Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) is one of our most famous Supreme Court justices. Long-lived, handsome, and quotable by the yard, Holmes was for many people the very model of a Supreme Court justice. He is much less well-known as a legal scholar, having written only one original book, The Common Law. But that one…
The following is the first of several posts that will explore selected titles from a collection of law and law-related books donated by the family of A.S. Williams, III. The Williams Historic Law Book Collection consists of seventy volumes that date from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. They are in their original bindings,…
This post offers a glimpse into the home study of United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black through descriptions of its furnishings and numerous books. Several books illustrate Black’s significant interest in the classics while Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book, Stride Toward Freedom, provides an example of the many books Black received as gifts containing…
The books presented in this post may seem to be nothing more than dusty old lawbooks, but they are in fact the mortal remains of Alabama’s frontier period. The energetic, mostly young men who made up Alabama’s legislatures faced the issues—national and local—of Jacksonian America. In response they spelled out their attitudes, self-interests, and startling…
In an interesting 1820 letter from our collection, Kentucky lawyer George Robertson illustrates some of the difficulties of a book consumer on the expanding American frontier. The letter is a nice find. It involves one of the towering figures in Kentucky legal history at an early point in his life. It also shines a light…
Hugo Black and the Classics is an exhibit in the University of Alabama School of Law Library’s Hugo Black Study that offers insight into Justice Black’s strong interest in Greek and Roman classical works. The collection shown here represents one component of the more than one thousand volumes of Black’s books held at the Bounds…
The subject of this blog post is a ledger used by Justices of the Peace in Clarkesville, Alabama during the 1820s and 1830s. Justices of the Peace used ledgers like this one to record developments in the cases they heard. This ledger specifically deals with the complaints filed between neighbors for outstanding debts. In it,…
On March 1, 1954, two hundred and fifty-four members of the Eighty-third Congress were debating immigration issues when a Puerto Rican Flag was unfurled and pistol fire erupted in the House of Representatives chamber. Four Puerto Rican nationalists fired thirty shots at the representatives below, wounding five of them. One of the wounded was the…
This post features a "Lifetime" voter-registration certificate recently discovered in a local antiques mall. It is an attractive and oddly cheerful bit of ephemera from a tragic era in Alabama history--the time of mass disfranchisement by means of the state's 1901 constitution.
For the next offering in our series titled “Preserved in Amber,” we feature a post on our Hannis Taylor collection. This collection consists of a copy of Taylor’s 1908 treatise The Science of Jurisprudence with two of his letters affixed to the endsheets. The letters are addressed to Cambridge history professor J.B. Bury. They seem…