A Beer to Fill Your Stein

In an earlier post I discussed the Mettlach lawyer stein. On a trip to my local liquor store yesterday, I found the perfect beer to fill that stein. It's called "Collaboration Not Litigation Ale" and it's produced by Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, Colorado. Not only is the ale quite good, but the label is one every lawyer should like. Indeed, I think that every law school class in ADR should have this as the official class brew. And, perhaps, in states like Kansas, which require mandatory ADR in certain cases, the parties ought to partake of this ale as a prelude to their negotiations.

La Femme Avocat

The other day Mommy Blawg was kind enough to mention this site. In their honor I am posting selected postcards from a series printed at Nancy in France ca.1900-1902 entitled "La Femme Avocat." The entire series consists of fifteen cards. The text on the cards is decidedly feminist and in favor of women lawyers. The first card reads, in part [in my loose translation]:

Married, a mother, I have the honor, before I plead the case entrusted to me,

to give the court my deepest respect, assured of their good will and persuaded that it is

not necessary to be a man...to see good law and justice triumph.

I wil gladly send scans of these cards to anyone who would like them. Just email me at hoeflich@ku.edu.

The Law Relating to Fleas

Thanks to an invitation to participate in a Golieb Seminar at NYU, I was able to spend a few afternoons browsing through used bookstores in NYC. I spent nearly a full day on the third floor of the Strand, well-known to most book fanatics, looking through their enormous stock of antiquarian works. Among these, I found one quite delightful text. It is a catalogue issued by Maggs Bros., the great London book seller, in 1931, titled: "Curiouser and Curiouser" [a line, of course, from Lewis Carroll's marvelous Alice]. The catalogue is a collection of unusual titles, including several on the law. No. 25 is a copy of Tractatus Procuratoris, editus sub nomine diaboli (Rome ca. 1491-1500). This esoteric work is a school book "in which the Devil (called Ascaron) pleads for justice at God's Tribunal aginst Man, who is defended by the Virgin Mary."

No. 173 is a book by George Whither, The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessours, in which William Shakespeare appears as a juror.

My favorite legal work contained in this catalogue, however, is No. 259, Otto P. Zaunschliffer's Dissertatio juridica de eo quod justum ext circa spiritus familiares foeminarum ( Marburg, 1688), a legal treatise on the rules relating to fleas. Among the topics considered are:

"Are fleas subject to the Civil Law?

Can a commoner's flea contract matrimony with a

Senator's flea?

May a flea be killed if it is pregnant when caught?

If I bequeath my clothes to you, am I expected to

include the fleas in my legacy?

Interestingly, I have a German translation of this work attributed to Goethe,published in Berlin by Alexander Duncker in 1839. It is, perhaps, one of the oddest legal works ever printed. I wonder if there are any modern legal books or articles on the flea?

Law Book Bindings of Human Skin

In my last post I spoke of David Murray's discussion of color coding law book bindings. A more sinister discussion of bindings for law books is to be found in Percy Fitzgerald's The Book Fancier. I have on my shelves the N.Y. edition published by Scribner & Welford in 1886. In that edition there is a discussion on pp.122-123 of two examples of the skin of executed criminals being used to bind law books. The first, according to Fitzgerald, a noted Edwardian book collector, essayist, and biographer, is a report of the criminal trial of one Corder for the murder of a young woman named Martin in a village near Bury St. Edmunds in England. This book is supposedly to be found in "a public library" in Bury. According to Fitzgerald a local surgeon removed skin from the executed murderer's body and tanned it so that it could be used for binding this volume. Fitzgerald notes that "human leather is darker and more mottled than vellum, of a rather coarse-textured surface, with holes in it like those in pigskin, but smaller and more sparse." The second example were "several volumes" from the Bristol Law Library, similarly bound in the flayed skins of executed criminals. I confess that I have not made any attempt to discover whether Fitzgerald's accounts of these grisly volumes are Edwardian "urban legends" or true, but I welcome any inofrmation readers might have.

Murray on Law Book Bindings

One of the subjects which David Murray discusses in his Legal Merriments is the history of the binding law books. He observes that the subject was not one which interested his contemporaries, a statement which would be true today as well. But, he pionts out that there have been learned disquistions published on the subject. Among the various opinions he cites is that of Sebastian Brant, best known for his Ship of Fools. Brant was a law professor at Basel and much interested in the organization of legal knowledge. He recommended that law book bindings be color coded, to reflect their contents. Thus, he argues that the Digestum Vetus be bound in white, for simplicty; the Infortiatum in black because it deals with succession and the property of the dead, the Digestum Novum in red because it deals with crimes; and theVolumen in green and red to signify that it deals with both recent laws and fiscal matters. [David Murray, Legal Merriments, pp. 266-267] It is interesting to speculate whether Brant's scheme of color coding bindings drew its inspiration from the medieval habit of illuminating law books with scenes which corresponded to the subjects discussed on the same and nearby pages, about which more in the next post.

David Murray

There are few books which provide greater pleasure to the legal antiquarian than David Murray's Lawyers' Merriments. Murray was an Edwardian Glasgow lawyer and antiquarian with a penchant for the obscure and the amusing. He published a number of works on legal and Scottish history, among which his Lawyers' Merriments, published at Glasgow by Maclehose in 1912, is his best/ He includes chapters on such things as legal lyrics, lawyers' libraries, facetious precedents, comic textbooks, and the relationship between the Devil and the legal profession. Over the course of the next few weeks I shall provide extracts from this volume with commentary.

The North American Legal Association

New York lawyer, publisher, and entrepreneur, John Livingston, founded the North American Legal Association [also known as the American Legal Association] in the early 1850s. It was a loose organization of lawyers from throughout the United States created to provide those doing interstate business a list of reliable legal counsel. Livingston distributed circulars advertising the group to postmasters and county clerks and solicited them to recommend potential Association members. He also advertised the group in his law journal, Livingston's Monthly Law Journal. Within a few years he was able to list members throughout the United States. The Association was one of the first national proto-bar associations in the U.S. A certificate of membership in the Association is illustrated above.

For more information on Livingston and his various enterprises, see my article, "John Livingston & the Business of Law in Nineteenth Century America," American Journal of Legal History, v.44 (2000), pp. 347-368.