Library Exhibit Celebrates Yale Law School Bicentennial
In honor of Yale Law School’s 200th anniversary, the Lillian Goldman Law Library is highlighting some of the School’s most historically significant artifacts.
'One Sound, Tested Method': Yale Law School at 200, curated and designed by Rare Book Librarian Kathryn James, will run through Jan. 13, 2025 in the Rare Book exhibition gallery.
“Drawing on the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s historical collections, the exhibit traces the characteristics discernible in the Yale Law School even at its outset: a small community of faculty and students and its library, situated within the communities of practice of New Haven, Connecticut, and an emergent American legal profession,” James writes in the booklet accompanying the exhibition.
Some highlights from the exhibit include a photo of Arthur Corbin, Class of 1899, during the Yale Law Journal-Faculty baseball game in the early 1940s, early drawings of the stained glass that would come to adorn the Sterling Law Building, and a letter from then-presidential nominee Bill Clinton ’73 detailing his first encounter with Hillary Rodham ’73 at the Law Library, which read, in part, “I was outside looking in. Hillary was inside and walked outside.”
Other notable items in the exhibit are newspaper clippings highlighting trailblazing alumni such as Alice Rufie Jordan Blake, Class of 1886, and Warner T. McGuinn, Class of 1887. Blake was the Law School’s first female graduate and McGuinn became a civil rights pioneer and the one degree of separation between Mark Twain and Thurgood Marshall.
The exhibit also includes the only extant copy of the earliest version of the Bluebook. In 1920, after serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal, Karl Llewellyn, from the Law School class of 1920, published The Writing of a Case Note, a precursor of the Bluebook.
“The short pamphlet, in its blue cover, addresses itself to an inexperienced editor, leading them through a ‘method of investigation’ of legal cases,” James writes. “Read twice, Llewellyn warns: look at multiple sources; never take an author at their word.”
James writes that Llewellyn and the earlier founders of Yale Law School felt that students had to know how to read as lawyers above all. “Beyond all that,” Llewellyn wrote, “all that can be said of the following is: that it is one sound, tested method of reaching the result desired, which will serve to help a man to construct an approach of his own.”
The Rare Book exhibition gallery is located in the Law Library’s Reference Room, which is adjacent to the main reading room. For more information on the Lillian Goldman Law Library, visit the Library’s website.
