Concepcion on The First American Law Libraries

Cattleya M. Concepcion, Georgetown University Law Library, has published The First American Law Libraries at The Green Bag Almanac and Reader 80 (2025). Here is the abstract.

A brief history and bibliography of the first American law libraries, including lawyers’ personal law libraries, bar association or membership law libraries, county law libraries, state law libraries, court law libraries, federal law libraries, law school libraries, law firm libraries, and prison law libraries.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. Note: This work is (or will be) published by the Green Bag (www.greenbag.org), which hopes you will find it useful.

Solove on Notable Privacy Books: A Journal Through History

Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University Law School, has published Notable Privacy Books: A Journey Through History. Here is the abstract.

In this essay, I discuss notable privacy books from the 1960s to 2020s – seven decades and more than 400 books. I briefly explain why each book is noteworthy. Examining the books chronologically also opens a window into history, as the books reflect the concerns, ideas, and terminology of the times in which they were written. The books also shed light on the discourse about privacy, which has evolved over the decades. In the past few decades, attention to privacy issues has significantly increased, and the number of books has proliferated. The books involve many perspectives, fields, and approaches: philosophical, journalistic, sociological, legal, literary, anthropological, political, empirical, psychological, and historical.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Haddock and McNeil on Bibliography on Indigenous Rights in Canada, 1995-2022 @OsgoodeNews

Leslie Haddock and Kent McNeil, both of Osgoode Hall, have published Bibliography on Indigenous Rights in Canada, 1995-2022 as Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4294966. Here is the abstract.

Note to users: This bibliography does not purport to be comprehensive, especially insofar as non-legal materials are concerned. Also, although we have done our best to be as accurate as possible, no doubt there are errors, for which we ask your forgiveness. An attempt has been made to include works that deal with more than one topic in the Table of Contents under each of the relevant headings. A bibliography covering the pre-1995 period, Indigenous Peoples in Canada: A Bibliography of Legal and Other Works to 1994, compiled by Kristen Clark, Leslie Haddock, and Kent McNeil, Osgoode Hall Law School, is posted on the same websites as this bibliography.

Download the bibliography from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Gemmette on Law and Literature

ICYMI: Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette has published four very useful reference books and collections on law and literature, great additions to the law and literature scholar's bookshelf.

Law and Literature: Legal Themes in Short Stories (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., Praeger, 1992).
Law in Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Law-Related Works (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., Whitston Publishing, 1998).

Law in Literature: Legal Themes in American Stories: 1842-1917 (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., The Buckingham Group, 2015).

Law in Literature: Legal Themes in Novellas (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., The Buckingham Group, 2017).

 She is also the author of Law and Literature: An Unnecessarily Suspect Class in the Liberal Arts Component of the Law School Curriculum, 28 Val. U. L. Rev. 267 (1989), Law and Literature: Joining the Class Action, 29 Val. U. L. Rev.665 (1994/1995), and Filling in the Silence: Domestic Violence, Literature, and Law, 32 Loy. Chi. U. L. J. 91 (2000).

ICYMI: Stern on Law and Narrative: A Bibliography of Recent Work @ArsScripta

ICYMI: Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Law and Narrative: A Bibliography of Recent Work. Here is the abstract.

This bibliography collects work focused specifically on law and narrative, published (approximately) over the last four years (i.e., 2013-17). A significant amount of work touches on narrative, without taking that as its focus; this work will be included in a bibliography of recent work on law and literature more generally (now being compiled). I have tried to link to non-paywalled versions, but in many cases that was not possible.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Behrens on the Life and Work of Thomas M. McDade @DukeLawLibrary

Jennifer L. Behrens, J. Michael Goodson Law Library, Duke University School of Law, has published Beyond 'The Annals of Murder': The Life and Works of Thomas M. McDade. Here is the abstract.

Thomas M. McDade is best known (if not well-known enough) for his seminal 1961 reference bibliography, The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900. Beyond that singular text on early American murder trial accounts, though, lies more than 70 additional publications on American legal history, law enforcement, and literature, gathered together for the first time in an annotated bibliography of McDade’s lesser-known writings. The article also examines McDade’s fascinating life and varied career as an early FBI agent, World War II veteran, corporate executive, and true crime chronicler.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Finding Real Life Whodunits

Casey N. Cep pays tribute to Thomas McDade's important The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1961) in this article for the New Yorker. It's a rare book now; a copy listed on Amazon sells for more than $175. There are a few other copies available on Alibris, starting at about $125 and going up over $300.

The Law Book: A New Legal Reference From Michael H. Roffer

Michael H. Roffer, New York Law School, has published The Law Book: From Hammurabi to the International Criminal Court, 250 Milestones in the History of Law (Sterling Publishing, 2016). Here is a description of the contents.

Offering authoritative context to ancient documents as well as today’s hot-button issues, The Law Book presents a comprehensive look at the rules by which we live our lives. It covers such diverse topics as the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, the Trial of Socrates, the Bill of Rights, women’s suffrage, the insanity defense, and more. Roffer takes us around the globe to ancient Rome and medieval England before transporting us forward to contemporary accounts that tackle everything from civil rights, surrogacy, and assisted suicide to the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Google Books, and the fight for marriage equality. Organized chronologically, the entries each consist of a short essay and a stunning full-color image, while the “Notes and Further Reading” section provides resources for more in-depth study. Justice may be blind, but this collection brings the rich history of the law to light.

Review from the New York Law Journal here.

Sean Cunningham on Researching Tudor Government

Sean Cunningham, National Archives, UK,  is publishing Researching Tudor Government (Manchester University Press, 2016)(IHR Research Guides). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Examines broadly the types of records that survive from Tudor England and shows researchers the context for their creation Reveals how documents highlight the points of contact between all subjects and the crown or its local governing processes. DS key to understanding how documents are used in archival research. Combines practical skills such as palaeography and dating with discussion of how documents relate to Tudor institutions, society. Offers a unique focus on practical research skills, exploration of document types, and explanation of the context and purpose which created the original records.

Attention, Future Lawyers

The Guardian has published a reader-selected list of the books those aspiring to a legal career should read. Choices include tomes on what the law is (Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law) how to become a lawyer (Nicholas McBride's Letters to a Law Student), critiques of the legal system (Helena Kennedy's Eve Was Framed) and what the law means, viewed through literature's prism (Charles Dickens' Bleak House).

Whither the Law Review, and Of What Use Is the Blog, If We Want To Have Fruitful Conversations About Law

Katharina Isabel Schmidt (Yale Law School) offers a comparative look at US and German law journals, blogs, and their uses in the transmission of legal ideas here in a post at the Völkerrechtsblog (English translation: Public International Law Blog). Here's an excerpt.

American law journals are interesting for the most part, if not necessarily always useful. German law journals, in turn, while useful for the most part, are not necessarily always interesting. As adumbrated above, this is due to the particular division of competences within the German legal profession on the one hand and the American legal profession on the other hand. German scholars, unlike their American counterparts, are routinely cited in court decisions. As such, they have no choice but to deliver the doctrinal goods expected of them. In the United States, unlike in Germany, placing articles in top-tier journals constitutes a necessary step on the long and winding road to tenure. As such, one can hardly blame aspiring academics for pretending to reinvent the wheel one case note at a time. In addition, trans-Atlantic divergences in the structure of legal education naturally influence the extent to which German and American jurists are able to produce and consume interdisciplinary knowledge. The – admittedly overblown – distinction between the common and the civil law tradition further contributes to making matters look positively discombobulated.

For some folks, that last sentence conveys fighting words! ;) Ms. Schmidt goes on to suggest that one way to further invigorate the intellectual tradition is to exploit the blog format.

At the same time I would argue that blogs like the present one hold the potential to facilitate conversations about law that are free from the intricate constraints of national legal science. In particular, the kind of jurisprudential writing they make possible confronts scholars and practitioners alike with ideas that lie outside the realm of their necessarily limited intellectual experience. It is in this way that blogs and other non-traditional platforms allow for a much-needed re-appreciation of what it means to be a jurist in the 21^st century. Therefore, the goal of law blogs and similar projects should be an attempt to counterbalance the deficits inherent in traditional approaches to the exchange of ideas about law and the legal profession – deficits exemplified by my discussion of contemporary American and German law journal culture.

Hannah Birkenkötter (Humboldt University) responds to the notion of evolving structures of intellectual transmission in a post here. An excerpt:

In her insightful and very pertinent blog post on legal formats, Katharina Isabel Schmidt takes a comparative look at law journals and legal formats in the US and Germany, the two systems that she is familiar with. Most of her observations correspond to my experience (although I have only spent a few weeks in the US, so most of my observations are grounded in conversation with colleagues and friends as well as reading American-authored scholarship rather than first-hand experience “on the ground”) and I wholeheartedly agree that comparative looks at legal formats allow us to “re-imagine the future of legal knowledge production”. I am skeptical, however, whether non-traditional means of knowledge production, in particular blogs, truly have the “potential to facilitate conversations about law that are free from the intricate constraints of national legal science” (emphasis my own). I’ve rather found legal blogs, or blawgs, especially of the academic type, to be quite different depending on the legal culture they are rooted in. I certainly agree that blogs have the potential, and are actually used as a means to disturb existing hierarchies and conventions of scientific communication, and that on both sides of the Atlantic. But at the same time, they are not free of their respective legal traditions.

But as Ms. Birkenkötter notes, blogs do allow new identities, regardless of the tradition, to emerge, more so in the US, perhaps less so in Germany, "While not free from constraints, they provide alternative platforms and thus room for alternative topics, actors and approaches. This very conversation is, in my view, proof of it. So let’s continue the talk."

I fully agree. I would point out that, in addition to blogs, other formats have emerged, including online law review journals, such as Stanford Law Review Online.  The Library of Congress has a listing of journals available online, although not all journals listed are exclusively "online" journals; some are print journals with an online presence and/or online "exclusives." Such an online approach allows frequent updating and permits a publication to address "up to the minute" topics and breaking news. It allows academics to "be relevant." It lets us use the more effective and efficient features of the web, including the ability to be interactive and to respond to critiques quickly, so that we really can engage in conversation on a frequent basis, rather than wait until those pleasant but increasingly expensive conferences roll around. Maybe we'll now get more out of them.

A Website For New Book Reviews From Rutgers School of Law-Newark and Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

The Rutgers School of Law-Newark and Rutgers School of Criminal Justice regularly review new books in the fields of criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice at the website Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books. You can sign up to be notified when the site publishes new alerts, or just visit often to scan for interesting reviews in your area of interest.

The Legal Image

Elizabeth G. Porter, University of Washington School of Law, is publishing Taking Images Seriously in the Columbia Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the
Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts have been rebooting the same formalist templates for over a century — templates that were formed before widespread use of the camera, never mind the computer. Outside of trial, where image-driven advocacy has a long history, legal practice begins and ends with text.
But over the past five years, for the first time — unrecognized by scholars or courts — creative trial lawyers, receptive judges and the iPhone camera are breaching these conservative bulwarks. Images are moving out of the evidentiary margins, driving argument in litigation documents from pleadings to judicial opinions. Unregulated, visual argument threatens fundamental premises of legal discourse and decision-making. Yet in comparison with law’s rich and detailed traditions for interpreting ambiguous text, lawyers and judges have few tools beyond common sense with which to ameliorate the interpretive risks of visual persuasion. “I know it when I see it” is not merely an aphorism; it is the reigning interpretive canon for images in law.
This Article, the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of images in written legal argument, establishes and critiques the nascent phenomenon of multimedia written advocacy as a vital, if potentially problematic, element of a lawyer’s toolbox. It argues that despite substantial risks, the profession should cautiously embrace the communicative power of multimedia writing. It concludes by offering concrete suggestions for the fair regulation of multimedia persuasion, including two foundational canons of visual interpretation — the basis for developing new traditions for integrating images into written advocacy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.