The Widener Law Delaware Law Library will be closed this weekend for Memorial Day. We’ll reopen Tuesday May 26th. See our website for more information about library hours.
The number one question I’ve been getting since the website redesign is “where did the old exams go?” The exam archive couldn’t stay on the new website so we’ve moved it to TWEN. Once you’ve logged on to TWEN, go to “Add Course” and add yourself to the course called “Exam Archive – Delaware Law Library.”
Not all faculty member give us exams, so if you don’t see the exam you’re looking for check with your professor. Many of them are now posting old exams on their own course pages.
The Widener Law Delaware campus law library is now on exam hours. We will be open until 2:00 a.m. every night through May 13th. For a complete listing of hours see our webpage.
Celebrate National Library Week at the Law LibraryApril 13—April 17
With Free PB&J!
11:30am—3:30pm
You just have to make the sandwich yourself!
Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg are offering advanced training classes to prepare students for summer jobs & practice.
Here’s the schedule:
The law library will be on shorter hours this week for spring break. Our hours will be:
February 27 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
February 28 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
March 1 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
March 2 – 5 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
March 6 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
March 7 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
March 8 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Access to the library catalog, some library databases (Lexis and Westlaw will not be affected) and ILLiad will be unavailable for 2-3 hours beginning at 11:00 A.M. on Monday, February 9th. Partial service disruptions may occur afterwards for the remainder of the day. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Just a few of the nearly 500 people arrested on one Sunday in 1941 for breaking Delaware’s blue laws, pose for a photo at the Wilmington police station.
I’ve previously posted about the blue laws, or Sunday closing laws, of Delaware. Originally passed in 1795, Delaware’s strict blue laws, prohibiting “any worldly employment, labor or business” on Sunday were still in effect in the first half of the 20th century, although they were rarely enforced. In 1911, Delaware’s blue laws made the news when Arden residents, including the writer Sinclair Lewis, were arrested for playing baseball and tennis on Sunday. There were calls for reform of the blue laws, but the Delaware General Assembly couldn’t agree to pass a bill repealing them. In 1941, a crusading attorney general named James R. Morford declared war on the state’s blue laws.
James R. Morford, Attorney General of Delaware from 1938 to 1943
James R. Morford was elected Delaware’s attorney general in 1938, fresh from a stint as Wilmington’s city solicitor. While city solicitor, he was part of a successful campaign to clean up corruption in the Wilmington police department. Morford strongly felt that having laws on the books that were only occasionally enforced, caused disrespect for the law and contributed to corruption of public officials. Frustrated by the General Assembly’s failure to enact reforms, he threatened to begin enforcing the blue laws strictly. In 1939, he asked the State Police to conduct a survey of the number of people breaking the blue laws, but no actual arrests were made. In 1940 he made a speech strongly stating his opposition to any laws that were not uniformly enforced, including the blue laws.
We have thereby created uncertainty as to what an honest citizen may or may not do, but we have created a situation where he may do an act one day and be apparently a law abiding citizen while the same act next day may subject him to arrest… But the worse feature is that by substituting the discretion of a man for the mandate of the law we have gone far to destroy respect for all law and have opened a door for graft and corruption in public office.
In 1941, when the Delaware General Assembly once again failed to pass a proposed bill reforming the blue laws, Morford decided to force them into action. Delaware papers carried the news that starting on Sunday, March 2nd, the blue laws would be strictly enforced. State and local police forces received orders from the Attorney General to arrest everyone found violating the law. All over the state police arrested taxi drivers, bus drivers, newspaper vendors, restaurant workers, gas station attendants, even the general manager of WDEL radio. Around 500 arrests were made that Sunday, swamping police stations and the courts.
Lena Blatman, owner of a Wilmington bakery, at the police station after being arrested for violating the blue laws.
Morford’s ploy worked, as the General Assembly finally passed a reformed blue laws bill on Friday, March 7th (it was approved by the governor on the 14th), narrowly avoiding another Sunday crackdown. State prosecutors dropped all of the pending cases against blue law violators.
Photos from the Delaware Public Archives. There are more photos of people arrested on March 2nd at the Delaware Public Archives digital collections page.
The Widener Law Library on the Delaware campus will be open Sunday, January 18th from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. On Monday the 19th, we will be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
For more library hours information see our webpage.
The Delaware campus law library will be closed for winter break from December 24th through January 4th. We will reopen Monday, January 5th. Enjoy the holidays!
For more information about library hours see our webpage.
The Delaware campus law library is now on exam hours. We will be open until 2 a.m. every night through December 18th. Good luck with your exams!
The Power of the Law by Edwin Blashfield, frontispiece of the original edition of The Story of Law.
The modern Delaware Bar exam has a reputation as one of the toughest in the nation. But today’s bar candidates can at least be thankful they no longer have to read The Story of Law by John Maxcy Zane. From 1931 to around 1970, those wishing to be admitted to the bar had to first register as a law student and were required to read and pass an oral examination on The Story of Law, a survey of the history of Western law originally published in 1927. The Delaware State Bar Association’s official history claims it was “for many members of the Bar, … a horrible experience they have never forgotten.” In 1963 13% of candidates failed their examination on Zane.
In a 1987 article in The Delaware Lawyer, attorney William Prickett (whose father, William Prickett, Sr., was a member of the Delaware Board of Bar Examiners) called The Story of Law “that truly awful book.” He recalled his father’s explanation for the Board’s continued use of the book: first, the members of the Board were already familiar with Zane and didn’t want to spend the time to learn a new book well enough to conduct the exam, and second, many aspects of legal practice are tedious, so reading and understanding Zane was a good test of a lawyer’s ability to learn tedious and dull material.
The Story of Law does have its admirers. A review in the Pennsylvania Law Review called it “… a source of delight from cover to cover.” It was republished in a second edition by the Liberty Fund in 1998 with a new introduction and illustrations. The introduction to the new edition describes it as “… a learned and highly readable account of the shaping of Western law from the Neolithic age to the dawn of the twentieth century.”
If you would like to judge Zane for yourself, you can read the new edition online at the Liberty Fund website. Widener Law Library has a copy of the new edition available for borrowing. The first edition is in our special collections and can’t be borrowed but you can view it on HeinOnline.
Sources:
Kinnane, Charles H., The Story of Law by John M. Zane, 78 U. Pa. L. Rev. 89.
Murphy, Earl Finbar, The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective by Carl Joachim Friedrich; The Story of the Law and the Men Who Made It-From the Earliest Times to the Present by René A. Wormser; Legal History, Law and Social Change by Frederick G. Kempin, 8 Am. J. Legal Hist. 89.
Prickett, William, Flunking the Bar, 6 Del. Law. 34 (Summer 1987)
Siebold, Dennis J. Admission to the Bar in The Delaware Bar in the Twentieth Century (Delaware State Bar Association, 1994)
Zane, John Maxcy, The Story of Law (Liberty Fund, 2nd ed. 1998)
Thanksgiving is coming up. The Delaware campus Widener Law Library will be closed on Thanksgiving and on shorter hours Thanksgiving weekend.
For more information on library hours see our webpage.
List of acceptable gold and silver coins for paying a tax levied in Delaware, 1781.
In 1781 the state of Delaware passed a law (2 Del. Laws ch. 71) calling for an assessment to pay the debt from the American Revolution. Part of the taxes had to be paid in gold or silver coins, or in new banknotes. The act listed which coins were acceptable for paying the tax, including the Brazilian johannes (commonly called a Joe), the English or French Guinea, the moidore (also minted in Brazil), Spanish pieces of eight, and the Arabian chequin. You could not pay in German coins (probably because they were notoriously debased.)
More information on early coins in America:
Here is the list of all new books received in the law library in October 2014.