- Social Law Library
The Social Law Library, founded in 1804, is the one of the oldest
law libraries in theUnited States . It is located in theJohn Adams Courthouse at Pemberton Square inBoston, Massachusetts , the same building which houses theMassachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and theMassachusetts Appeals Court .The history of the library is very much bound up in the history of the Supreme Judicial Court itself. Many of the proprietors of the library were chief justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, including
Theophilus Parsons ,Lemuel Shaw ,Horace Gray , andOliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. . The library was also caught up in the debates between the Federalists, who wanted to see thecommon law (based onEnglish law ) received into the newly formed United States, and the Jeffersonians, who preferred to have a civil law-based system similar to theNapoleonic Code . The Federalists, who were prominent in Boston and integral to the library's founding, began importing English law books for local lawyers to use. The Supreme Judicial Court, needing a law library for their own use, permitted the library to be moved into the Court's offices in exchange for access to its many volumes. Meanwhile, theMassachusetts General Court (the state legislature of Massachusetts) established the office ofReporter of Decisions , which was the first office of its kind at the state level in the United States. This turn of events allowed the public greater access to the decisions of the courts of Massachusetts, and in turn popularized the common law legal system in the United States.Today, many lawyers in the Boston area use the library for
legal research . Members pay a yearly fee for the privilege of being admitted to the library and using its facilities, with the exception of state, court or non-profit legal services organizations members. The library has over 450,000 volumes of printed materials, most of which can be searched using an online catalog accessible via the library's web site.External links
* [http://www.socialaw.com/ Official homepage of the Social Law Library]
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