Target Audience: Librarians interested in legal history
Learning Outcomes
1) Participants will be able to identify three professional needs of 19th-century American legal practitioners.
2) Participants will be able to discuss how the content of an early legal journal empirically reflects and addresses historical legal professional interests and needs.
Zoey Orol will present "Reading the Early American Legal Profession: A Study of the First American Law Review." Orol is the second-place winner of the 2012 Morris Cohen Student Essay Contest and a 2L student at New York University School of Law. John Beerbower, a 3L student at the University of Virginia School of Law, wrote the first-place essay. His essay, "Ex Parte McCardle and the Attorney General's Duty to Defend Acts of Congress," examines key historical antecedents of Attorneys General refusals to defend a statute or appear on behalf of the United States in cases before the Supreme Court. (Beerbower is unable to attend the AALL Annual Meeting.) These excellent papers demonstrate the continuing importance of historical research to understanding the foundations and development of legal theory and practice. The LHRB-SIS annual essay contest is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, former Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School, whose scholarly work was in the fields of legal research, rare books, and historical bibliography. The purpose of the contest is to encourage scholarship in the areas of legal history, rare law books, and legal archives, as well as to acquaint students with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and law librarianship. Additional information on the Morris Cohen Student Essay Contest is available on the LHRB SIS website.