Category Guest Contributors

UA Women in the Law School: “It’s great to be first, to be ‘one,’ it’s the two, three that come after you, that’s the telling thing.” Nina Miglionico (Class of 1936)

On August 24, 1953, the ABA stamp was unveiled at the Statler Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. This historic event was marked with speeches, music, a radio broadcast, and a special presentation of the stamp to then ABA President, Robert Storey.

Among legal historians there is a long-standing controversy over whether (or how much) of Roman law was “received” into the Common Law. Marshal Trigg’s “A Small Reception” surveys the development of Roman Law and Canon Law in the middle ages, and shows the influence of the Roman legal concepts on such innovations as Henry II’s…

Hunter Myers’ “Brutus, Cassius, Judas, and Cremutius Cordus: How Shifting Precedents Allowed the Lex Maiestatis to Group Writers with Traitors” represents a fine work of scholarship that shows how the Roman concept of Maiestas (the “majesty of the state”) developed over time. It concludes with persuasive evidence that the Emperor Tiberius[2] twisted that element of…

The work of Porter King, a prominent nineteenth-century lawyer, state legislator, and businessman from the State of Alabama, is featured in the latest acquisition of the John C. Payne Special Collections of the Bounds Law Library. The Judge Porter King Ledger is a six-page legal document detailing criminal court fees issued by the Court of…

Review of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep, reviewed by Andrew Toler. Before the publication of Go Set a Watchman—only eight months before her death—the literary community had come to accept the fact that Harper Lee would likely publish only one book. Upon hearing the news that…

From time to time we like to post historical essays written by recent Law School graduates. Today’s post is a work of intellectual history by Christopher Collins, a 2019 graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law who is currently a graduate student in the UA College of Communication and Information Sciences. Chris is…

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…

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…

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,…