Researching Black History
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Kate Boudouris
1M ago
Black History Month is an opportunity to honor past generations of Black Americans and learn more about their pursuit of equity and justice. There are many online resources for researching Black history—from digital collections maintained by the Library of Congress and National Archives to the numerous African American Studies databases available through UVA. This post focuses on three types of resources that may be especially interesting to UVA Law students: (1) Collections relating to UVA and the Law School, (2) oral histories that preserve personal accounts of the past; and (3) databases wi ..read more
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Law Library Podcast: Legal Knowledge
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Addie Patrick
7M ago
This spring, Law Special Collections launched Legal Knowledge, a limited series podcast that examines UVA Law’s impact on legal education from the University’s founding to the present. The podcast is based on the Law Library’s forthcoming book with UVA Press—a volume which brings together thirteen contributors to trace UVA Law’s pedagogical history. Season One of the podcast covers the first hundred years of the Law School, from Thomas Jefferson’s founding vision in 1819 to coeducation in 1920 and, in turn, the first half of the book. In each episode of Season One, Meggan Cashwell, former Post ..read more
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Celebrating Juneteenth: Emancipation at UVA 
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Addie Patrick
1y ago
This Juneteenth, we recognize Henry, a man who emancipated himself in March 1865 with the arrival of Union troops in Charlottesville. He was previously enslaved by UVA Law professor John B. Minor (1845-1895). In a diary entry dated March 6, 1865, Minor wrote: “The enemy got upwards of 100 horses between Meechum’s river and [the University of Virginia], and multitudes of servants went off with them, poor misguided creatures! Amongst them my boy Henry, hired in Staunton. I lament it more on his account than my own.” Minor’s eldest daughter, Mary Lancelot Minor, penned a letter to an aunt a cou ..read more
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BALSA and Legal Aid
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Addie Patrick
1y ago
UVA Law’s Black American Law Students Association (BALSA, now BLSA) formed in October 1971. Alongside the organization’s main goals of increasing student and faculty diversity, BALSA’s founding members forged their community of action through legal aid. During the 1971-1972 academic year, BALSA members took on pro bono work to provide legal counsel to underserved communities, particularly through collaborations with local legal aid groups like the Charlottesville–Albemarle Legal Aid Society (now the Legal Aid Justice Center, founded in 1967 by a group of Charlottesville attorneys and ..read more
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Fifty Years Later: An Archival Look at the 1971 Virginia Constitution
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Addie Patrick
1y ago
Introduction Law Special Collections recently installed Revising the Virginia Constitution, 1968-1971 in the lobby of the Law Library. In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1971 Virginia Constitution, the exhibit provides a retrospective look at Virginia’s Commission on Constitutional Revision through the work of UVA Law professor and constitutional law expert A. E. Dick Howard (’61). Howard served as executive director of the Commission, an appointment he received from Commission chair and former Virginia governor Albertis Harrison Jr. in Feb ..read more
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Negotiating Law and Order on Grounds
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Meggan Cashwell
1y ago
Faculty Chairmen and the Lives of Enslaved People at the University of Virginia To mark the launch of Slavery & the University of Virginia School of Law, a digital initiative exploring the law school’s historical connections to slavery, we offer the following post that recounts interactions between UVA Law faculty in their role as faculty chairmen with enslaved workers on Grounds. At the University of Virginia, precious little exists of first-person slave narratives that might tell us more about the enslaved community here and how they shaped, experienced, and felt about their lives. Even ..read more
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Your Legal Rights as a Woman: A Handbook for Virginians
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Kelly Fleming
1y ago
Five years after the University of Virginia Law School began offering a “Women and the Law” course, which was supervised by two male professors in 1972, the Virginia Law Women (VLW) embarked on an extraordinary project. Six members of the group—Joan Kuriansky, Susan Buckingham Reilly, Diane Pitts, Jackie Blyn, Diane Smock, and Tracy Thompson—researched and wrote a legal handbook for women in Virginia titled Your Legal Rights as a Woman: A Handbook for Virginians (1977). Modeled on a handbook created by the North Carolina Law School Women, the text was, as the introduction stated, “written by w ..read more
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Women’s Legal Rights in UVA’s First Law Library: Baron and Feme
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Kelly Fleming
1y ago
In honor of Women’s History Month, this post by Kelly Fleming discusses the history of women’s legal rights as reflected in the 1828 Catalogue of the Library of the University of Virginia. Kelly is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at UVa, where her research focuses on women’s property rights and political participation in eighteenth-century British novels. She is assisting the Law Library with its 1828 Catalogue digitization project. Of the 369 law titles in the 1828 Catalogue of the Library of the University of Virginia, only one was explicitly dedicated to the legal status of wives ..read more
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Special Collections Team Wins Cromwell Research Grant
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Jim Ambuske
1y ago
Buried deep in the stacks of Edinburgh libraries lie court records that tell stories about early America. In the Faculty of Advocates Library and The Signet Library, both just a few doors down from Scotland’s Court of Session, and in the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh, rests evidence of Glaswegian merchants who traded for Virginia tobacco, families divided by the American Revolution, enslaved men and women who toiled on Caribbean sugar plantations, and much more. These Session Papers, the printed material submitted to Scotland’s supreme civil court as part of th ..read more
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A New Guide for Legal Historians
University of Virginia Law School Library » Legal History
by Kent Olson
1y ago
Shortly before his death in 2010, Morris Cohen told me about a book he was writing with his Yale colleague John Nann on research in American legal history. I wondered at the time if this was mostly a means of keeping Morris engaged in work and might not amount to much. But lo and behold, eight years later The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History (Yale University Press, 2018) has landed on my desk. And it’s full of great insights for the legal historian. Instead of divisions by material type or genre, most of the book’s chapters focus on distinct time periods in American ..read more
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