Tarlton Law Library has three exhibit spaces - in the atrium near the entrance to the library, near the reference desk on the main floor, and on the sixth floor in the Rare Books Reading Room.
Now on exhibit:
Rare Law Dictionaries at Tarlton Law Library
The Tarlton Law Library began to collect early law dictionaries systematically in 1988 to support the Oxford Law Dictionary Project at The University of Texas School of Law. After the project ended the collecting continued. The largest number of volumes entered the collection in October 2001, when the library acquired 21 dictionaries at the Birmingham Law Society auction in London, thanks to a generous gift from Joseph D. Jamail (UT Law Class of 1953).
The collection focuses on law dictionaries from Western Europe, the British Isles, and the Americas. Among the over 200 editions are Tarlton’s Millionth Volume – the first English law dictionary ever printed – John Rastell, Exposiciones terminorum legum anglorum (London, c. 1530), and the oldest book in the collection, Vocabularius utriusque juris (Strasbourg, 1476), and its Million-&-First Volume, Vocabularius utriusque juris (Basel, 1488). Even within such a seemingly narrow field there is wide variety in typography, format, and intended audience. Many of the most important printers in Europe are represented in the collection. These individuals and their workshops produced dictionaries in all sizes from tiny duodecimo pocket dictionaries to large folio editions, written for scholars, law students, practicing lawyers, and merchants and other lay persons. Although editors and compilers designed most of the dictionaries to be as comprehensive as possible at the time, some works are little more than glossaries. A few volumes in the collection are alphabetically ordered reference works rather than a sequence of words and their definitions.
Curated by Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Rare Books Librarian and Archivist
United States Patent Models, 1836-1880
The Department of Special Collections presents a new exhibit on patent models. Patent models saw their heyday between 1836 and 1870 – and that is the period from which most of the models in this collection date. Inevitably, inventors submitted models more rapidly than space could be found to house them. Despite devastating fires in 1836 and 1877, by 1880 the Patent Office had exceeded capacity and banned new models altogether – with the notable exceptions of flying machines and perpetual motion devices.
The first sale of the models took place in 1925, resulting in the dispersal of more than 100,000 models among institutions and private collectors. In 1941, one such collector – the auctioneer O. Rundle Gilbert – purchased tens of thousands of models at a bankruptcy auction, saving them from being melted as scrap. He in turn sold approximately 1000 of these to Jack R. Crosby and Fred Lieberman in the early 1970s. In 1973 Crosby and Lieberman donated more than 800 pieces from this collection to the then Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Faced with space constraints of its own, the Harry Ransom Center transferred the collection to the Texas Memorial Museum between 1981 and 1988.
The models now serve the University of Texas as tools for teaching, scholarly exploration, and inspiration, and as concrete examples of the School of Law’s commitment to intellectual property law.
Curated by Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Rare Books Librarian and Archivist.
The exhibits in and outside the Rare Books Reading Room showcase focused collections of material - currently a selection of Seldeniana, English legal documents from the Tudor period, and UT Law memorabilia.
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Previous exhibits:
Williston Fish's Last Will