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

QR Codes Added to Current Exhibit

To enhance our current exhibit, "Magna Carta, 800 Years: Rights and the Rule of Law," we recently added QR codes in the exhibit gallery.  In addition to information included in the cases to accompany the volumes, and nine standing panels with images and text around the room, the new QR codes link by smartphone to audio recordings that shed further light on exhibit items.  With the codes, we aim to offer some more in-depth information and add to our visitors' experience.

By offering short audio (and/or visual) clips, QR codes can highlight interesting additional information - about a book's binding or a former owner, for example - that may be difficult to give attention to in the text for the main exhibit.  This was the case for our exhibit book, Magna Carta Opposed to Assumed Privilege (London, 1771).  The volume contains material related to the controversy over printing Parliamentary debates in England, and radical figure John Wilkes's role in it.  The book's binding is also noteworthy, depicting on its spine images of the "liberty cap and pole," symbols of freedom in the restive American colonies as well as Europe.  The use of the symbols on the binding likely referred to Wilkes's image as a political radical, something eagerly celebrated in the colonies (whose grievances he supported).  We chose to display the book's title page in the exhibit case, and included a close-up image of the binding elsewhere in the exhibit room.  The audio recording was a great way to focus on the richness of this particular volume, bridge its 'inner' and 'outer' significance, and improve the variety of information available for visitors touring the exhibit.  

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections            

New Digital Exhibit: "Magna Carta, 800 Years: Rights and the Rule of Law"

To mark Constitution Day, and in celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the University of Minnesota Law Library has digitized its year-long exhibit, "Magna Carta, 800 Years: Rights and the Rule of Law." In addition, the digital site features a virtual showcase for the Library's collection of early printed editions of Magna Carta, the earliest of which dates to 1514. Drawn from the treasures of the Library's Arthur C. Pulling Rare Books Collection, the exhibit includes over seventy-five works that reflect and illuminate the deep influence of Magna Carta on the Anglo-American legal tradition.

Viewed through cases, texts and ideas that were shaped by Magna Carta, the exhibit traces the document's impact on the development of rights and the rule of law in England and early America, and its emergence on a global stage. Through the exhibit visitors are invited to explore the history, challenges and promise of Magna Carta, rights and the rule of law, in its first eight hundred years.

The digital exhibit was designed and curated by Glen Anderson, Barbara Berdahl, Patrick Graybill and Ryan Greenwood.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

New Rare Acquisitions!

Hayward's Confession (Minneapolis, 1895)

The Riesenfeld Center has recently been fortunate to acquire several new titles for its rare books collection. Among these are three titles generously donated by Mr. William Whitlock, which include a contemporary account of the trial of Charles I, an account of the Parliament in the crucial years leading to the English Civil War, and Whitelockes Notes Uppon the Kings Writt, 2 vols. (London, 1766). The titles all bear on the conflicts between Parliament and king in tumultuous 17th-century England, and the constitutional ideas that animated them.  The volumes are terrific additions to the collection, particularly as we celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and recall the importance of the same conflicts for the rebirth of Magna Carta as a political document in the 17th-century.

Hayward's Confession joins a large collection of trials, often sensationalistic and printed for a mass audience, held at the Center. Hayward's case is interesting not only as a murder case but a local one: in 1895 Harry Hayward was convicted of murder in Minneapolis, and the trial and verdict were closely followed. Our rare account, printed as a supplement to the Minneapolis Times, represents the convicted man's final confession.  For more, and more images, see our recent Tumblr post.

Another item falls into the category of legal humor. Lawyers and the law are perennial subjects of satire, as a number of titles in our law and literature collection attest. The Law and Lawyers Laid Open (London, 1737), joins this venerable tradition. Closely related to works on law reform, the volume takes the form of a series of humorous dialogues and visions about lawyers' ethics and sharp practices.


   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

         

        

Elizabeth Pickering: The First Woman to Print Books in England

Colophon from: The Great Charter, Called in 
Latin Magna Carta ...London: Elizabeth Pickering, 1540/41.

To continue our series of posts on books related to Magna Carta, and the Library's collection of early printed Magna Cartas, one of the Library's editions was printed by a woman named Elizabeth Pickering (or Pykeryng). This might seem striking in the period, and it is. Elizabeth Pickering was the first woman in England to print books that survive today. Her edition of Magna Carta (1540/41), stands with Granville Sharp's copy of Magna Carta and the second printed edition of the Great Charter, from 1514, as the most notable editions that the Library owns. Widow of noted law printer Robert Redman, Pickering took over her husband’s printing press on his death in October 1540. At least two women are known to have printed earlier works, but these have not survived, while Pickering produced as many as thirteen titles that have come down to us. Ten are directly attributable to her, and three others may be hers as well. 

Pickering's first book, A Lytle Treatyse Composed by Iohn Sta[n]dysshe, with a colophon dated December 13, 1540, was printed at her shop at the "sygne of the George" in London's Fleet Street, where her husband also printed. Pickering continued publishing under her own name until transferring her press to William Middleton, on her remarriage to William Cholmeley in 1541. In our Magna Carta, Pickering employs Robert Redman’s monogram, and clearly identifies herself as the book’s printer in the colophon. Pickering printed her edition of Magna Carta in English, as Redman had done for the first time in 1534, and helped spread its tenets to a wider audience. We are fortunate to have one of her most remarkable works in the collection, and as a centerpiece of our current exhibit.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections