Legal Research

Legal Antiquarian: New Blog on History of Daily Lives of Lawyers

By Michel-Adrien Sheppard

Mike Hoeflich, a professor at the University of Kansas School, has just created a blog called The Legal Antiquarian.

As he mentions in his intro post last week, the blog deals with “the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past. Among the subjects I will cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and read, etc. I will also post quotes on this Blog from little-known sources about the law, such as postcards, trade cards, and other ephemera.”

On my blog Library Boy, I have posted a number of items in the past about the material dimension of the history of the legal profession

• Honoré Daumier Lithograph Collections and Corrupt Lawyers (August 14, 2005): “The Librarians’ Index to the Internet features 2 items this week about 19th century French artist Honoré Daumier, who gained notoriety for his often acerbic caricatures of the monarchy, politicians, and the French middle class. He is especially well-known for his Les gens de justice collection attacking the corrupt practices of lawyers of his time.”
• Why Do Lawyers and Judges Wear Funny Robes and Wigs? (February 25, 2006): “If you have ever wondered about the origins of court attire in the common law jurisdictions, especially the United Kingdom, there is an interesting book out that is also available in PDF format: ‘Legal Habits: A Brief Sartorial History of Wig, Robe and Gown’. Published by Ede and Ravenscroft, suppliers of wigs and robes to the British legal profession for a few hundred years, this small volume by Thomas Woodcock covers the history of judges? robes, barrister?s gowns and wigs.”
• UK Judges Throw Off Their Wigs (January 6, 2007): “The question of whether judges and lawyers in the UK should keep their famous wigs has been a hot topic of debate across the pond in the past year.Yesterday, The Guardian reported in an article entiled ‘Civil court judges prepare to cast aside their wigs after 300 years’ that a consensus seems to have emerged that civil court judges will abandon their head coverings.”
• Harvard Law School Legal Portraits Online Collection (August 31, 2007): “The Harvard Law School Library owns 4,000 portraits of jurists and legal thinkers from the Middle Ages to today: (…) ‘Although the most frequent request is for reproductions of the likenesses of individuals important in the history of the law, the collection has also been consulted for iconographic images (e.g., scales of justice, blindfolded justice) and for scenes depicting judicial activity (e.g., courtrooms, assizes). Researchers in fields other than legal history may also benefit; many of the images will interest students of social history, costume, art history, and heraldry’. ”
• Harvard Law Library Collection of Early British Broadsides from Public Executions (January 10, 2008): “The Harvard Law School Library has an online collection of so-called crime broadsides, publications sold to the crowds who came to witness public executions in 18th and 19th century England…”

Cross-posted to Library Boy.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).