1 WorldCat is a product of OCLC, the union catalog and “bibliographic utility” that, through its ties with the Library of Congress, furnishes cataloging and interlibrary loan information. For information on the nature and scope of these agencies, see Jason Vaughn, “OCLC WorldCat Local,” in Library Technology Reports, 47 (January 2011), at 12–13. For further context see Margalit Fox, “Frederick G. Kilgour, Innovative Librarian, Dies at 92,” New York Times, August 6, 2006.Google Scholar

2 See Theodore F.T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5^th edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), 20–26, 144–150.Google Scholar

3 For example, a statute dating to Mississippi Territorial times, but still in effect in Alabama in the 1830's, declared that “every other felony, misdemeanor, or offense whatsoever” not covered by an act of the legislature “shall be punished as heretofore by the common law.” See Harry Toulmin, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama, Containing the Statutes and Resolutions in Force at the End of the General Assembly in January, 1823 (New York: J. & J. Harper, Printers, 1823), 214 (sec. 45); and John G. Aikin, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama, Containing All the Statutes of a Public and General Nature, in Force at the Close of the Session of the General Assembly, in January, 1833 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Alexander Towar, 1833), 107 (sec. 35), 107 n. 1. See also Toulmin, Digest, 453–487, for entries under the heading “Judicial Proceedings at Common Law.”Google Scholar

4 Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2^nd edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 21–29, 403–406. Alabama's first example of codified law is John J. Ormond, Arthur P. Bagby, and George Goldthwaite, The Code of Alabama, head notes and index by Henry C. Semple (Montgomery: Brittan and de Wolf, 1852).Google Scholar

5 Fred Rodell, Nine Men: A political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955 (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 19.Google Scholar

6 For the “common law mentality” see below at n. 53 and n. 54.Google Scholar

7 See Paul M. Pruitt, Jr., and Penny Calhoun Gibson, “John Payne's Dream: A Brief History of the University of Alabama School of Law Library,” Journal of the Legal Profession, 15 (1990), 5–25. The School of Law Library was renamed the Bounds Law Library in 1998.Google Scholar

8 Count made in December 2008 by Research Assistant Adam Eason, of court reporters and statutory compilations in the KD ranges (Library of Congress classification), main stacks, Bounds Law Library‥Google Scholar

9 American Bar Association [Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and of the Accreditation Committee], Standards for Approval of Law Schools: Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1987), “Annex II: Core Collection Library Schedule,” n.p.; and subsequent editions.Google Scholar

10 Pruitt and Gibson, “John Payne's Dream,” 12.Google Scholar

11 For the initial treatise section of Making of Modern Law, see the description at http://gdc.gale.com/products/the-making-of-modern-law-legal-treatises-1800-1926/?searched=making+of+modern+law&advsearch=oneword&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1+ajaxSearch_highlight2+ajaxSearch_highlight3+ajaxSearch_highlight4. For an earlier collection, high-tech for its time, consider the “Yale Blackstone,” an assemblage in microfiche of more than two hundred editions of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, initially collected by Yale graduate Macgrane Coxe and donated by him to Yale's law library in 1909—more than a century ago. The set is a tribute both to the energy and intelligence of twentieth-century Yale librarians; that many academic law libraries have purchased the set is a tribute to Blackstone's ubiquitous appeal. See Catherine Spicer Eller, The William Blackstone Collection in the Yale Law Library: A Bibliographical Catalogue [Yale Law Library Publications No. 6, June 1938] (New Haven: Yale Law Library, 1938), ixGoogle Scholar

12 M.H. Hoeflich, Legal Publishing in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 26, 132–133.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 22–29, and passim. As Hoeflich states, this thesis was earlier set forth by Daniel Hulsebosch, in his Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina Press, 2005). For law as a “science of reason,” see William P. LaPiana, Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

14 See, for example, James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 4 volumes (New York: O/ Halsted, 1826–1830). For a comparison of Kent and the later English legal scholar Sir Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), see Neil Duxbury, Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 297 n.78. For Pollock and Oliver Wendell Holmes, see below.Google Scholar

15 See (among many possibilities) Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, with a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, 3 volumes (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833).Google Scholar

16 Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws, Foreign and Domestic, in Regard to Contracts, Rights, and Remedies, and Especially in Regard to Marriages, Divorces, Wills, Successions, and Judgments (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1834); for quoted passage see William R. Leslie, “The Influence of Joseph Story's Theory of the Conflict of Laws on Constitutional Nationalism,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 35 (September 1948), 203. For foreign editions of Story's works, see below.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See David Hoffman, A Course of Legal Study, Addressed to Students and the Profession Generally, 2^nd edition; 2 volumes (Baltimore: J. Neal, 1836).Google Scholar

18 Hoeflich, Legal Publishing in Antebellum America, 27–28, 36–41, 42–43, 74–104; andGoogle Scholar

19 See Erwin C. Surrency, A History of American Law Publishing (New York: Oceana Publications, 1990), 237–242, for the origins of the West Publishing Company (founded in 1872).Google Scholar

20 For Kent's role in encouraging Americans along these lines, see James Kent, et al., Outline of a Course of English Reading, Based on That Prepared for the Mercantile Library Association of the City of New York (New York: G.P. Putnam and Co., 1853); this posthumous edition was based on Kent's A Course of Reading, Drawn Up By the Hon. James Kent… for the Use of the Members of the Mercantile Library Association (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1840).Google Scholar

21 “Atticus” is the online catalog of the Bounds Law Library. A January 14, 2011 search found 163entries under Story's name, on specific topics that included Agency; Bailments; Bills of Exchange; Constitutional Law; Equity; Partnerships; and Promissory Notes. To carry out a search, see http://atticus.law.ua.edu/.Google Scholar

22 Works cited below in notes 23, 25, 26, 27, and 28, are all from the collections of the Bounds Law Library.Google Scholar

23 Joseph Chitty and Thomas Chitty, A Treatise on the Parties to Actions, and on Pleading, with Second and Third Volumes Containing Precedents of Pleadings and Copious Directory Notes, in 3 volumes, 8^th American edition from 6^th London edition (Springfield, MA: G. and C. Merriam, 1840). “Atticus” lists 135 entries for Joseph Chitty (1776–1841) and 19 entries for Thomas Chitty (1802–1878). The Chitty name has survived to the present day; the Bounds Law Library recently cataloged H.G. Beale, editor, Chitty on Contracts, 30^th edition (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2008).Google Scholar

24 A June 10, 2011 WorldCat search revealed that Dunlap's name is associated with as many as 118 holdings, in various media, of WorldCat libraries; Ingraham's name is associated with as many as 202 holdings in various media.Google Scholar

25 William Oldnall Russell and Charles Sprengel Greaves, A Treatise on Crimes and Misdemeanors, in two volumes, 5^th American edition from 3^rd London edition (Philadelphia: T. and J.W. Johnson, Law Booksellers), 1845. The work lists Daniel Davis and Theron Metcalf annotators of “former American editions,” as well as “additional notes and references, by George Sharswood.” Sharswood's name is printed in larger type. See Sharswood, An Essay on Professional Ethics, 2^nd edition (Philadelphia: T. and J.W. Johnson, 1860).Google Scholar

26 Charles, Lord Tenterden and William Shee, A Treatise on the Law Relative to Merchant Ships and Seamen, in Five Parts, 8^th edition; 7^th American edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854). The work was published “with the Notes of Mr. Justice Story, and Additional Annotations by J.C. Perkins.”Google Scholar

27 Robert Alexander Fisher, Albert Hart, and S.B. Harrison, A Digest of the Reported Cases (from 1756 to 1870, Inclusive,) Relating to Criminal Law, Criminal Information, and Extradition (San Francisco: S. Whitney & Co., 1871), [i].Google Scholar

28 Henry Coleman Folkard, Folkard's Starkie on Slander and Libel, Including Pleading and Evidence, Civil and Criminal, 4^th English edition (New York: Banks and Brothers, Law Publishers, 1877), i.Google Scholar

29 See, for example, Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws, Foreign and Domestic: In Regard to Contracts, Rights, and Remedies, and Especially in Regard to Marriages, Divorces, Wills, Successions, and Judgments, 3^rd edition, revised (Boston: Little, Brown; London: A. Maxwell and Son, 1846); and Joseph Story and Edmund H. Bennett, Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws, Foreign and Domestic: In Regard to Contracts, Rights, and Remedies, and Especially in Regard to Marriages, Divorces, Wills, Successions, and Judgments, 7^th edition (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1872). For further examples, see (1) Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Law of Bills of Exchange, Foreign and Inland, As Administered in England and America, With Occasional Illustrations From the Commercial Law of Nations of Continental Europe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1843) [WorldCat's copy contained notes on booksellers in cities including Boston, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Cambridge]; (2) Joseph Story, Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence as Administered in England and America, 5^th edition, revised (Boston: C.C. Little & J. Brown; London: V. & R. Stevens and G.S. Norton, 1849); and (3) Joseph Story and Frederick Thomas Pratt, Notes on the Principles and Practices of Prize Courts: With a Selection of Documents and Forms as Used in the High Court of Admiralty of England (London: Benning, Law Booksellers, 1854). Among other foreign treatments of Story's work, the most remarkable is a two-volume manuscript creation of circa 1841, “written in five distinct hands,” and titled Commentarj Sul Conflitto delle Leggi Straniere e Domestiche in Ordine ai Contratti, in the Harvard law School Library; apparently it is based on the Boston 2^nd edition (1841) of Story's conflicts treatise.Google Scholar

30 James Kent, A Practical Treatise on Commercial and Maritime Law: With a Chapter on Incorporeal Hereditaments, Embracing Aquatic Rights, Rights of Common, Etc. (Edinburgh: T. Clark, 1837); and James Kent and J.T. Abdy, Kent's Commentary on International Law, Revised with Notes and Cases Brought Down to the Present Time (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1866).Google Scholar

31 See among other editions, James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 12^th edition, edited by O.W. Holmes, Jr. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1873).Google Scholar

32 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881). There were also late nineteenth or early twentieth-century editions of The Common Law in German and Italian. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Rudolf Leonhard, Das Gemeine Recht Englands und Nordamerikas (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1912).Google Scholar

33 C.C. Langdell, A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts: With References and Citations (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1871). For evidence of British interest in Langdell, see Mark DeWolfe Howe, editor, Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), I: 80, 91.Google Scholar

34 West's chief rival was the Lawyer's Cooperative Publishing Company founded in 1882; see Surrency, History of American Law Publishing, 242–245. The two companies (or their corporate descendants) have produced parallel series of reporters since the late nineteenth century. These descendants are Thomson Legal (owner of West Publishing; http://west.thomson.com/about/history/) and LexisNexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool/). Both are better known to law students through their impressive and all-embracing online products, respectively Westlaw and LexisNexis.Google Scholar

35 This term is a reference to the “regional reporters” of West's National Reporter System, designed to cover the appellate courts of all the states.Google Scholar

36 For the searches summarized below, the Lexis databases utilized were, respectively “Combined Alabama Cases”; and “Federal and State Cases Combined,” the latter searched simultaneously with “U.S. Supreme Court Cases, Lawyer's Edition.” Each search was a “proximity” search, using such search patterns as: Magna w/3 Carta. The various searches were carried out on January 12, 2009 (Alabama cases) and January 20, 2009 (federal and U.S. Supreme Court cases).Google Scholar

37 “Coke Upon Littleton” is a old-fashioned abbreviation for Sir Edward Coke's First part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Or, a Commentary Upon Littleton, 1^st American from the 16^th European edition, in 3 volumes (Philadelphia: Johnson and Warner, and Samuel R. Fisher, Jr., 1812). This American edition of Coke's classic 1628 treatise contained additional notes and commentary by Francis Hargrave and Charles Butler, as well as “the notes of Lord Chief Justice Hale and Lord Chancellor Nottingham, and an analysis of Littleton, written by an unknown hand in 1658–9,” with yet more explanatory material by Thomas Day.Google Scholar

38 The most readily obtained edition of this 18^th-Century restatement of law is the modern facsimile reprint of the first edition (1765–1769), i.e., Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Among many American editions, the most interesting may be St. George Tucker, editor, Blackstone's Commentaries, with Notes of Reference to the Constitutions and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 5 volumes (Philadelphia: William Young Birch, and Abraham Small, 1803), with additional notes by Edward Christian.Google Scholar

39 Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford, William Murray, the First Earl of Mansfield (1705–1793), was a respected member of parliament in the 1740s and 1750, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1756 until his retirement from the bench in 1788. A scholar of Roman and civil law, his opinions reshaped the British law merchant and helped facilitate British commerce. See Theodore F.T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th edition (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1956), 248–251.Google Scholar

40 Among passages of the United States Constitution that echo Magna Carta, see Art. III, Sec. 2, Clause 3; Amendment 1; Amendment 5; Amendment 6; Amendment 7; and Amendment 8. For Alabama instances see, inter alia, Toulmin, Digest, 915–916, 1819 Constitution of Alabama, Article I, Declaration of Rights (especially secs. 10–17); and Code of Alabama 1975, Volume 1, Constitution of Alabama of 1901, Declaration of Rights, 84 (Sec. 5), 96–97 (Sec. 6), 166 (Sec. 7), 172 (Sec. 9), 186 (Sec. 11), 198 (Sec. 13), 235 (Sec. 15), and 243 (Sec. 17).Google Scholar

41 For these cases, see 627 So. 2d 878 (1993) and 684 So, 2d 685 (1996) (punitive damages); 695 So. 2d 1158 (1997) (university trustee); 735 So. 2d 1172 (1999) (retiree benefits); 847 So. 2d 331 (2002) (election of deacons and trustees); and 895 So. 2d 366 (2004) (forcible entry). For other mentions of Magna Carta see cases at 66 Alabama reports 87 (1880) (conflict between a widow and a “judgment creditor” over homestead lands); 248 So. 2s 148 (1970) (dispute over who should sign a complaint concerning violation of a municipal ordinance); and 713 So. 2d 869 (1997) (discretion of court concerning a school funding plan).Google Scholar

42 See Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987), 372.Google Scholar

43 For Somerville's opinion see 81 Alabama Reports 577–597 (quoted passages at 587, 596).Google Scholar

44 For the distinctive evolution of American legal studies see Robert B. Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and William A. LaPiana, Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

45 Women students were seldom admitted to either the American or British bar in the early twentieth century; numerical parity of female and male students is a late twentieth century phenomenon. See n. 44, below.Google Scholar

46 See Penny Darbyshire and Keith James Eddy, Darbyshire on the English Legal System, 8^th edition (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2005), 369–371, and (for women and minorities in law schools), 371. For a less succinct but more revealing look at status among English attorneys, see John Mortimer, The First Rumpole Omnibus (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).Google Scholar

47 See Marc Galanter, Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),Google Scholar

48 This massive work, written self-consciously to rival Alexis de Tocqueville's celebrated Democracy in America (1835, 1840), went through many editions. The most accessible today is James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 volumes, introduction by Gary L. McDowell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995); for bar and bench, see II: 1283–1305. See also Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. “James Bryce,” in Encyclopedia of the United States Supreme Court (Detroit: Thomson Gale Group, 2008), 1:225–227.Google Scholar

49 Sometimes affability traveled in the other direction. Consider Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884), holder of multiple cabinet-level offices in the Confederate States government. After the fall of Richmond in 1865, Benjamin fled, coming to rest in England and (eventually) France. He practiced law in England, where he won appointment as Queen's Counsel and was a highly successful legal author, notably of Benjamin's Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property: With References to the American Decisions, 3^rd English edition based on 4^th American edition, 2 volumes (Jersey City: F.D. Linn & Company, 1884). For biographical information, see Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988).Google Scholar

50 Mark De Wolfe Howe, editor, Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–1932 (see n. 31, supra); and Mark De Wolfe Howe, editor, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935, introduced by Felix Frankfurter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). Other (less legal) collections of Holmes’ correspondence have also been published; he was an indefatigable letter-writer, and he remained active into his nineties. Of course, not all transatlantic correspondence was carried out between equals. Alabama native Hannis Taylor (1851–1922) was a prolific legal writer whose works achieved respectable sales. Nonetheless, in two letters written to English historian J.B. Bury of Cambridge University (October 14 and November 25, 1908) Taylor takes a wheedling tone in promoting his book The Science of Jurisprudence: A Treatise (New York: Macmillan, 1908). After boasting about the reception his book received among “the great German doctors at Leipsic,” Taylor adds: “If you great people at Oxford and Cambridge are as kind, I will have nothing more to ask.” These letters are pasted to the end-sheets (from and back) of a copy of Taylor's Science of Jurisprudence held in the Special Collections Department of the Bounds Law Library.Google Scholar

51 See Penny Gibson and Bailey M. Harned, “Harry Cohen: A Bibliography of His Life's Work,” in Journal of the Legal Profession, 32 (2008), vii–xii, especially x; and Steven H. Hobbs [untitled tribute] in Journal of the legal Profession, 32 (2008), xiv–xxii, especially xvi–xvii.Google Scholar

52 See, for example, David F. Partlett, Professional Negligence (Sydney: Law Book Company, 1985); and Barry Nurcombe and David F. Partlett, Child Mental Health and the Law (New York: Free Press, 1994).Google Scholar

53 J.W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); see also J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

54 Stephen A. Conrad, “Review: The Constitutionalism of the Common Law Mind,” Law and Social Inquiry, 13 (Summer 1988), 619–636, especially 628–629. See also Beverly Zweiben, How Blackstone lost the Colonies: English Law, Colonial Lawyers, and the American Revolution (New York: Garland Press, 1990).Google Scholar

55 Mortimer, Rumpole Omnibus, 166 (in the story “Rumpole and the Learned Friends”).Google Scholar