Harvard Law School Library┋Special Collections

With nearly 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts, approximately 200,000 rare books, and more than 70,000 paintings, prints, photographs, and other visual materials, the Special Collections Department of the Harvard Law School houses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of research materials for the study of the history of the law in general and of Anglo-American law in particular. Particularly noteworthy are its virtually complete collections of English and American statute books, case reporters, and legal treatises; more than 10,000 volumes, spanning the last five centuries, of the accounts of civil and criminal trials; extensive holdings of the papers of Joseph Story; Simon Greenleaf; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; Louis Brandeis; Felix Frankfurter; Roscoe Pound and other jurists and legal educators; and important manuscript collections relating to such organizations and events as the New England Watch and Ward Society, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, and the Alger Hiss case. The legal art collection, by far the best anywhere of its type, has portrait and photographich images of lawyers and judges as well as of famous trials, and legal controversies.