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,…
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…
The editors of Litera Scripta offer their sincere condolences to Frances Robb and salute the memory of David Robb, gentleman and scholar.
Maud McLure Kelly (1887-1973) was Alabama's first woman lawyer and a pioneering political activist and archivist. From an early age, Kelly was fascinated with law, and after the family moved to Birmingham in 1905, she read law in her father's office. Two years later, Kelly entered the University of Alabama to study law formally. Although the school had opened its doors…
Julia Strudwick Tutwiler was a celebrated educator, prison reformer and temperance advocate. As an educator, Tutwiler had tried to lead her students toward lives of reason, moderation, and self-control. In a 1911 letter to the Montgomery Advertiser, Tutwiler presented "The Upton Sinclair Fast Cure for the Mind," which offered her psychological insight based on Sinclair's…
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…
According to persuasive folk memories, Union general Gordon Granger read an order at Galveston, Texas on the 19th of June, 1865, to the effect that all previously enslaved people were free. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect, officially, on January 1, 1863. It freed as many as 3.5 million slaves, but existing Confederate…
In November 1869, Henry Tutwiler sat down to review (for the Mobile Register) a translation of the fifth book of the Iliad. A slender volume titled Diomede: From the Iliad of Homer, it was the work of his former pupil William Russell Smith, who had studied under Tutwiler at the University of Alabama more than…
The Bounds Law Library has published its ninth Occasional Publication, titled Law and Miscellaneous Works: The Lives and Careers of Joel White and Amand Pfister, Booksellers and Publishers. The work reveals a little-known world of nineteenth-century southern booksellers and small-scale publishers and places it in the context of regional and national affairs.