Overview

The history of the law is known above all through its literature, an extraordinarily diverse body of texts in an equally diverse variety of formats. Histories of Legal Literature maps the past hundred years of English-language scholarship with a bibliography of 998 publications on the origins, authorship, dissemination, design, readership, and preservation of the works that shaped the law books of today, including the vast legal literatures from outside the Anglo-American world. With the help of a detailed subject index and statistical analysis, Widener and Greenwood reveal the strengths and gaps in this body of scholarship and point to opportunities for new contributions. Histories of Legal Literature will be a useful reference for legal historians, book historians, librarians, and those working in allied fields. [viii], 202 pp.

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9781616196912

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Reviews

The history of legal literature needed this study by Widener and Greenwood. Readers now have a priceless tool that shows the exponential growth in English-language scholarship on legal literature in the past 100 years. The authors provide a checklist and the necessary analysis to help assess the scope of collections, narratives, topics, and authors. This study is a joy and a must-read for those interested in legal history and the history of books and reading practices! Agustín Parise Faculty of Law, Maastricht University Law is the intersection of language and power, and the medium through which law works is legal literature. Now two of the world's foremost experts on the history of legal literature have compiled an authoritative and fascinating bibliography of that history. Michael Widener and Ryan Greenwood's work on this is a giant step toward creating a new discipline of the historiography of legal publications. Fred R. Shapiro Associate Director for Collections, Yale Law Library, and Editor, New Yale Book of Quotations To be useful, law must be understandable and available. In other words, law must be literature and that literature must be published. And so it has been published, practically since the dawn of recorded history. This book is a study of studies of the numerous, various, and evolving ways in which that publication has taken place. It is a unique and exceedingly valuable work, useful to anyone interested in the ""how"" of the preservation and transmission of law. Ross E. Davies Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Author Information

Michael Widener was Rare Book Librarian at the Yale Law School Library until his retirement in 2021. He teaches a course on law books for the University of Virginia's Rare Book School. He is co-author (with Mark S. Weiner) of Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection (Talbot Publishing, 2017), which won the 2018 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. Ryan Greenwood is Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Minnesota Law Library, and has served as Widener's co-instructor at Rare Book School. He is co-author (with Patrick Graybill) of Jewels of the Collection: Treasures of the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center, which won the 2024 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries.

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