American Legal Histories — A Rare Book Exhibit

American Legal Histories
An exhibition of sources used by students of American Legal History, Spring 2025, 
led by Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law John Fabian Witt and Kathryn James

On view in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Level 3 & Lower Level 2
August 27, 2025 – January 16, 2026

American Legal Histories is an exhibit about legal historical research. In Spring 2025, students of the Yale Law School’s American Legal History course engaged with the Yale University historical collections, each week in class and over the semester in their final research papers. The exhibit highlights a document chosen by each student from their research in primary source collections, online and in person, from Yale and elsewhere. It also includes some of the documents shown in class each week, drawn from the Yale Law Library’s historical collections. The result: an exploration of the fragmentary images and items, preserved by individuals and institutions, through which a historical record is sustained. American Legal Histories celebrates the iterative, messy, tantalizing process of historical research, in catalog records and finding aids, online images, record groups, and photographs taken in the bad, dim light of special collections reading rooms.