of early Magna Cartas and underlined by the likes of Granville Sharp.

With that addition, Chapter 29 could look more like a microcosm of Magna Carta itself, protecting all of one's liberties, as forms of property, against usurpation, abridgement and violation, unless by the judgment of peers or the law of the land.

Magna Carta's famous early modern interpreter and one of the greatest English jurists, Edward Coke (1552-1634), considered Magna Carta a fundamental expression of English common law, which like Magna Carta could stand as a bulwark against abusive royal power.  Coke reiterated the (evolved) understanding that Magna Carta's protections extended to all Englishmen, and that "the judgment of peers or the law of the land" in chapter 29 meant "the due process of law."  Although rudimentary and often violated in practice, the principle that procedural rights were fundamental in English law was maintained in Coke's time and after, often with reference to Magna Carta, and formed a basis of modern understandings of procedural due process.  We can look to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to see chapter 29's direct legacy in the American Constitution.

Notably, Coke also understood chapter 29 to stand for a more general liberty of the individual.  In his influential Second Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1642), he read the "liberties" of chapter 29 to mean: the laws of England (including Magna Carta); the liberties of Englishmen; and privileges granted by the king.  In setting out a category of liberty apart from Magna Carta, and other statutes or royal grants, Coke held open a way to describe new rights, subject to judicial interpretation.  He invoked in support relatively recent decisions against monopolies and special ordinances, which he agreed infringed the liberty of the subject to ply a trade or choose the provider of a service.  Coke's comment on substantive due process was grounded in the altered text of Magna Carta's chapter 29, and its reference to unenumerated English liberties. 

It would take too long to give a fuller account of Magna Carta's chapter 29, but it is interesting that one relatively small change could alter the long legacy of a great document.  It is certainly a legacy that will remain robust. 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

Professors Narita and Sharafi Visit the Riesenfeld Center

The North-Western Reporter (St. Paul:
John B. West and Co, 1878)

Fall has brought several notable visitors to the Riesenfeld Center.  In late August and early September, Professor Hiroshi Narita, the leading international expert on the history of the West Publishing Company, came to Minneapolis-St.Paul to complete research for his forthcoming book on West Publishing.  While here, Professor Narita undertook to discover the earliest beginnings of John B. West's publishing companies in St. Paul.  He also sought to resolve questions related to the printing of early reporters and the later history of the company, after it was absorbed by Thomson and Thomson Reuters.  During his stay, Professor Narita was hosted by the Law Library and did research at the Riesenfeld Center.  In addition, he did work at the Minnesota Historical Society and took a full-day tour of the Thomson Reuters campus in Eagan.  After a two-week trip, Professor Narita journeyed to Stanford University to continue work, before returning to Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches in the law faculty at Seijo University.  The Library and Riesenfeld Center were happy to support Professor Narita’s research, and we look forward to his book!      

In October, Professor Mitra Sharafi visited from more proximate Wisconsin, though her current research takes her similarly far afield, to colonial India.  Sharafi, a legal historian of South Asia with wide and fascinating interests, is at work on a new project studying the impact of medico-legal experts, like the Imperial Serologist, on the development of medical jurisprudence in India.  She visited the Law School on October 1st to present her paper, “Blood Testing and Fear of the False in British India,” as part of the fall Legal History Workshop series organized by Professors Susanna Blumenthal and Barbara Welke.  Professor Sharafi also toured the Law Library’s collection of colonial Indian law, which cataloger Claire Stuckey has been working to catalog, based in part on a list of titles included on a resource site that Sharafi created.  Over the past year, Stuckey has corrected and updated hundreds of jurisdictions, call numbers, and subject headings for volumes that have been identified as rare.  In many cases, the colonial titles held at the Law Library are among the only recorded copies in the world.  As Professor Sharafi pointed out, these volumes may be held in India, but are often not well recorded or preserved, and remain in great danger of being lost.  The Law Library hopes to do a further service by relocating these volumes to basement storage and our climate-controlled rare book stacks.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections