Tag imported11202023

As tax day in the United States draws near, Litera Scripta highlights a territorial act that defined the assessment and collection of taxes 200 years ago in Alabama.

The following post, “Alice in Court,” seeks to describe the legal aspects of one of the world’s great fantasy stories–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The exhibit includes works in a Lewis Carroll collection assembled by Litera Scripta co-editor Paul M. Pruitt, Jr.

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,…

In response to our recent posting of D. Pierson’s 1902 “Lifetime” voter registration certificate, our friend David E. Alsobrook sent us an image of his great grandmother’s 1929 certificate. As you can see, it was issued to Jessie Gillis Parish of Barbour County, Alabama, on January 3 1929. Jessie Parish is one of the characters…

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.

Over the past year the Litera Scripta editors and research assistants have worked with their counterparts at the University of Virginia Law Library to create a website presenting the correspondence of former UA Dean Daniel J. Meador and his pupil Ronald Sokol. Their correspondence features discussions of politics, approaches to law, and the nature and…

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…