Old Harvard, old France, old crime
The Harvard Law School Library is a launching point for well-trained modern lawyers, but it is also a time machine. Scholars or the merely curious are free to climb into the library’s Historical and Special Collections, which house tens of thousands of rare books, images, and manuscripts. These HOLLIS-hastened time travelers can examine how law has been taught and studied and compiled. Legal history holdings at Harvard go back 10 centuries. The oldest document in the collections, a canon law manuscript from 1150, includes some impressive doodles. That may prove that legal studies, even in a monastery a millennium ago, were not always a dour pursuit. The latest exhibit drawn from the collections is “Spanning the Centuries,” open in Langdell Hall’s Caspersen Room through Aug. 22 and curated by collections manager Karen S. Beck. Two glass cases contain items from 1579 to 1868, most of them added during the three years she...