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Full-Text Articles in Law
Beyond The Annals Of Murder: The Life And Works Of Thomas M. Mcdade, Jennifer L. Behrens
Beyond The Annals Of Murder: The Life And Works Of Thomas M. Mcdade, Jennifer L. Behrens
Faculty Scholarship
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.
Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner
Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner
Faculty Scholarship
In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …
Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner
Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner
Faculty Scholarship
Law Librarians and others have often referred to Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell’s statements that the law library is the lawyer’s laboratory. Professor Danner examines the context of what Langdell through his other writings, the educational environment at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, and the changing perceptions of university libraries generally. He then considers how the “laboratory metaphor” has been applied by librarians and legal scholars during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The article closes with thoughts on Langdell’s legacy for law librarians and the usefulness of the laboratory metaphor.
Patent Confusion, Jennifer L. Behrens
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 …