ABOUT THE BOOK
The history of the law is known above all through its literature, an extraordinarily diverse body of texts in an equally diverse variety of formats. Histories of Legal Literature maps the past hundred years of English-language scholarship with a bibliography of 998 publications on the origins, authorship, dissemination, design, readership, and preservation of the works that shaped the law books of today, including the vast legal literatures from outside the Anglo-American world. With the help of a detailed subject index and statistical analysis, Widener and Greenwood reveal the strengths and gaps in this body of scholarship and point to opportunities for new contributions. Histories of Legal Literature will be a useful reference for legal historians, book historians, librarians, and those working in allied fields.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Widener was Rare Book Librarian at the Yale Law School Library until his retirement in 2021. He teaches a course on law books for the University of Virginia's Rare Book School. He is co-author (with Mark S. Weiner) of Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection (Talbot Publishing, 2017), which won the 2018 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries.
Ryan Greenwood is Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Minnesota Law Library, and has served as Widener's co-instructor at Rare Book School. He is co-author (with Patrick Graybill) of Jewels of the Collection: Treasures of the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center, which won the 2024 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries.
About the book.
