LAW LIBRARIES OF EIGHTEENTH-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 England. Therefore, it was English common-law, with its habits, its traditions, its way of thinking, which took firm root in the New World. Upon this ground, Colonial law branched into three elements: folk-law, new law created to address the needs of life in a new country, and legal elements shaped by the settlers' ideologies (for example, the Puritans in Massachusetts).
There were also strong culturally ties with England. Lawyers who practiced in the colonies were Englishmen, some of whom had had the...