Rare Books Collection

The Rare Book collection at the College of Law contains more than 10,000 volumes dating from the sixteenth through the twentieth century in a range of areas from the Anglo-American tradition to renaissance Europe to pre-Communist China. The law collection is particularly strong in United States and British law and, appropriately, one of the few in America with a comprehensive run of Blackstone’s Commentaries.

The nation’s foremost expert on legal rare books has said of the Rare Book collection at the College of Law that it easily ranks among the top ten in the country. This is due not only to the impressive breadth and depth of the collection, but also the inclusion of many items found only at the Jenner Law Library. From the handwritten diaries and case notes of nineteenth century jurists to practitioner marginalia in 18th century reporters to the many examples of “ephemera” in the form of sensational cases involving murder and treason, sold as true crime thrillers of the day, the collection is, by any measure, extraordinary.