Historical & Special Collections curates a major exhibit each year in the Law Library’s Caspersen Room on the fourth floor of Langdell Hall. Smaller exhibits also rotate in and out of the Caspersen Room bookcases and at the Areeda Hall entrance to the Library.
Current Exhibit
This exhibit highlights a selection of acquisitions by Historical & Special Collections staff over the past five years. The material on display comes from three curatorial divisions: rare books and early manuscripts, modern manuscripts, and art and visual materials, and features a variety of formats and languages.
Some of the featured items build on long-established collecting areas, such as Harvard Law School faculty papers and English crime broadsides. Others represent important collection milestones, such as the first entirely born-digital visuals collection. These acquisitions also demonstrate efforts to broaden the collection to include historically underrepresented individuals and communities, as well as materials that illustrate how the law treats marginalized people and how it can further marginalize them.
The exhibit is on view in the Caspersen Room, Harvard Law School Library, weekdays from 9am to 5pm from September 2024 – June 2025.
Explore From the Ephemeral to the Extraordinary online.
CURIOSity
Explore both new and migrated online exhibit content via Harvard Library’s CURIOSity platform.
Highlighted Exhibits
Explore CURIOSity exhibits curated by Historical & Special Collections
-
![Pulling the wooden law shield out of its case]()
Retiring the Harvard Law School Shield
Learn the history of the Harvard Law School’s first shield, from its complex and troubling origins to its retirement.
-
![Grid of 21 headshots of HLS affiliates who became US Supreme Court Justices between 1882 and 2017.]()
Collections | Connections: Stories from the Harvard Law School Library
Celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Harvard Law School by exploring how the Harvard Law School Library preserves the school’s history.
-
![A print of a lion and a unicorn with the text,]()
Ruhleben: A British Community in War-Time Germany
Learn about the community built at Ruhleben, Germany’s World War I civilian internment camp.
-
![Three-quarter length portrait of Charles Hamilton Houston by C. Gregory Stapko after a painting by Betsy Reyneau.]()
Charles Hamilton Houston and the Harvard Law School
This exhibit explores and celebrates Houston’s connection with Harvard Law School.
Exhibit Addenda (2015-2024)
Exhibit Addenda was a website that featured companion content for Historical & Special Collections’ physical exhibits, as well as online exhibits. It debuted in January 2015 and was retired in April 2024.
Select content from the Exhibit Addenda site was migrated to CURIOSity.
Looking for Historical & Special Collections exhibit content not available on CURIOSity? You can view past versions of the Exhibit Addenda site via Archive-It (a web archiving service built at the Internet Archive). The archived Exhibit Addenda site was collected by the Harvard University Archives, as part of their collection of “A-Sites: Archived Harvard Websites.”
The Exhibit Addenda site is also searchable via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Questions
Still not finding what you are looking for? Please contact specialc@law.harvard.edu with questions.