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Recording a horrific history
The documents are chillingly frank. Faded with time, too fragile to touch, the photographs, papers, and reports tell of atrocities committed with a calculated, unspeakable precision. The record...
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Guides to the gallows
On Nov. 30, 1824, a London banker named Henry Fauntleroy was hanged in public outside Newgate Prison, one month after being sentenced to death for embezzlement. There were 100,000 onlookers. Many of...
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Evidence of greatness
In the entrance to Harvard Law School’s Langdell Hall is a marble statue of long-ago professor Joseph Story, who is reputed to have saved legal studies at the University from an early demise. Only one...
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Holmes’ suite home
On the first Sunday in March of 1931, about 500 people gathered in Langdell Hall at Harvard Law School to listen to a CBS Radio broadcast by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the...
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The rote notes of early U.S. law
In 1812, a Connecticut law student named Samuel Cheever summarized a lecture on “Baron and Feme,” which were the legal terms for husband and wife. Toward the top, in Cheever’s slanted script, is a...
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Old Harvard, old France, old crime
The Harvard Law School Library is a launching point for well-trained modern lawyers, but it is also a time machine. Scholars or the merely curious are free to climb into the library’s Historical and...
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Complicated legacy
For centuries Magna Carta, or “The Great Charter,” has been held up as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy. It was signed, or more accurately sealed, by England’s King John on June 15, 1215,...
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Guarding the dazzle of the past
Inside the four-story, glass-and-concrete building near Harvard Square, past busy coffee shops and restaurants, Harvard social clubs, and a flower store, women and men in white ministered to rare...
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German doctors killed Anna Weiss as part of a Nazi euthanasia program directed at individuals they classified as disabled. The woman’s so-called disability, as recorded in trial documents: being an...
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Panel discusses the rulings that took the most effort, biggest toll
It’s uncommon for judges to speak publicly about their hardest cases, the ones that tested their impartiality and independence and exerted an emotional toll. In the new book “Tough Cases,” 13 trial...
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