Welcome

Welcome to my new Blog, the Legal Antiquarian. This Blog will be devoted to the history of the material culture of the law, i.e. to the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past Among the subjects I will cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and read, etc. I will also post quotes on this Blog from little-known sources about the law, such as postcards, trade cards, and other ephemera. I'll also try to alert readers to new books, articles and online sources on these aspects of legal history.

The pictures on the bottom of this page will change, as the mood suits me. For the most part what I will post will be items about the law and legal profession from my collection. Currently, there are two illustrations at the bottom. The first is a trade card, i.e. an advertising card, from the ast quarter of the nineteenth century. It was printed in color by the chromolithographic process. The illustration of a court in which the participants are all animals is partof a long tradition, going back to the Middle Ages.

The second illustration is of a postcard dating from between 1908-1912. It is obviously of a law congress of some sort, perhaps, the Comparative Law Conference held at St. Louis, in which a contingent of women lawyers proudly march.