Rare Books Collection: American Classics

Among featured collections, the Riesenfeld Center holds an outstanding range of early American law. Many of these are statutory laws that open a window onto early American society. Due to the contemporary need for legislation, statutory law makes up the great bulk of colonial American law. Many other law books were English imports to America until the later 18th century. The first native case reporter, Ephraim Kirby, did not publish his collection of Connecticut cases until 1789. General commentaries did not fare much better: Blackstone's influential Commentaries were available in the colonies before the Revolution in English and American editions, but American commentaries did not become a genre of publication until the early 19th century. The narrower American legal treatise came of age in the same period. Practice guides and form books, at least, which offered to lay practitioners of the law everything from contract templates, to selections of statute and common law organized by subject, were available from the earlier 18th century, in response to practical needs.

A few early American law books also carried some political significance. One notable example, English Liberties, was produced in 1721 in Boston by the older brother of Ben Franklin, as an updated re-print of a 1680 English work by Henry Care. It collects key English statutes, with a summary of what can be called English constitutional law, and features some elements of a legal practice guide. The Boston edition of English Liberties represented a defense of the colonists' "English rights" against a British Parliament intent upon revoking colonial charters; it was reprinted again in 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution. 

Political dispute and dissent eventually became widespread in the colonies, though books were not the best vehicle for them. Cheap newspapers and pamphlets were circulated more quickly to a larger audience. As the colonists' grievances against the English Parliament and Crown became acute, in the 1760s and early 1770s, newspapers shaped and carried public opinion. Popular letters first printed in newspapers might also be reprinted later. An example is John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, printed as a series of letters in newspapers from late 1767 to early 1768, and then in collected editions. An important figure of the Revolutionary period, Dickinson gained a wide public hearing through his opposition to new British tax schemes in the Townshend Acts (1767), which he argued were threats to the colonists' liberty and rights. 

The annual publication with perhaps the largest public following was Poor Richard's Almanac, which Ben Franklin and his friends sometimes also turned to political purposes. With details on astrology, astronomy, agriculture and current affairs, the almanac sold thousands of copies each year and made Franklin a well-to-do Philadelphian. The edition from 1765 is one with a legal and political dimension, since it included the text of the new Stamp Act (1765). As pseudonymous editor Richard Saunders, Franklin included the act as "most necessary" for Americans to read. When Franklin heard of the colonists' fiery denunciations of it, in early 1766, he was resident in London on business for Pennsylvania. He was granted a Parliamentary hearing and sided with his countrymen. Repeal of the act came soon after and gave lasting credence to Franklin's diplomatic and political abilities, which he would turn to good account in the following years.

Editions of these classics form part of the Center's early American collection - and there is much more to explore.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections    

      
     

Rare Newspapers in the Collection

Print newspapers are not always considered particularly collectible in libraries. But they are excellent time capsules for their historical moments and often record "firsts:" the first mention and immediate reaction to significant historical events. Legal events may seem less newsworthy than a moon landing, but some are special and deserve (and have received) attention. One of the most famous legal "firsts" in an American newspaper, the first publication of James Madison's June 8, 1789 draft amendments to the Constitution, were circulated in the June 13 issue of the United States Gazette. News of important legislation, court cases, and their resulting decisions can make for interesting, popular collection items; the three below are examples from our collections.    

The opening of the Northwest Territories was one such landmark event. The Territories themselves were established by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and renewed by a similar act in 1789. The historic legislation created what would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota east of the Mississippi. The new 1789 Act was printed on September 3, 1789, in the Pennsylvania Packet, an influential early newspaper and the first successful daily in the young United States. Such circulation of the new law helped induce westward settlement, though this was sharply contested by the land claims of American Indians and led to periods of war and simmering conflict.

The National Intelligencer was a long-running and significant political reporter that published government documents and Congressional debates. Run by Joseph Gales and William Seaton, the Intelligencer was the official government printer when it first published the decision in Gibbons v. Ogden on March 6, 1824, marked also as its earliest printed announcement. The landmark constitutional case established the basic interpretation of the Commerce Clause, affirming the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

The Law Library's Clarence Darrow collection includes a wide variety of work related to Darrow's life and career, represented most extensively by his letters, as well as publications, briefs, speeches, personal books, and other material. It also contains selected newspaper accounts of major trials that he was involved in. Few were more notorious than his defense of Leopold and Loeb, the 1925 "thrill killers" who Darrow saved from the death penalty. Pictured is one issue from several papers in the collection that headlined the trials and focused the spotlight of national attention on it. These kinds of print media coverage can capture the contemporary interest and response to events whose white-hot celebrity is otherwise harder to communicate to audiences with the passage of time.  

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

Upcoming Fall Exhibit: Racial Justice and the Law

This fall, the Riesenfeld Center will open a new exhibit on racial justice and the law, continuing a number of ongoing conversations at the Law School regarding race and criminal and civil law in American society. The exhibit will consider the struggle for equal rights through legal cases and events that saw those rights denied, limited, or advanced, amidst determined and continuing movements for equality.

The Center's rare book collection holds an important set of titles related to 19th-century anti-slavery movements, and to civil rights movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries. As leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois remarked in the early 20th century, while Reconstruction had real but limited effects, civil rights movements suffered a grave setback with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. 

At the same time, organizations dedicated to the achievement of equal civil rights emerged. The Afro-American League, led by Timothy Thomas Fortune, and the Afro-American Council - the latter of which held its annual meeting in 1902 in St. Paul - were eventually succeeded by the NAACP, founded in 1909 by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey, among others. These and other organizations arose in response to segregation enforced by law, and lawless violence, including lynching, faced by African Americans. In the late 19th century, many states passed segregationist Jim Crow laws, and with the moral blindness of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) segregation was ruled a constitutionally-protected principle.   

The NAACP initiated lawsuits targeting segregation and discriminatory laws, and made progress in some cases. It pursued anti-lynching laws, and lawsuits following race riots, which eventually resulted in some expansion of federal jurisdiction over states' criminal justice systems. A prominent case with strong NAACP support was that of Dr. Ossian Sweet, which features in our collection and reflects on the history of segregation in America. The following description is based on the excellent, detailed account of the Sweet trials by Mike Hannon for our Clarence Darrow Digital Collection. 

In 1925, Dr. Sweet, an African American medical doctor, moved with his family into a segregated white neighborhood in Detroit. Throughout America, segregation was maintained informally and formally. Often racial covenants prevented African Americans from owning houses in white neighborhoods (the practice flourished in Minneapolis, for example). The 1920s were a time of nation-leading demographic growth in Detroit, which saw an influx of African American and white workers looking for jobs and housing. The Ku Klux Klan also had a presence in the city and local political clout. In the case of Sweet, as in other cases, white neighbors resorted to tactics of intimidation and violence to drive African Americans from their homes. 

In September 1925, just after moving into a house on Garland Street, the Sweet family faced a mob massing outside their home. Family members and friends were called to help while the crowd began to hit the house with rocks and yelled epithets. Shots rang out from the house and struck two people, one of whom was killed. In the subsequent trials of Dr. Sweet, his family and friends, only Henry Sweet, Ossian's brother, would admit firing into the crowd.

The defense of Sweet, his family and friends was organized by the NAACP, which recruited the services of the nationally-renowned trial lawyer, Clarence Darrow. (Darrow's storied career is preserved in our library, which holds the largest collection of his letters, and material from his life and cases. Darrow was friends with founders of the NAACP and served as a member of its general committee.) At the first trial, for murder and conspiracy, Darrow and the defense team consistently argued that the Sweet family acted in self-defense while in direct fear of their lives. 

One aspect of Darrow's argument was that the 'reasonable man' standard, applied to gauge the fear of the defendants, had to be that of a black man in a similar situation of violence and threatened violence. The arguments at the first trial were bolstered by the testimony of several other African Americans, who had been chased from their Detroit homes by fear of violence and threats; and others who testified that between 400 and 500 people were present outside the Sweet home on the fateful day. 

In a long closing argument, Darrow argued that suffering due to race and deep inequality were at the heart of the case, appealing to a white jury to see past their own racial prejudice. In his jury instructions, Judge Frank Murphy noted that a black man's home was his castle in the same way as that of a white man: there was no right to invade or assail it (familiar as the 'castle doctrine,' with its long provenance). The jury deliberated for 46 hours and came back deadlocked; the judge declared a mistrial.  

Jury in the Henry Sweet trial

The prosecution vigorously pursued a retrial, and Darrow filed for the defendants to be tried separately. The first tried was Henry Sweet. The trial followed similar lines of argument; Darrow now had more success in hounding prosecution witnesses. In part, he pressed for admissions that a neighborhood homeowners association was organized to keep African American owners away and would use violence to do so. During the closing argument, attended by hundreds inside a packed courthouse, Darrow asked the all-white jurors again to set their prejudices aside and put themselves in the shoes of the Sweet family. He attacked the prosecution's case for eight hours, asking jurors to understand the defendant's plight and the history behind it. After jury instructions of more than two hours, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty in three hours; no further cases were tried.

The case was a notable victory for the family, the NAACP and Darrow, and reflected on issues of race and justice in 1925 that are still with us today. Racial covenants were not struck down until 1948, and de facto segregated communities have left their legacy across urban and suburban American landscapes. Self-defense doctrines have come back into the spotlight more recently in broader debates over lethal force used by police and private citizens, particularly when victims are minorities. In all of these, the problems of racial injustice that we still struggle with, and must continue to struggle with for a more equitable future, have come directly back to the foreground.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections  

New Tumblr Posts: from the Glorious Revolution to D-Day

Capt. Horace Hansen, a prosecutor at the Dachau
war crimes trials, 1945-47, with Sen. Claude Pepper. 

We have a host of new and interesting posts by my colleague Ian Moret over on our Tumblr site.  Ian has done a great job to mine our collections for historical materials that might not otherwise be uncovered; and has highlighted material that we will feature in larger projects in the future.  In the former category is the fascinating trial of John Perrott, the last man hanged in England for bankruptcy.  Perrott failed to cooperate with the bankruptcy commissioners, a capital offense in mid-18th century England, being unable or unwilling to account for large sums borrowed from creditors.  See Ian's link to a great article on the subject of Perrott by law professor Emily Kadens.  There is also interesting documentation from our Darrow Collection, revealing property that Clarence Darrow held in Minnesota, as well as posts (and here, and here) on new acquisitions related to the Glorious Revolution in England, among others.  In the latter category, of material that we are developing into larger projects, there are several posts related to our Horace Hansen archival collection (most recently here, and here, for the D-Day anniversary).  Hansen, from St. Paul, MN, was a WWII war crimes prosecutor at the Dachau war crimes trials.  Hansen's archive represents a rich trove and legacy that we are developing into a digital exhibit and collection.  Thanks to Ian for these great posts!

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections 

    

New Rare Acquisitions: The Glorious Revolution

The Riesenfeld Center has recently acquired several items related to England's Glorious Revolution, which add to existing strengths in early English law and the history of constitutional law in the rare books collection. 

The Glorious Revolution involved a momentous series of events in 1688 and 1689, which tested the fabric (and the fiction) of constitutional government under a monarch.  King James II (1633-1701), son of the political survivor King Charles II (1630-1685), was tolerated less and less during his short reign (1685-88) for his Catholicism and for the suspension by his prerogative power of laws that prohibited Catholics from serving in public office. When Parliament objected, James followed his Stuart predecessors and dismissed the national legislative body in 1685, planning to fill it with men who would repeal those laws.  Before he could realize the plan, he also produced a male Catholic heir, traditionally seen as the final straw of his reign.  Opposition leaders called upon William, the Prince of Orange (1650-1702) and husband of James's daughter, Mary, to protect the country's "religion, lawes and liberties."  William made the journey to England from Holland at the head of an army, and James duly fled, giving the events the name of a "glorious" (and comparatively bloodless) revolution that has been preserved.  It is ironic, of course, that the furor over a king's abuse of power was caused by efforts to mitigate laws excluding a minority religion.

From a constitutional standpoint, William's invited invasion created another rather difficult problem: how to approach the question of an altered line of succession, and a new monarch, in law?  The king had by right traditionally called Parliament, but this Parliament was in effect calling a king.  And how to describe the action of James - was it an abdication or a desertion of the seat of power, and was the throne vacant?  Fine-pointed discussions turned on the law, and the meaning of James's act and its effects, as these were taken up and debated in a constitutional convention called to recognize William as king, and to settle the question of how William came to the throne.  In the end, constitutional devices were found, at least to the satisfaction of a majority of the convention's participants, to what was ultimately a political problem.  Apart from the wrangling, and the success of a new claimant, the most important item to result from the Revolution was the English Bill of Rights, a set of laws and rights that Parliament believed was fundamental to their nation, and could not be traduced by a king.  Prominently, the Bill of Rights required that no king suspend statutory law without the consent of Parliament, and that none would grant individual dispensations from the laws as had "been exercised of late."  Among other clauses were the prohibitions on excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments.  William agreed to limit the power of his government in order to take up the throne, the document was memorialized in statutory law, and it went on to influence the American Bill of Rights one hundred years later.

In our collection, we have a copy of the English Bill of Rights contained in laws issued in the first year of William and Mary's reign, and now several important related documents.  The first is a speech of William, Prince of Orange, convening (some) members of Parliament while in London in late December, 1688; and Parliament's hasty reply, requesting that William take over the affairs of state.  The second is a rare and very interesting broadside (below) listing all those called from each county in England to Parliament in an attempt to recognize William as king and Mary as queen.  The third is a speech by William in February 1689, just after he and Mary had accepted the Declaration of Rights (what became the English Bill of Rights in statute), which shows the negotiated nature of William and Mary's government, and the beginnings of England's more modern constitutional monarchy.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections       

  

Bobbleheads Open House - Winners!

Congratulations to the winners of the prize drawings from the bobbleheads exhibit open house! The main drawing, for a bobblehead of Supreme Court justice David Brewer (1837-1910), was won by Franklin Rosenberg. Among other case references, the Brewer figure stands at a washtub, representing his opinion in Muller v. Oregon (1908) that limited the hours women could work.  Great thanks to The Green Bag and its editor, Professor Ross Davies, for the Brewer bobblehead.

Equal congratulations to Alex Galle-From and Nick Muellerleile, the winners of the Roberts Challenge. The Challenge asked participants to correctly identify case references on the newest Supreme Court bobblehead, that of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. The identifications were: a) the broccoli held in Roberts's left hand; b) the crab near his left foot; and c) the reference to "oysters and raisins" on the base of the bobblehead. Mr. Galle-From and Mr. Muellerleile's correct entries were selected from a drawing.


The answers to the puzzle are as follows: a) National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. In the Chief Justice's majority opinion, broccoli is referenced 12 times, most memorably as "the broccoli horrible," the hypothetical specter of a mandate to purchase the green vegetable. The crab refers to: b) FCC v. AT&T, a case in which Roberts noted that adjectival meanings of words, like "crabbed," may differ from their noun roots (i.e., crab). Finally, and interestingly for us, is c) Horne v. Department of Agriculture, a case that centered on the Takings Clause. In his opinion, Roberts distinguished "oysters" from "raisins" by observing that raisins were the fruits of Horne's labor, whereas oysters were "ferae naturae," or of a wild nature, belonging to the state. The government ultimately had to compensate Horne for a taking (by remitting a large fine).  

The principle that some animals are "of a wild nature" and owned by the state is reflected in an early English case that we have in our rare books collection. In The Case of Swans (1592), the royal court found the swans at issue were "ferae naturae," and thus could not be acquired by transfer or prescription. They were also "Royal fowl," owned by the Queen.     

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections     

     

New Tumblr Posts: Illustrated Law Books

Detail from Damhoudere, Praxis rerum
criminalium (1570)

There are lots of great new posts on our Tumblr site, featuring more (wonderful) items from the Riesenfeld Center's collections. Barbara Berdahl, Special Collections Assistant Librarian, has mined rich veins of collection material in curating the Tumblr blog, and has mixed newly found and favorite items, from Supreme Court bobbleheads and fascinating trials, to medieval manuscript fragments. Although Barbara is departing soon, the Tumblr site is one terrific testament to her work.

Some of the greatest rare book and archival finds on the Tumblr blog are recent ones. Among many highlights, Barbara has honed in on examples of early modern illustrated works, including Andrea Alciato's pathbreaking Emblemata (1581), Johannes Buno's Memoriale Institutionum Juris (1672) - which uses intricate and beautiful visual mnemonics to teach principles of Roman law - and Joost de Damhoudere's Praxis rerum criminalium (1570), depicting in over 50 woodcuts the wide array of criminal offenses summarized in the work. Added to these are images from satirical works in our law and literature collection, our two accounts of the Minnesota state constitutional convention, a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, images of medieval manuscript fragments that we have identified in the collection, and much more!

http://riesenfeldcenter.tumblr.com/
 
   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

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