School of Law Logo11:45pm 12/07/2024

Litera Scripta

  • Welcome to Litera Scripta

    Welcome to Litera Scripta, the Bounds Law Library Special Collections blog! We hope to share with you our many books, manuscripts, and artifacts. We’re not particular about form or format. At Bounds, we preserve and catalog a diverse collection of documents and objects, all with an eye to the evolution of common law. Our primary…

  • New Acquisitions: Letter from Justice Hugo Black

    We have recently acquired a 1953 letter from Justice Hugo L. Black to his good friends Marilew and Herman Kogan of Chicago. In it Black congratulates the Kogans upon the birth of their son Mark. Apparently he is responding to Marilew’s announcement: “We just produced another Democrat.” For information on the rich cultural and journalistic…

  • “A Little Renaissance of Our Own:” Tudor-Stuart Law Books

    The following text and images are taken from an exhibit titled, “A Little Renaissance of Our Own.” That exhibit was first shown several years ago, and was remounted in our Special Collections reading room in October 2014. Our efforts to acquire materials from this era are ongoing, as this exhibit shows, but it also reflects…

  • Book Note: Dan T. Carter’s Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South

    In addition to exploring new acquisitions, exhibits, and collections in the Bounds Law Library’s Special Collections, we will occasionally post short book notes on works relevant to Alabama and Southern legal history. We hope to explore both classic and more recent works, from a variety of disciplines and methodologies, with an eye towards illuminating the…

  • New Acquisitions: Blackstone’s Commentaries

        William Blackstone’s name is iconic in the common law world. The Bounds Law Library is pleased to add a first-edition set of Blackstone’s Commentaries (printed at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1765-1769) to its collection of common law works, which include several later editions of the Commentaries.                  …