Next week, the Legal Information & Book History workshop will meet at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to examine the account books kept by Samuel J ..read more

Please join Fred Shapiro (Associate Director for Collections) and Kathryn James (Rare Book Librarian) on Thursday, October 20, 12-1pm, for a tour of the Library’s current exhibition, “Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School.”  We’ll meet at the Rare Book Room, on Level Two of the Library, down one floor from the main entrance.  Please bring your Yale ID to access the Yale Law School building ..read more

Shown left: “Published on board the convict ship ‘Success’ ”: Detail, The History of the Convict Ship ‘Success’ (1912); call# SSP H629.  ..read more

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Back to School: Highlights from the Rare Book Collection An exhibition welcoming incoming and returning students, on view in the Danzus-Panziger Rare Book exhibition area, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Level Two August 1-31, 2022 Including: –Batman’s Yale Law School diploma, in the original art work by Sal Amendola, ca. 1974 –Copy-editing the Gettysburg Address, in the Yale precursor to the Harvard Bluebook, Yale Law Journal, 1921 –Law students in class, ca. 1495 ..read more

A new acquisition from Maggs: George Warner, “Paper Relating to the Prisons in Dublin” (London: Luke Hansard, 1819), with an engraved plan of Newgate Prison ..read more

The Rare Book Collection has acquired two manuscript notebooks kept by Ludwig Freyberger, physician and early expert pathologist at the turn of the 20th century in England.   Originally from Austria, where he trained in Vienna as a physician, Freyberger was a prominent London physician and barrister-at-law at the Middle Temple.  Nominated as an expert pathologist in 1902 by John Troutbeck, Coroner for the City and Liberty of Westminster, Freyberger kept detailed notes of his postmortem investigations, recording both his own notes on the cause of death and the jury’s verdict.&nb ..read more

In 1839, the English Quaker, Elizabeth Fry, published this pocket-sized devotional work, intended for distribution to women prisoners in France.  Fry was a dedicated advocate for prison reform and a founding member of the Ladies’ Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, reconfigured in 1821 as the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners.   Between 1838 and 1843, Fry made five visits to European prisons.    ..read more

In April 1972, the French theorist Michel Foucault made a detour from a campus trip to the State University of Buffalo to visit the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York.  Attica, the prison, was by then already “Attica,” the site of the violent series of events of September 9-13, 1971.  Watched on television, read in the news, “Attica” was consumed by audiences across America and around the world.  ..read more