Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

The Legal History and Rare Books (LH&RB) Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), in cooperation with Cengage Learning, announces the Ninth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.

The competition is designed to encourage scholarship and to acquaint students with the AALL and law librarianship, and is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Cengage Learning and up to $1,000 for expenses to attend this year's AALL Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Winning and runner-up entries will be invited to submit their entries to Unbound, the official journal of LH&RB. Past winning essays have gone on to be accepted by journals such as N.Y.U. Law Review, American Journal of Legal History, University of South Florida Law Review, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and French Historical Review.

The entry form and instructions are available at the LH&RB website: www.aallnet.org/sections/lhrb/awards. Entries must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., April 17, 2017 (EDT).

New acquisition: 1613 edition of Justinian's Institutes

The main focus of our collection is English and early American law books, but thanks to gifts by Professors Daniel R. Coquillette and Michael Hoeflich, we also have a strong collection of Roman law books. This new acquisition is a 1613 Venice edition of Justinian's Institutes, the synopsis of the Roman legal system that was designed to instruct law students. It's a key piece of the body of Roman law known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, organized and preserved by Emperor Justinian in the 6th century. 

This edition was edited and annotated by Silvestro Aldobrandini (1499 — 1558), a Florentine legal expert. It features red and black printing on the title page and woodcut initials throughout. As it typical in Roman law books, the original text is printed in the center, with the gloss (or commentary) and other annotations printed around it.