A Visit from Professor Bruno Debaenst

This past spring, Professor Bruno Debaenst was the visiting professor to Minnesota from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University. Professor Debaenst is an expert in legal history, whose scholarship and interests range widely and include employment, labor and insurance law, international legal organizations and the modern welfare state, Swedish legal history, and early and modern Belgian legal history, among other subjects. At the Law School, he taught an excellent class on historical trials in comparative perspective. 

Professor Debaenst was the most recent faculty visitor as part of a Minnesota-Uppsala exchange program that dates back to the fall semester of 1982. The program has been strengthened since then, sending numerous faculty members of the respective law schools back and forth for enriching teaching and study across the Atlantic. The kindred cultural and academic relationship has opened many doors for exchange students from the two universities, some of whom have stayed, lived and thrived in the US and Sweden.   

During the semester, Bruno took the time to visit the Riesenfeld Center and rare books collection, and became a good friend in the process. While here he found several items of particular interest. One was a remarkable work by Flemish jurist Joost de Damhoudere (1507-81), whose Latin title is Praxis Rerum Criminalium. First published in 1554 and reprinted many times after, it is the most extensively and vividly illustrated law book of the 16th century, a compendium of Flemish-Roman criminal law that depicts in more than 50 woodcuts the wide range of crimes it discusses. 

The book is one that had caught our eye also, and was featured in an exhibit that was mounted two years ago. Of the two copies of the work in our rare books collection, one we acquired was formerly owned by the great German jurist and legal historian Hermann Kantorowicz. That copy is enhanced by unique and rich student annotations - probably from a German student contemporary to the book's publication - and the book was perhaps partly purchased or given to Professor Kantorowicz for that reason.   

In discussing the book with me, Bruno pointed out the potential that it had for further research. Among other interesting perspectives on the work is that of plagiarism. In fact, Joost de Damhoudere plagiarized his magnum opus from Philips Wielant, an earlier jurist and public official who also served as a mayor of the Liberty of Bruges. Why Damhoudere chose not to acknowledge his principal source is a mystery. Although the 16th century placed no modern legal or perhaps cultural prohibitions on plagiarism, it seems there were some basic rules of ethics, which Damhoudere must have been aware that he violated. In addition, other questions were raised: one was the extent of the work's reliance on an existing Roman law tradition vs. its reflection of contemporary Flemish law. Other questions involve the woodcut depictions, the complex publication history of the book, and the fascinating topics of criminal law that are covered (some seem included only to highlight a particular sensationalistic woodcut). In all, the book raises many more questions than an ordinary (even historical) law book typically does.

In our second copy of the book, the rich annotations also reveal information about the student who took notes in it. Apparently a humanist by inclination, the student was fond of citing Latin classics and appended quotes in Greek. The text itself became an imaginative space for the student's heavy multi-colored pen work, with interlinear and marginal notes, pointers and labeling. 

Likewise for us, thinking about the book centuries later, it provides a similar space for discussion and thought, and the elaboration of new approaches to the material. It is a wonderful conversation piece, ripe for further research.   

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

Two New Library Digital Exhibits: Treasures of the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center

The Law Library and Riesenfeld Center are pleased to announce two new digital exhibits:

"Noted and Notable: Treasures of the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center"

and

"'Böcker Har Sina Öden' (Books Have Their Destinies): Treasures of the Swedish Law Collection at the Riesenfeld Center” 

The digital exhibits preserve and make available online the Riesenfeld Center's spring exhibits, highlighting treasures of the Law Library's special collections. In particular, the items in these exhibits have been chosen for their unusual value as artifacts, including such features as interesting annotations, associations with notable former owners, striking illustrations, beautiful bindings, and other properties that make historical law books fascinating objects that are worthy of study. 

"Böcker Har Sina Öden' (Books Have Their Destinies)," was curated by Professor Eric Bylander, who has been twice a visiting professor at the Law School and is Distinguished University Professor at the Faculty of Law, Uppsala University. "Noted and Notable: Treasures of the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center" is still open by appointment for viewing in the Riesenfeld Center.  

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

 

Our Rare Chinese Law Collection

Recently we were visited by Yao Chen, the librarian of the East Asian collection in Wilson Library here on campus. Yao is working on compiling an important bibliography of rare Chinese books at the University, which involves updating the records and information we have about the books. It is a great project that allows us to learn more about our own collection also, which has been exciting. 

Our collection of Chinese law was largely acquired from the Northwestern Law Library as a single acquisition. Although not extensive, a number of multi-volume sets push the size of the collection over 100 volumes and fascicles. The earliest title in the collection, published in 1810, is the Ta Tsing Leu Lee in its first English translation by George Thomas Staunton. Often transliterated today as Da Qing lüli, these are the "Laws and Precedents of the Great Qing," the law code of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), which was periodically updated over their long reign. The criminal code covers a broad range of subjects, from offenses related to ritual and familial piety, to marriage, public administration, tax, property and violent crimes.   

Other items in the collection are also of note. We hold one late Qing series of bulletins on administrative law, as Yao mentioned to us, that is very rare and will require a detailed comparison to holdings in other libraries. Many other titles relate to criminal law and touch on subjects that are worth the attention of the historical researcher who can navigate them. In one example, pointed out by a visiting student, some penalties under the Qing dynasty could be reduced if the guilty party's family would suffer from a loss of livelihood. In other cases, like crimes against the state, penalties were severe, resulting in the forfeiture of family property and the execution of family members. 

After Staunton's translation of the Da Qing lüli, the next earliest titles in our collection are also among the most unique. Yao very kindly pointed these out to us during her research. The works relate to the legendary judge Bao Zheng (999-1062) and the famous administrator Hai Rui (1514-1587). Both figures have been mythologized in Chinese culture (Bao Zheng has been taken sometimes as divine). Both have also been interpreted as paragons of uncompromising justice, and as bulwarks of law against corruption. They are still portrayed today in literature, television (here, for example), cinema and other forums in China, though more innocuously than at points in the past. In the case of symbolism associated with Hai Rui, a controversial play about his career provided the spark for Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

The two works in our collection related to Bao Zheng and Hai Rui are similarly fictionalized. The first title, transliterated as Xiu Xiang Longtu Gong An (1816), are stories related to Bao Zheng, and the second, Hai Rui da Hong Pao Quan Zhuan (1813), stories about Hai Rui. In these fictitious criminal cases, well-dramatized wrongs are investigated and righted by the protagonists. Judge Bao, in particular, was and is a very popular protagonist in gong'an, or crime stories, of which our work represents an example. Somewhat like "Law & Order" today, the stories were popular among Chinese audiences under the Ming dynasty, and certainly during the Qing, when our books were published. Our titles are appropriately mass market books intended for wide distribution. The quality of printing is also appropriate for a mass market. Unusual even for more literary works in our collection, our edition of stories about Bao Zheng is illustrated with scenes from the tales. The woodblock printing required single carved blocks to create the engaging images, some of which are included below. For more on reading illustrated fiction during the period, see here.

Although modest in scope, the collection of Chinese law is diverse and interesting, and certainly worth perusal and study.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

        

Recent Rare Books Acquisitions: Criminal Law

Over the late spring and summer, the Riesenfeld Center has added notable titles to its collection, several of which fall in the area of criminal law. Our most important active collecting area related to criminal law is the Clarence Darrow collection, which not only includes the nationally preeminent trove of Darrow letters, but writings by and about the famous American trial lawyer, who championed criminal defendants facing great odds throughout his career. At the same time, other areas of the collection touch significantly on notable criminal trials, criminal law reform, and the philosophy of punishment. 

Among works of philosophy, we recently acquired the Essays (1824) of the English barrister and jurist Basil Montagu (1770-1851), a friend of William Wordsworth and James Mackintosh, who rejected the harshness of the death penalty in England, wrote to reform bankruptcy law, and advocated for his beliefs in a range of published works and as a member of several societies. Montagu's essays add to key reformer Jeremy Bentham's Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802), a recently-acquired first edition published first in French, which lays out Bentham's revolutionary utilitarian views on law and punishment. 

Another acquisition, a copy of the Report from the Select Committee on the Criminal Law of England, bound together with the Further Report (London, 1824), is among the very few copies listed in institutions. The parliamentary committee that authored the reports contributed importantly to the movement for 19th-century English criminal law reform, begun under the influence of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and figures like Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh in Parliament. In 1819-20, popular support for reform led to a more urgent awareness among lawmakers, and in 1823 the death penalty was made discretionary in cases not involving treason or murder for the first offense. In 1824, Parliament took up forgery, which became the focal point of death penalty reform efforts and of our reports. The committee treated in an analytic way what kind of crime forgery was, and its relation to fraud; and surveyed the history of forgery legislation in England. The work was the product of extensive legal expertise, and the reform of forgery law became a key precedent for 1830s reforms, which saw many of the over 200 capital offenses in England abolished by the end of the decade. 

A more recent work, the Hand Book of the Minnesota State Prison (1910), is a very rare edition of a handbook published to describe and tout Minnesota's new prison complex in Stillwater, then still under construction. The pamphlet outlines the prison's principles and objectives, organization, features, and finances, and is based generally on a utilitarian approach to the rehabilitation of its inmates. Arguing for the necessity of the new prison, it proclaims that the prison will be one of the most modern in the country, if not the world. Adding to the interest of the manual, and certainly meant as an additional advertisement, are two fold-out illustrations of the floor plan of the prison and an artist's bird's eye view of the prison and its grounds.

Even more recently, in the late 1940s and early 50s, the trials of the "Trenton Six" raised key issues of due process, in a murder trial that captured national attention and helped to catalyze the civil rights movement. Six young African-American men were convicted in 1948 of the murder of an elderly shop-keeper in Trenton, New Jersey, and sentenced to death. The men came to trial based on coerced confessions resulting from days of interrogation without access to attorneys, and were arrested without warrants in a wide sweep of the city. After a publicity campaign, the convictions were reversed on appeal in the New Jersey Supreme Court, for failing to specify what degree of murder the defendants were guilty of. After a new 13-week trial, four of the six defendants were acquitted, while circumstantial evidence resulted in convictions for the remaining two, one of whom died soon after, while the other was paroled in 1954. From these significant trials, we acquired a pamphlet published by the NAACP that formed part of the publicity effort to bring the case to a national audience; and a typed, signed censure by the judge in the first trial, which faults several of the defendants' attorneys for violating the New Jersey Bar's code of ethics. The censure sheds light on contemporary issues: the attorneys were reprimanded for speaking publicly about their clients' innocence and campaigning for it locally and nationally during the trial. Among other things, the judge also suggested that the attorneys, from New York, were raising money through their representation for other causes. The documents vividly bring the circumstances and sensation of the case to life, and encourage discussions about defendants' rights and the role of the media in trials, issues that are of continuing importance.

- 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