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Full-Text Articles in Law
More Than Decisions: Reviews Of American Law Reports In The Pre-West Era, Richard A. Danner
More Than Decisions: Reviews Of American Law Reports In The Pre-West Era, Richard A. Danner
Faculty Scholarship
In the early nineteenth century, both general literary periodicals and the first American legal journals often featured reviews of new volumes of U.S. Supreme Court and state court opinions, suggesting their importance not only to lawyers seeking the latest cases, but to members of the public. The reviews contributed to public discourse through comments on issues raised in the cases and the quality of the reporting, and were valued as forums for commentary on the law and its role in American society, particularly during debates on codification and the future of the common law in the 1820s. James Kent saw …
Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner
Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner
Faculty Scholarship
Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company’s American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West’s digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring’s scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were …