Display of Early Italian Statutes Celebrates Former Law Dean

It was 50 years ago that Judge Guido Calabresi graduated from the Yale Law School (YLS), where he later served as dean. To mark that anniversary, the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale recently acquired a significant collection of early Italian law books that date back much further than 50 years.

The 60 books, obtained from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in September, are now part of the library’s extensive collection of Italian statutes dating from the 14th to 20th centuries.

An exhibition about the collection, titled “The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library,” is now on view in the Lillian Goldman Law Library. The exhibition, which is dedicated to Calabresi, debuted during the YLS’s Alumni Weekend 2008.

Calabresi was born in Milan, Italy, and graduated at the top of the YLS Class of 1958. He joined the YLS faculty in 1959 and served as dean from 1985 to 1994, when he was appointed judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by another YLS alumnus, President Bill Clinton ‘73 J.D. Calabresi is now the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.

The Law Library’s collection of Italian statutes is likely the largest collection of its kind in the United States, according to Michael Widener, rare book librarian. It began in 1946 when the library acquired a private collection of 750 volumes. Today, it contains more than 900 volumes of printed books and 60 manuscripts from over 380 municipalities — including large and powerful cities such as Venice and Milan, and small towns such as Pesaro and Montebuono. In their mixing of Roman law, local law and pragmatic innovations, the Italian municipal statutes became the prototype of European civil law.

The “Early Italian Statutes” exhibition will be on display in the Law Library’s new state-of-the-art Rare Books Exhibition Gallery through February 2009. The gallery is located on the lower level (L2) of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (127 Wall St.), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room.

The exhibition was jointly curated by Widener and Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, a doctoral candidate in medieval history at Stanford University.

Those who cannot visit the exhibition in person can make a virtual tour on the Law Library Rare Books Blog: http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks/archive/tags/Early+Italian+Statutes+exhibit/default.aspx.