Quiz Answers: St. Patrick's Day and Women's History Month

Thanks to all for taking the St. Patrick's Day and Women's History Month Quiz!

Below are the answers - for more see further below on Belva Lockwood and the Irish case reports, both featured in the quiz.

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902); the Declaration of Independence. 

2. Belva Ann Lockwood (1830-1917), in Kaiser v. Stickney, 102 U.S. 176 (1880). She won her next case before the Supreme Court: United States v. Cherokee Nation, 202 U.S. 101 (1906), confirmed that the government owed the Cherokee an outstanding balance of $1,111,284.70 subject to fees.

3. Burnita Shelton Matthews (1894-1988); Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005). 

4. John Davies. Le primer report des cases & matters en ley resolues & adiudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland. Dublin: Printed by Iohn Franckton, printer to the Kings most excellent Maiestie, 1615. 

5. All are true.

6. The Irish Jurist; first volume, first issue published November 4, 1848 (1848/1849 for year is fine).

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Belva Ann Lockwood matriculated at the National University Law School (later absorbed by George Washington) after being denied, based on gender, at several other D.C.-area schools. She also had to petition President Ulysses S. Grant to receive her diploma from National in 1873. In 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to admit her to its bar; in 1879, they finally relented: Lockwood became the first woman admitted before that court. In 1880, she argued Kaiser v. Stickney, related to a debt payment, becoming the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court. Lockwood ran for U.S. President as the candidate for the National Equal Rights Party in 1880 and 1884, amidst a career of activism and legal work also with her husband. In 1906, she won in United States v. Cherokee Nation. Some of her achievements are captured on the Green Bag's terrific bobblehead; Jill Norgren has written excellent books and several other pieces (one here, and here) about Lockwood's trailblazing career. 

The first printed Irish case reports came not long after a difficult turning point in Irish history. At the culmination of the Tudor military reconquest in 1603, James I of England (r. 1603–1625) imposed English common law throughout Ireland, replacing an older Gaelic (Brehon) law and transforming Irish landholding and inheritance. For more on early Irish law, see this excellent reference guide by Janet Sinder.

John Davies (1569–1626) served as England’s attorney general in Ireland from 1606 and published the first Irish case reports, Le primer report des cases. He brought attention to law that was unique to Ireland: in the Case of Tanistry, for example, English primogeniture ran up against the custom of Irish royal inheritance by kin-group election. The complexity of Irish history and law could not in fact be immediately subjected to the new “common” law. The Library's copy of the reports is a rare first edition. The book is also our earliest imprint from Dublin, which soon became an important player in the legal printing trade. 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections 

St. Patrick's Day and Women's History Month Quiz!

Welcome to our St. Patrick's Day and Women's History Month Quiz!

Answer the questions below to be entered to win swag from the bookstore!  The most correct entry wins $25 worth of swag from the Law School bookstore (t-shirts, mugs, hats, keychains, etc., or a combination), with a drawing in case of ties. UMN law students only are eligible.

Also available: an RBG prize - a poster of RBG by a local artist!

1. At the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY, who presented the Declaration of Sentiments? Which document are the first lines modelled on?

2. Who was the first woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court?  Which case did she win, and what settlement did she win?

3. Who was the first woman to serve as a judge on a United States district court? Who was the first Black woman to serve as a judge on a United States district court?

4.  The first book of Irish case reports, printed in Dublin, was from what year?  Who printed the book?  (Searching the library catalog quickly should help; the book is in our collection.)

5.  Which if any of the following was not among the Irish Penal Laws affecting Catholics during some part of the 18th century (see this very good UMN Law Library site and database, or wikipedia for the short version, on Irish Penal Laws): 

a) prohibited from intermarrying with Protestants; b) prohibited from inheriting Protestant land; c) prohibited from serving in the Irish Parliament; d) prohibited from serving as lawyers and judges; e) prohibited from voting.

6.  What is the oldest Irish law journal and date of the first volume?

New Digital Exhibit: Horace R. Hansen and the Dachau War Crimes Trials

The Law Library is pleased to announce the release of a new digital exhibit this spring:

“A Witness to Barbarism: Horace R. Hansen and the Dachau War Crimes Trials”

Captain Horace R. Hansen (1910–1995), a St. Paul native and graduate of the University of Minnesota, was a lead prosecutor at the Dachau war crimes trials (1945–1947). Assigned to Dachau in October of 1945, Hansen served as a chief prosecutor in the War Crimes Division of the U.S. Third Army and prepared key concentration camp cases for trial before the American military tribunals.  Collectively, the Dachau Trials represented the largest prosecution of Nazi war criminals undertaken by the occupying American forces in post-war Germany.  

The Library’s digital exhibit details Horace Hansen’s World War II service as a soldier, war crimes investigator, and prosecutor.  It also describes the main Dachau concentration camp trial and the genesis of Hansen’s later book about his experience, Witness to Barbarism (2002).  The new exhibit is based on several generous donations from Mr. Hansen’s daughter, Jean Hansen Doth, now held in the Library’s Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center.  Included on the digital site are a valuable series of documents and images, including the digitized transcript of United States v. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al., the main Dachau camp trial.  Mr. Hansen’s wartime career bears direct witness to barbarism, and reflects on its legal remedies in a powerful way that still resonates today.

The new digital exhibit will be opened as a physical exhibit in the Riesenfeld Center in the fall.  For more information about the exhibit or the Hansen archival collection, please do not hesitate to contact me (rgreenwo@umn.edu; 612-625-7323).

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections 

Several New Acquisitions: Movements for Racial Justice

The current Riesenfeld Center exhibit, "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice," focuses on collection items that highlight Black Americans' struggle for rights and equality in relation to the law, through the lens of historical legislation, cases, and movements which cast light on obstacles and on key moments of progress. Beyond the exhibit, the center also has an active, growing collection of material related to movements for Black American legal rights, several items of which are below. 

The earliest item in our current exhibit is an 1804 address by Quaker abolitionist Matthew Franklin to the free Black community of Philadelphia. The abolitionist movement had its origins somewhat earlier in the colonies, though largely still in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Anthony Benezet (1713-1784) was a prominent early figure, a Huguenot refugee from France who became a Quaker in England and adhered deeply to the Quaker belief that each human being was equal before one another and God. His writings include Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771), which details the immorality of the slave trade. In the same volume are texts by the noted English abolitionist and friend of Benezet, Granville Sharp. An earlier post has more on Sharp, a book of his at the Center, and the Somersett case. Another anti-slavery item in the collection is particularly rare, a recently-acquired circa-1850s broadside petition to Congress. It argues that the Constitution forbids slavery and urges Congress to secure the right of habeas corpus, and thus of liberty, for each person in the country. The item is one of only two recorded copies in libraries.    

Two other recently-acquired pieces relate to 20th-century civil rights. The first adds to a current exhibit item on the Trenton Six, a case that drew national headlines. Six young Black men were tried for the murder of an elderly shopkeeper in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948, despite coerced confessions and a lack of access to counsel. The new pamphlet describes problems with witness statements and the defendants' strong alibis in the case. Four of the six defendants were acquitted and the case threw national light on due process violations in criminal cases for Black defendants. The other is an earlier issue of W. E. B. DeBois's The Crisis, the flagship magazine of the NAACP. In the issue, from 1931, are featured articles by early leaders in the NAACP including Charles W. Chesnutt and Mary White Ovington; and Robert E. Jones, one of the first bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

   

Upcoming Exhibit: Horace Hansen, Dachau War Crimes Prosecutor

Horace R. Hansen (1910–1995) was a St. Paul native, graduate of the University of Minnesota and St. Paul College of Law, and an important prosecutor at the Dachau war crimes trials (1945–1947). The Law Library's spring digital exhibit will focus on Hansen's World War II career, and his role as a war crimes investigator and chief prosecutor in the war-crimes division of the U.S. Third Army.

The upcoming exhibit is based on a rich trove of archival material held at the Center. In 2005, the Law Library received a generous donation of three boxes of material related to Horace Hansen's WWII career from his daughter, Jean Hansen Doth. We are very grateful to Ms. Hansen Doth to be able to preserve and provide access to these materials. More recently, three additional boxes of archival material have been added to the collection. This month, Ms. Hansen Doth also kindly donated four rolls of microfilm containing the trial transcript for the main Dachau concentration camp trial, an important source for study. 

The exhibit will follow Hansen's career as a lieutenant and a captain in the Army's Judge Advocate General Corps, to which he requested transfer in 1944 to assist in the prosecution of war crimes. Hansen was assigned to gather evidence of war crimes in the Netherlands and the American sector of occupied Germany, which included taking witness testimony from concentration camp inmates and photographs, and drawing up lists of perpetrators. He was then transferred to Dachau in the fall of 1945. Liberated at the end of April 1945, the concentration camp at Dachau was the first in operation under the Nazi regime and remained a symbol of the inhuman brutality and depravity of all concentration camps, many of which were modelled after it. Dachau would serve as the central trial location for war crimes committed in the American-occupied area and against Americans from 1945-47.

At Dachau, Hansen tried two cases involving American POWs, and oversaw others, including the main Dachau concentration camp trial. That trial charged 40 of the most notorious administrators, guards, and other staff with what were gross violations of the laws and customs of war. Rather than crimes against humanity, applied at Nuremberg, it was these more established charges that the prison staff and administrators at Dachau and the other camps faced. The team prosecuting the accused provided abundant evidence of mass murder (by firing squad), summary individual killing, extreme torture (including medical experimentation), abuse, starvation, intense labor, and abject neglect; and demonstrated that the operation of the camp showed a common design or purpose to kill the internees, who were political prisoners and those labelled subversive, Jews, enslaved laborers from Nazi-occupied territories, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, and others.    

The exhibit describes the main details of the trial, supported by some of the documents and photographs that Hansen preserved in his files. It also includes documents important for studying the legal organization of the trials, and procedures used to identify and review Nazi officials for criminal charges. In fact, the trials' form and procedure was modified to provide more safeguards for the defendants than ordinarily would have been afforded in a military trial, based partly on procedures of the pre-war German courts. In the end, the 40 defendants at the Dachau camp trial were found guilty and 36 were initially sentenced to death. The trial helped to establish the validity of subsequent international criminal tribunals and set a new standard of accountability for crimes committed during wartime.

A final focus of the exhibit is Horace Hansen's book, Witness to Barbarism (2002), first drafted in the 1980s and published by his daughter Jean Hansen Doth after Hansen's passing in 1995. The book chronicles the author's journey to Dachau, the horrors of atrocity, and the main camp trial. In particular, the book project arose in response to Holocaust deniers in the 1980s, who rejected teaching the Holocaust in schools. Hansen hoped in part to understand the mentality of Hitler, and his fellow Nazi ideologues and supporters, who could have ordered and carried out the extermination of millions of Jews, Russians, Poles, and people across eastern Europe; as well as political and religious dissidents, homosexuals, Roma, and others. For that purpose, Hansen compiled hundreds of pages of conversations with Hitler's stenographers, or personal secretaries, at several periods, and included excerpts of these in his book. In the end, it is perhaps not easy to reach the full depths of the pathology. But Hansen did what he had set out to do: to bear witness to barbarism, and detail its legal remedies, in a direct and powerful way.

   - 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

An Early English Study Guide (1600)

As finals are nearing an end, the Library and Riesenfeld Center wishes good luck, and a happy holidays, to our students. The year has been a difficult one in many ways, and the pandemic is still with us. None of this has made the study of law easier. Though as the early modern English lawyer William Fulbecke reminds, all things worth doing - and particularly the study of law - are challenging. Fortunately, the going gets easier; Fulbecke writes in A Direction or Preparative to the Study of the Law (1600):

"For though the way were plain, yet to them that know it not, it is hard and difficult. And as the yoke is to the young steer heavy, not because he [ed.: she, he, or any individual!] is not able to bear it, but because he is unacquainted with the carrying of it, so young students [...] are somewhat troubled at the first: yet in continuance of time, by labour and some direction of veterans of the art, they pierce through the thorny fence or bar of these great difficulties..."

Fulbecke has other advice, for example on studying early instead of late, based on astrology and the ancient theory of the humors, which should probably be set aside. But his general encouragement is perhaps not out of place then or now.

Best wishes for a very good end of semester and holidays, and for a happy (and safer, healthier) 2021.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections