About
Law Special Collections is dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and sharing the history of UVA Law and making accessible our collection of legal history materials.
The storage location of our collections determines how quickly each collection can be accessed and available for research. Items housed in the Rare Book Room and in our on-site storage facility are available for same-day research. Items located in Ivy Stacks, the off-site storage facility for the UVA Library System, must be requested two business days in advance. Patrons conduct research in our reading room, located on the third floor of the Law Library.
Digitization, in tandem with Access and Preservation, broadens and strengthens the Library's mission. To expand access to our archival collections of the greatest value to scholars and the Law School communtiy, the Law Library over the past ten years has prioritized the creation of digital content alongside our ongoing efforts to catalog and process print collections. As resources permit, we have invested in equipment and staff training that enable us to digitize selections from our diverse collections and make these materials available for open-access, online research. For the vast majority of our digital collections, we provide access to the digital files under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license making our materials freely available with minimal restrictions.
Special Collections staff create and curate multiple exhibitions to showcase the legal and institutional history at UVA Law.
Randi manages projects that preserve and exhibit the law school's institutional history, and she supports research in the Library’s archival, rare book, and digital collections. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2014 with a focus on the politics and global geography of trade in the early American republic. She has served as a fellow in digital humanities at the UVA Law Library and at the UVA Scholars’ Lab, and in 2016-17 served as a Kundrun Postdoctoral Fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. She is completing a book, Maritime Frontier: Early American Merchants and the Commercial Republic, 1760-1830.
Loren leads the library's efforts to develop online research tools and to promote, create, and preserve its digital collections as well as acting as the Library's Systems Liaison to the main library system. Loren received his bachelor's in English and American studies from Kalamazoo College in 2004 and earned a Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia in 2014, studying Federal Housing Policy, Gender, and American Political Development. He has served as the director of the Project for Technology in History Education at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History, the technology coordinator for UVA's Digital Classroom Initiative, and project programmer for the Virginia Center for Digital History.
Dan Cavanaugh is an archivist working to preserve and make accessible the UVA Law Library’s special collections. He earned an M.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts in 2005 and received an M.S. in Library and Information Studies from Drexel University in 2012. Before joining the Law Library, Dan served as the Curator of Historical Collections for the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.
Addison serves as Library Coordinator at the UVA Law Library. She plays a lead role within Law Special Collections on public history projects, including curating online and physical exhibitions. She co-manages the Women’s Oral History Project, which the law library launched in 2020. Addison has previously worked with the Alexandria Archaeology Museum, “Getting Word” at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, WTJU 91.1, the President’s Commission on the University during the Age of Segregation, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. She received her BA in Anthropology and French from the University of Virginia in 2020.