Tuesday, April 18: Celebrate Clarence Darrow's Birthday!

Join us in the Law Library lobby on Tuesday, April 18, to celebrate Clarence Darrow's birthday!  

Come out and pick up cake, donuts, and coffee! In addition, take a quiz about Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), the great American trial lawyer, to learn more about his life and career. 

The celebration is due to the Law Library's preeminent national collection of more than 1,000 letters, as well as speeches, case material and writings by and related to Darrow, which are held in the Riesenfeld Center.  

Finally, don't forget to take a selfie with Clarence!  

When: Tuesday, April 18, 11 a.m - 1 p.m.
Where: Law Library Lobby
What: Donuts, cake, coffee, and a quiz!

Wednesday, April 5: Rare Books Open House!

Come out to the Riesenfeld Center's April open house, this Wednesday, from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.!

Enjoy snacks and drinks, and see treasures from the library's rare books and special collections. 

When: Wednesday, April 5, 12 p.m - 3 p.m.
Where: Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center*
What: Rare books, bagged snacks and treats, and refreshments!

(*The Riesenfeld Center is in N30, on the subplaza past Student Orgs. in N20.) 

West Publishing and the History of Westlaw

Some of the great achievements in the history of legal publishing have been made in St. Paul, Minnesota, and around the Twin Cities. Fundamental to common law systems is of course access to court decisions, traditionally in the form of case reports. In the Anglo-American system, case reporting goes back to nearly the beginning of English common law in the Middle Ages. In America, Zephaniah Swift (1757-1804) published the first volume of American reports in 1789. Alexander Dallas (1759-1817) produced the first Supreme Court reports not long after, and the business of nominative reports (reports identified by the name of the individuals who created them) in the United States was born.

 

It was the dynamic figure of John B. West (1852-1922), however, who produced the system of national, standardized reporters that revolutionized American law reporting. West began selling law books in the early 1870s in downtown St. Paul. In 1876, West produced a weekly circular, The Syllabi, that reported notable Minnesota federal and state court decisions. In 1877, the publication expanded to include Wisconsin cases as The North-Western Reporter. The West Publishing Company soon introduced a uniform indexing system and case headnotes for its expanding regional reporters. Before long, these covered the whole nation in the form of the National Reporter System. The benefits brought by the system were immediately clear: American law was organized and searchable in a way that it had never been before. The rest was history: West Publishing became the leading legal publisher in the country, serving generations of the bench and bar. Under the aegis of Thomson Reuters, that tradition of legal publishing continues today.

 

In the early 1970s, another revolution transformed the legal publishing industry and would have equally wide effects. In this revolution, too, West Publishing Company played a leading role. The "second revolution" centered on the more widespread introduction of computers and automated searchable databases. Minnesota itself had become a hotbed in the 1960s for computer development, and West did not fail to take notice. In 1974, West Publishing developed a computer system to search case headnotes across its reporters, entering the market with its technology in 1975. The product, familiar everywhere today as Westlaw, marked the beginning of one of the most successful commercial legal tools developed. In 1978, locked in competition with Mead Data Corp., Westlaw began to provide full-text search for cases. In 1979, dial-up access to the database was offered over phone lines to its customers. By the early to mid-1980s, Westlaw terminals and the services it offered were becoming increasingly indispensable to American legal consumers. The rest, again, was history. Today Westlaw features more than 40,000 databases of information and is available in numerous countries across the world.

 

The history of the development of Westlaw, foundational to the larger history of legal publishing, requires an understanding of the challenges the system faced, the vision it required and the success it ultimately achieved. William Voedisch, who retired in 1996 as Manager of Technical Systems Development at West, was a key early developer of Westlaw, who has chronicled its early phases and some of the extraordinary work and decisions that went into creating it. Donated to the Law Library last year, Mr. Voedisch's narrative is a very important archival document, not only for the history of legal publishing and the development of database search capabilities that it documents, but for the history of computing itself and its inroads into key commercial markets, not least of which has been law. Voedisch's document, with permission of the author, is included below on the link. It will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of this history.

 

https://z.umn.edu/westlaw      

 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

  

   

Wednesday, March 15: Rare Books Open House!

Come out to the Riesenfeld Center's March open house, this Wednesday, from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.!

Enjoy snacks and drinks, and see treasures from the library's rare books and special collections. 

When: Wednesday, March 15, 12 p.m - 3 p.m.
Where: Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center*
What: Rare books, bagged snacks and treats, and refreshments!

(*The Riesenfeld Center is in N30, on the subplaza past Student Orgs. in N20.) 

New Library Digital Exhibit: Law Books and the History of Legal Education

 The University of Minnesota Law Library is pleased to announce the release of a new digital exhibit:

"Tools of the Profession: Law Books and the History of Legal Education"

"Tools of the Profession" explores the history of legal education through literature that has profoundly shaped it. From statute books to casebooks, and from treatises to dictionaries, legal literature has developed not only to record the law and aid professionals in practice, but to guide students from the earliest stages of study.

The exhibit also showcases the reciprocal nature of legal literature and legal education. In England and on the continent, legal literature developed in response to and as a product of education. Literature in our own country has followed a similar path: even C. C. Langdell's famed "revolution" in legal education, still with us today, is first evident in his 1871 casebook on contracts. A selection of historical books illustrates transformative developments in legal education over several centuries.

An accompanying digital exhibit, "Legal Education at Minnesota," is drawn from the Law Library's rich archives. This exhibit highlights course books, lectures, exam prep material, and early exams that shed light on the history of legal education at the Law School. Selections from the Library's student notebook collection, in particular, reflect how students have engaged with the law through a tradition of dynamic classroom instruction.

The physical exhibit, on which the digital exhibit is based, will be open in the Riesenfeld Center through the spring semester. For more information about the exhibits, please contact Ryan Greenwood (rgreenwo@umn.edu, or 612-625-7323). The exhibits were curated by Ryan Greenwood, Pat Graybill, Lily Eisenthal, and Joy Brown. 

 

     

Legal History Prize: 2023 Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

The Legal History and Rare Books (LH&RB) Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), in cooperation with Gale, a Cengage company, announces the Thirteenth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. 

The competition is designed to encourage scholarship and to acquaint students with the AALL and law librarianship, and is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The winner will receive a $1,000.00 prize from Gale, a Cengage company, and will be invited to present their paper to AALL members via webinar.
 
Winning and runner-up entries will be invited to submit their entries to UNBOUND: A Review of Legal History and Rare Books, the official journal of LH&RB. Past winning essays have gone on to be accepted by journals such as N.Y.U. Law Review, American Journal of Legal History, University of South Florida Law Review, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and French Historical Review.

The entry form and instructions are available at the LH&RB website: www.aallnet.org/lhrbsis/awards-grants/. Entries must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., May 15, 2023 (EDT). 

 

Spotlight on Rare Books: Joost de Damhoudere's Praxis Rerum Criminalium

Last spring, Professor Bruno Debaenst was the visiting professor to Minnesota from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University. As an expert legal historian, he has truly wide-ranging interests, from employment, labor and insurance law, to international legal organizations, Swedish legal history, and early and modern Belgian legal history. At the Law School, he taught an excellent class on historical trials in comparative perspective.

Bruno visited as part of the wonderful exchange program between the Minnesota and Uppsala law schools that dates back to the fall semester of 1982. The program has sent numerous faculty and students of the two law schools back and forth for enriching teaching and study across the Atlantic.  

 

During Bruno's stay we became good friends and he became interested in one of our historical law books in particular, a striking copy of Joost de Damhoudere's Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1570). The book is remarkable as one of the most extensively illustrated law books, featuring dozens of woodcuts graphically depicting the crimes it discusses. Our 1570 copy is additionally interesting for the unusually rich, creative annotations made by a contemporary student, citing literature and law in German, Latin and Greek. Notably, our copy was also owned by Hermann Kantorowicz, an influential legal historian and scholar of the 20th century, whose personal library is held in our collections.

 

Last spring, we had a nice opportunity to discuss this extraordinary book for the Premodern Podcast "I've Got A Thing" series, hosted by the Center for Premodern Studies at Minnesota. Bruno highlighted in his discussion one further feature that is especially remarkable about Damhoudere's magnum opus: it was plagiarized from a manuscript by Philip Wielant, a city magistrate of an earlier generation. Bruno's great comments 'revealed the steal' and we talked further with Elijah Wallace, a PhD candidate in the History Department, about the illustrations and annotations. The podcast is available here.

 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections