By Wanne Mendonck and Katharine Matthews
If you have visited the Law Library over the last week you may have come across our new display Letters of the Law, which will introduce you to the wide range of material we have in the Law Library collection; after all, and as this display will hopefully show, the law really does touch most areas of life.
By zooming in on a number of relevant topics for the time of year, the display will try to guide you through the daunting variety of Law Library holdings. It will highlight how our class-mark system works, and look at some locations within the Law Library you may not have known about. All the material chosen will have a link to upcoming or recent anniversaries and interesting or important moments from (legal) history. You can find the display near the ‘new journals’ shelves next to the soft seating on Level 2 as you come in (or ask at the desk).
There are large maps to show you where in the Library these items usually live and we will try to include items that will encourage you to explore all four floors.
If you missed last week’s display, a quick look back:
Photo by ash_crow’s shared under CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
Items from our collection at classmarks KM 201 (civil rights) and KA 65 (civil disobedience) were displayed for Martin Luther King Junior Day on the 15th January. This date is now a national holiday in the US. Information on the fight to get it recognised as a national holiday can be found on the National Museum of African American History & Culture here https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/15-year-battle-martin-luther-king-jr-day . More information on his legacy can be found on the King Center website here https://thekingcenter.org/ .
Letters of the Law also marked the anniversaries of the start of the trial of King Charles I, the launch of Wikipedia, and the adoption of the first Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. As the Law Library, we are obviously interested in constitutional histories, and if you are too, then remember we have Oxford Constitutions of the World available online (to OU members only) here https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma991025213908407026 .
This week’s classmark is KN172.73:
On 22 January 1973, the supreme court announced its decision in the landmark case of Roe v Wade, a decision still very much in the news due to its 2022 overturning. It will no doubt continue to be much discussed: related books will be found in the library at this shelfmark, and a selection is now on display, as is the text of the supreme court decision itself.
We also remember the adoption of the constitution of India in 1950 (26/01) by highlighting relevant material from our extensive collection on level 1 of the library, from commentaries by leading scholars to the collected writings of B. R. Ambedkar.
If you are looking for Australian legal materials (Australia day is on 26/01), monographs are integrated into our Moys classification scheme on Level 2, and we have a large collection of law reports on level 1. For primary sources there is also Westlaw AU (for OU members) and there is free site Austlii here https://www.austlii.edu.au/ ).
The Bodleian Law Library, in a separate display more centrally in the main reading room, will also mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, remembering the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime, as well as the millions of victims belonging to other groups subjected to Nazi persecution. See Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (hmd.org.uk)
