Modern Manuscripts

In 1964 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote to Professor Alexander M. Bickel of the Yale Law School, "...all my private papers pertaining to my work as an Associate Justice are eventually to go into your keeping for ultimate permanent deposit in the Harvard Law School." These papers became the nucleus of the Harvard Law Library's Modern Manuscript Collection.

This collection contains the papers of eminent nineteenth- and twentieth- century jurists, legal educators, and attorneys. Representative of the collection are the papers of Joseph Story, Simon Greenleaf, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, and Roscoe Pound, among others.

In addition to these personal papers, the collection also includes the records of important law cases and selected organizations, such as the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the New England Watch and Ward Society, the Ruhleben British Civilian Internment Camp, the Lotta Crabtree will case, and the records of the Wood Detective Agency. The Modern Manuscripts also include over 440 small collections of individual letters and documents of personal papers or records relating to legal matters. Most of these date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

To search the Modern Manuscripts Collection:

If you are interested in researching any of the Modern Manuscript collections, in addition to HOLLIS, you should consult the central access point for Harvard University’s archival and manuscript finding aids, OASIS. With OASIS, researchers may search finding aids from the Law School Library and across Harvard, view the full text of a finding aid, and seach by keyword within that finding aid.

Some of the Law School Library’s Manuscript collections have been digitized as part of the Library’s ongoing effort to preserve our collections and make them more accessible to scholars. These collections, which include parts of Harvard’s collection of Nuremberg Trials documents, are listed on our Online Collections page.

Early Manuscripts

The manuscripts in this collection comprise a wide variety of documents relating to the law, ranging in date from the late thirteenth to twentieth centuries. The collection includes lawyers' business records, lecture notes, student notebooks, commonplace books, accounts of trials, peerage claims, judges' opinions, docket books, precedents of pleading, and collections of writs.

To search the catalog records of the Early Manuscripts Collections, simply use Harvard University’s HOLLIS Catalog.