Date/Time
Date(s) - 11 Mar 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Workshop in the History of Material Texts this Monday, March 11, 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
This week, we welcome frequent seminar attendee Mitch Fraas (Penn Libraries), whose talk is entitled “Printing for Emphasis: The Legal Brief in the Anglo-American World 1600-Present.” Mitch writes:
“Most scholars and even legal historians think of legal printing as being primarily concerned with published case reports and records of judicial opinion, the volumes that yield those familiar case citations. However, printing and legal practice have long been much more closely intertwined. The day-to-day business of common law courts and indeed any court consumes reams upon reams of paper even today in the electronic age. This has been true for several centuries as lawyers, judges, sheriffs, and clerks all required countless forms, bills, writs, and briefs in order to ensure the machinery of the law kept moving.
“This presentation examines the complicated world of Anglo-American legal printing primarily through the lens of one of these forms, the legal brief. To this day in the U.S. and many other countries lawyers submit printed copies of their arguments to appellate courts in advance of a formal hearing. These briefs, once primarily distributed in manuscript, underwent a long, gradual, and incomplete shift to print from the 17th to 19th centuries. Occupying a middle ground between ephemeral job printing and literary production, these briefs range in length from single sheets to short pamphlets to large works of hundreds of pages, and were usually printed in batches of only a handful meant for circulation to those judges and lawyers concerned in a case. Though rarely seen by the public, the history of these little-discussed printed texts can help to map attitudes towards print, manuscript, and the proper manifestation of authority across the English speaking world.”
Mitch Fraas is the Bollinger Fellow for Library Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. At Penn, Mitch works on a variety of projects cutting across general and special collections, with a special focus on digital humanities. He holds doctoral and masters degrees in history from Duke University. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition to the history of law and imperialism, he takes an active interest in cartography, the history of printing and the book, the digital humanities, as well as the future of scholarly publishing and copyright.