California Legal History Manuscripts in the Huntington Library A Guide

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The Huntington Library houses a wealth of material pertaining to legal history. The collections that deal with California law are predominantly from the nineteenth century and involve real estate, agriculture, and industries such as mining, oil, and commerce. For the lawyer of the period, these areas of activity generated a large property and contract law practice. Manuscripts relating to property law involve the acquisition, development, use, and transfer of real estate. Contract law documents in the collections pertain to the transactions of a dynamic era of entrepreneurialism in the nineteenth century. This guide provides access to the collections for scholars and attorneys researching California legal, social, and business history. Compiled by Gordon Bakken, under the direction of the Committee on History of Law in California of the State Bar of California, the guide has been published with the generous support of various foundations, law firms, and attorneys. It will encourage research in legal history and facilitate a deeper understanding of the development of American law. The guide has two main parts, each supporting a very different approach to historical research. The Subject Access Guide is essentially a subject index to relevant manuscript materials at the Huntington. The objective is to lead researchers to individual documents and to sets of documents by their subject. Using subject headings familiar to most attorneys, historians, and other researchers, the guide identifies the type of material, subject matter, and date as well as the location of manuscript sources. The second part of the guide is a description of collections of interest to legal historians. That part assesses the significance of each collection for research purposes.