Legal Research

New Collection in the Archives: George Wharton Pepper's Course Materials

By Biddle Law Library

Philadelphia scion George Wharton Pepper was an accomplished figure in American legal history.  As a student at Penn, he helped found the Daily Pennsylvanian in 1888, the university's student-run newspaper.  After studying the law under prominent Philadelphia attorney George Biddle, Pepper ran his own successful law practice in Old City.  A first-rate legal mind, Pepper was a founding member of the American Law Institute (whose archives, coincidentally, are located at the Law School).  Later, he also entered politics, and served as our United States Senator from 1922 to 1927.  And, amidst all his professional achievements, he found time to teach at the Law School from 1893 to 1910.

I processed a small collection of papers from Insurance Law courses Pepper taught in the late 1890s.  The collection includes Pepper's lecture notes, class hypotheticals, and a syllabus - referred to as a "synopsis" - from the 1897 term. 

There are some other Pepper papers located in the American Law Institute Archives.  While they are currently unprocessed, I hope to make them available to researchers soon.  But for now you can see some images from this collection.

If you're interested in checking out more of this slice of Penn Law history, contact me or stop by the Archives.

Full post as published by Biddleblog on March 24, 2010 (boomark / email).