LAW LIBRARIES OF 18TH CENTURY AMERICA

It is the purpose of this paper to explore law libraries of eighteenth-century America. As such, it is important to realize that the model of a library readily available to society of that time was solely the social library; this model was supplemented by the example of the private collection. Two institutions represent the law libraries of early America: the Social Law Library and the Library of Congress, both of which had their origin in a collection of judicial and legal texts. Whereas the Social Law Library remained an entity committed to collecting material relevant to judicial use and practice, the Library of Congress, inspired by the vision of Thomas Jefferson (and seeded by his private collection) became an immense national repository and institute. Both of these examples of the eighteenth-century book collections have survived to this day.

English-speaking people in the early seventeenth-century first settled the territory that is now the United States. Their settlements were scattered along the east coast of the country. The Puritans sank their roots into the soil of New England; the Quakers settled in Pennsylvania; and English Catholics colonized Maryland. There were also early settlements in what are now Virginia and the Carolinas. Indeed, it is simple to deduce from this pattern of settlement that the historical element in American law comes from a single source, namely

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es only to the extent that the main object was thereby advanced. The very fact of structural diversity in the earlier social libraries testifies to the absence of any slavish following of a single example. Thus the Book Company of Durham, Connecticut was based on the principle of stock-ownership with specific rights added. The Philogrammatican Library of Lebanon was a covenant between one person and the remaining members of the association. The Charter of the Redwood Library of Newport displayed the characteristics of the true corporate form. The social library of Portsmouth, New Hampshire was based on the principle of a tontine , supplemented with income derived from a lottery. These early variations soon disappeared as the pattern of the social library became set, and by the end of the Colonial period it had become reasonably standardized. The Revolutionary War and its aftermath of political uncertainty and economic depression were only pauses in the advance of the social library. No new libraries were established in any New England state during 1776 to 1777, and only three or four such institutions appeared during the remainder of the decade. But the 1780s produced more new social libraries than the entire previous half-cent
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4036
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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