Exhibit | Law Inscribed | Archives & Special Collections

Exhibit | Law Inscribed

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Legal texts carry the marks of their past, from the inscriptions of a reader to the stitched bindings and chain-lined paper of a printer. These marks of ownership and construction reveal what law was, how it was read, and how it worked. Curated by students from across UVA, this exhibit brings together inscribed legal texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, selected from the Law Library's Special Collections and the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Each student curator provides a deeper look into their selected items in the StoryMap exhibits below.

Learning Littleton: Tenures Inscribed

Curated by Lucie Alden

How did people interact with law books in the seventeenth century? The heavy marginalia in UVA’s copy of Littleton’s Tenures helps unearth signs of readership. The notes help us understand how people read, annotated, and digested law books in the seventeenth century.

Curated by Morgan Maloney

This project explores legal documents concerning the crime of piracy. Two documents describe individual piracy trials while the third is Justice Joseph Story's charge to a grand jury. In particular, this project examines the jurisdictional questions presented by piracy.

Curated by Isabel Bielat

These pamphlets were sold cheaply in 1760s London during a scandalous series of seditious libel prosecutions. The anonymous letter supports the British radical politician John Wilkes, whose defense against obscene and seditious libel charges criticized search and seizure practices and press regulations.

Curated by Shannon Pickrell

Two printed trials highlight the importance of Charles I’s trial to the ongoing political disputes of the Restoration, from his son’s ascension to the throne to religious and political conspiracies.

Curated by Evan Cheney

Tudor lawyer Edmund Plowden pondered how to report credibly on the law, preserving a speaker's intent while necessarily selecting, condensing, and explicating. Accordingly, this early edition of Plowden’s Commentaries—recently added to UVA Law’s special collections—invites us to consider the blurred relationship between authority and evidence in sixteenth-century England.