History •

852 RARE: The Paper Chase Turns 40

By: Karen Beck - September 24th, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Cool, Faculty Channel, Harvard Law School Library News, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel

This week, the Law School will host John Jay Osborn, Jr., author of The Paper Chase, in a conversation with Dean Minow on the 40^th anniversary of the novel’s publication.

To commemorate the occasion, the Library has prepared a special exhibit: The Paper Chase Turns 40, featuring items from the collections of John Jay Osborn, Jr. and the Library. On view are multiple print, DVD and TV versions of The Paper Chase, draft copies of the novel, photographs, scripts, a Contracts casebook written by “Professor Kingsfield” used a as prop in the movie, and even some gruesome models of hairy hands used by HLS Professor Clark Byse when he taught Hawkins v. McGee.

The exhibit is on view in the Caspersen Room, fourth floor of the Library, through September 30. The Caspersen Room is open 9 to 5 seven days a week.

852 RARE: A Little Something for Everyone

By: Mary Person - September 17th, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Cool, Faculty Channel, Foreign Jurisdictions, Harvard Law School Library News, Historical & Special Collections, History, International Law, Student Channel

Small gems are often hidden within large collections and this summer we were lucky enough to come across just such a gem– a slender volume bound in limp vellum with faded Spanish manuscript scrawled across the front. It surprised and delighted us and seemed to have “something for everyone.” The outer binding alone is intriguing to look at, the front covered with just barely legible manuscript in Spanish, and the covers neatly fastened with tiny beaded toggles. Upon opening it, one is immediately dazzled by the gleaming floral “Dutch gilt”paper pastedowns and endpapers.

Front cover

Toggle closure & back cover

Dutch gilt paper lining the front opening

The 52-page text, Exámen sucinto sobre los antiguos límites de la Acadia y sobre las estipulaciones del Tratado de Utrecht relativas à ellos is a Spanish translation of the 1755 French work Discussion sommaire sur les anciennes limites de l’Acadie … and the two are printed in side-by-side columns. This anonymous work is generally attributed to Mathieu François Pidanzat de Mairobert (1727-1779), a member of a French literary society who wrote on a wide variety of topics.

Title page with manuscript commentary

Following the provisions of the multi-faceted Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 France ceded Acadia (most of modern-day Nova Scotia) to Great Britain, but relations between the two nations remained uneasy –as Mairobert’s treatise attests. Under the printed title of this copy, a note in Spanish points out that the dispute over Acadia was ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris and also mentions the secret November 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in which France ceded Louisiana to Spain.

Finally, folded at the end of this slim volume, is an intriguing map of eastern North America showing historical claims to Acadia and the eastern portion of present-day New Brunswick from 1621 to 1750, referred to in Mairobert’s text. The title Mapa de una parte de la America Septentrional uses the old term “septentrional” meaning “of the north.” This term is derived from an ancient reference to the seven stars of the Big Dipper, used by navigators to find the North Star, and subsequently the name for North America that appears on many early maps.

Map at the end, unfolded, showing Acadia

852 RARE: New Joseph Story Exhibit and Digital Suite

By: Karen Beck - August 30th, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Cool, E-Resources, Faculty Channel, Harvard Law School Library News, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel 1 Comment

You are invited to the Harvard Law School Library’s Caspersen Room to view our fall exhibit, A Storied Legacy: Correspondence and Early Writings of Joseph Story, on view through December 7, 2012. Complementing and expanding upon the exhibit is our new Joseph Story Digital Suite.

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845) was uniquely important to American jurisprudence and to the Harvard Law School, where he taught as Dane Professor from 1829 until his death. With the Court (established in 1789) and the Law School (founded in 1817) still in their early years, Story was in the right place and time to exert a lasting influence on both institutions.

In the exhibit, selections of original documents from four HLS Library collections attest to Story’s scholarly and judicial abilities, and reveal glimpses of the close friendships he formed with the leaders of his day. Written when he was a young lawyer, his three-volume Digest of Various Court Decisions prefigured his approach to legal analysis which he used in his Commentaries decades later. Story’s Papers, 1796-1845 include correspondence with leading legal and social figures of Massachusetts and beyond, as well as a manuscript draft of his Commentaries on the Law of Promissory Notes. The Story-Pitman correspondence (from the John Pitman collection), spanning 1817 to 1845, sheds light on the close professional and personal association of Justice Story and judge Pitman of Rhode Island, who served together on the First Judicial Circuit. Complementing these components are images of Story from the Harvard Law Library’s Art and Visual Materials Collection.

All documents and visual images from these four collections have been fully digitized and are available in the Joseph Story Digital Suite, searchable by name, date, collection, and other criteria.

The exhibit was curated by Karen Beck and Margaret Peachy, Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. The Suite was the product of many individuals’ talent and hard work, and we are grateful to them all. We hope you enjoy the exhibit!

852 RARE: The Monthly Special – The Littlest Graduate

By: Lesley Schoenfeld - August 1st, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Faculty Channel, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel 1 Comment

Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law Library, VIA Record ID:olvwork654430

In 2004, Historical & Special Collections began a project to catalog its collection of Harvard Law School class pictures, which culminated in the conservation and digitization of the collection in 2008. The collection includes over 130 posed, professionally shot group photographs of LL.B./J.D. students, graduate students, and students from abroad, often with members of the Harvard Law School faculty and staff. For many students, this is the only photographic evidence we have of their time at the Law School. The collection spans the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century; the oldest class picture dates back to circa 1876.

Thanks to two recent gifts from the Harvard Law School Graduate Program we have been able to fill gaps in the collection relating to graduate students and students from abroad.

Among the recent acquisitions is a group portrait of HLS graduate students from 1975-1976. This picture is unique because seated in the front row, first chair on the left, is a small child. Who the child is and how he ended up in the picture is still a mystery.

You can explore the entire digitized collection of class photographs through VIA, Harvard’s online catalog of visual images. To search for specific class photographs in VIA, do a title search for “harvard law school class” and limit your search to the dates the student was enrolled. In limiting by date, be sure to use the year of their September enrollment and the year of their graduation.

Stay tuned – we still have more photographs awaiting digitization! If you have a class photograph for a year we don’t currently have, and would like to donate it, we would love to hear from you! Here is our contact information.

852 RARE: The Monthly Special – The Immigration Question

By: Margaret Peachy - July 2nd, 2012
Filed under: Cool, Faculty Channel, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel

Philip Elman graduated Harvard Law School in 1939 and immediately began his legal career as a clerk for Judge Calvert Magruder in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Elman quickly climbed the ranks and soon thereafter clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (1941-1943). Finding his place in the Supreme Court and in the Justice Department, Elman spent the next 17 years of his career as an assistant to the Solicitor General. In this time, he worked on several briefs for landmark Civil Rights cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Shelley v. Kraemer.

However, in a recent review of his papers, I came across a folder entitled “During Announcement of Opinions June 3, 1957,” which piqued my interest. Upon further investigation, I found a single note in the folder that I’m sure sums up many people’s feelings on the publication of Supreme Court opinions:

Note from the Philip Elman Papers on the occassion of the publication of the June 3, 1957 Supreme Court opinions. Elman Papers, folder 3-34.

Nobody can be clear which decision(s) inspired the “Oi-Wei” memo, but there were two companion cases the court issued decisions for that June both having ties to immigration laws: Mulcahey v. Catalanotte and Lehmann v. Carson. While immigration laws have been a topic brought before the Supreme Court a number of times in the intervening 55 years, the opinion just issued by the current court on Arizona v. United States surely elicited a few Oi-Weis from the supporters of the law.

852 RARE: The Monthly Special – The Law Will Be Saved!

By: Karen Beck - May 10th, 2012
Filed under: Cool, Historical & Special Collections, History

John Y. Pashgian, Ut Lex Servetur

Historical & Special Collections recently received a gift of a terrific caricature drawn by John Y. Pashgian, HLS 1932. Titled “Ut Lex Servetur” (“ut lex servitur” = “the law will be saved”), it features cartoon drawings and autographs of well-known HLS faculty from the 1930s, including Samuel Williston, Felix Frankfurter, and Roscoe Pound. See if you can pick them out! In a wonderful bit of synergy, it turns out we also have the talented Mr. Pashgian’s HLS class notes. You can find details about the drawing on VIA, Harvard’s Visual Image Access database. We are most grateful to Barry S. Kramer for this addition to our collections.

852 Rare: The Monthly Special – The “Unusual” Supreme Court Clerk Nominee

By: Margaret Peachy - April 23rd, 2012
Filed under: Faculty Channel, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel

“My second nominee is somewhat unusual.” This was the first line written by New York University School of Law Dean, Russell Niles, in support of Rita E. Hauser’s candidacy for a clerkship with Chief Justice Earl Warren. The letter was written in October of 1958 and what was “unusual” about the recommendation was that the candidate was a woman.

Dean Niles’ recommendation was indeed unusual; up until 1958 only one woman had served as a clerk to a Supreme Court Justice. Her name was Lucille Lomen and she clerked for William O. Douglas during the 1944-45 term.

Ms. Hauser did have an interview with the Chief Justice, but was not hired. As she mentions in a note accompanying the recommendation letter she recalls Warren saying that he was not ready to hire a female clerk. He was on the court for eleven more years and never did hire a woman. The next woman selected by any Justice did not happen until 1966.

Note accompanying letter of recommendation. Hollis 13105554.

A copy of the letter and Ms. Hauser’s note were recently given to the Library by Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. For such a short document it reveals much about a time in this country when sexism and gender discrimination were powerful adversaries for women.

The documents have been digitized and are available via the Hollis record.

Post contributed by Edwin Moloy, Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Archives.

Old Man Taxes, Here I Am

By: Janet Katz - April 17th, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Cool, History

Did you file with a smile?

Irving Berlin did, and wrote a song about it for the IRS seventy years ago. Berlin, a Russian immigrant, said, “This country has been wonderful to me. I love my country. I love to pay taxes.”

Listen to the Smart Set sing “I Paid My Income Tax Today,” by Irving Berlin, and try feeling patriotic and penniless instead of just penniless.

Find the official record, lyrics, and music from Treasury Department files here.

852 RARE: The Weekly Special – Radical Reading

By: Mary Person - March 19th, 2012
Filed under: Cool, Faculty Channel, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel

Recently a tattered volume of twenty one English pamphlets, a gift of Dean Roscoe Pound to the Law Library in July 1929, crossed my desk in need of cataloging. All the pamphlets were printed between 1832 and 1837, most in London, a few in Newcastle. The title of the first work, from about 1835, gives an indication of the “radical” nature of the volume’s contents: George Edmonds’ appeal to the labourers of England, an exposure of aristocrat spies, and the infernal machinery of the poor law murder bill. Accompanied by appalling proofs of the alarming progress of cruelty, cannibalism, gluttony, ignorance, prodigality, lying, slandering, atheism, blasphemy, sedition, and sexual profligacy, in the high-priced aristocrat press, and especially the six shilling Quarterly review.

Title page of George Edmonds' appeal to the labourers of England

The pamphlets report on meetings and public dinners at taverns and music halls and reproduce stirring speeches (including that of Irish rebel Robert Emmet (1778-1803) two days before his execution for high treason). They reprint articles from “The Radical” and include long poems such as Wat Tyler; a dramatic poem, in three acts about a leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt and Lord Byron’s controversial Cain; a mystery. Interestingly, several of the pamphlets are clearly marked across the title page as the property of the reading room of a “Working Men’s Association.”

Title page of The speech of Robert Emmet, Esq. published by Hetherington in 1836

The London Working Men’s Association was founded in 1836 by four men with a radical bent: Henry Hetherington (1792-1849) “penny press” publisher; printer/publishers James Watson (1799-1874) and John Cleave (1794 or 1795–1850), and cabinet maker turned writer, William Lovett (1800-1877).

“Besides circulating information for the good of the working classes, [the Working Men’s Association] wanted ‘to seek by every legal means to place all classes of society in possession of their equal, political, and social rights’. The Association discussed the ideas that would later form the central document of the Chartist movement: The People’s Charter. This was written by William Lovett, with the help of Francis Place, in 1838 and detailed the six reforms that comprised the core of Chartist doctrine.”

A few pamphlets in this volume are identified as having belonged, in 1837, to the Newcastle Working Men’s Association.Together this collection of pamphlets provides an intriguing look at writings reflecting the British working class labor movement and the stirrings of the Chartist movement.

An 1837 pamphlet, the subtitle of which (p.3) reads "Some remarks on a bill, called by those who would know better, a bill for pulling down our churches."

852 RARE: The Monthly Special – From the Barber Shop to the Bench

By: Lesley Schoenfeld - February 28th, 2012
Filed under: Announcements, Faculty Channel, Historical & Special Collections, History, Student Channel

As Black History Month draws to a close, I wanted to take a moment to spotlight George Lewis Ruffin (1834-1886), Harvard Law School’s first black graduate. Ruffin was one of eight children born to free parents George W. (1800-1863) and Nancy Lewis Ruffin (1816-1874) in Richmond, Virginia. Committed to their children’s education, Ruffin’s parents hired a tutor to teach them English literature, Latin, and the classics. Knowing that Virginia was not an environment where their children could excel academically (the Virginia legislature had already prohibited blacks from learning to read), George’s mother moved her children to Boston in 1853 with the hopes of giving them a better education. George attended and graduated from the Boston Public Schools and in 1858 he married Josephine St. Pierre (1842-1924). That same year, in response to the racism of the time, George and Josephine moved to Liverpool, England

Portrait of George Lewis Ruffin by Melvin Robbins, Harvard Law School Library, VIA Record ID: olvwork599614

where they stayed for approximately six months. Upon their return to Boston, George, like his father before him, made a living as a barber. In the 1860s, Ruffin began to make his mark as an activist. Along with advocating for black suffrage, he participated in the 1864 National Negro Convention, as well as the 1865 National Negro Convention in Boston. It was around this time that Ruffin began reading law at the Boston firm of Jewell and Gaston. In 1868, Ruffin was accepted to Harvard Law School and in 1869 earned his LL.B., making him the Law School’s first black graduate.

Ruffin established a successful law practice and became politically active: he was elected in 1869 and 1870 to the state legislature and in 1876 he became the first African American elected to the Boston Common Council. In 1883 Governor Benjamin Butler appointed him judge to the Charlestown, Massachusetts Municipal Court, making Ruffin the first African American to hold such a position in Massachusetts.