Special Collections

With nearly two thousand linear feet of manuscripts, over two hundred thousand rare books, and more than seventy thousand visual images—photographs, prints, paintings, and objects—the Special Collections Department houses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of research materials for the study of legal history. Its chief mission is to acquire, catalog, preserve, and make available to researchers materials that document the history of the law in general and of Anglo-American law in particular.

The Department serves the research needs of the Harvard Law School community, the Harvard University community, and the scholarly world at large. Although the Department was first organized as an administrative unit in 1985, the history of the collecting of historical legal materials at the Harvard Law School Library dates to the founding of the Law School in 1817.