- Object type: Document
- Formal Title: Day's Reports
- Creator: The Banks Law Publishing Co.
- Date Created: 1904
- Origin: New York
- Current Location: Los Angeles, California
The spine of Thomas Day's legal legacy, Day's Reports shows beautiful wear and tear, phenomenal stitch work and cracked leather binding. All signs of a dying era when law students relied on the printed law report to plunge in and whittle away in the ecstasy of delicious cases after delicious case.
This particular volume made its way, with its own legal citation to distinguish it in the jungle of law reports (Day), likely after publication in New York and in some form of ground or ship transportation, to Los Angeles where it was discovered and photographed at the law library of USC in Los Angeles on November 5, 2010 at 3 p.m., all with the support and permission of the law librarian.
Imagine the fingers of the various law students, professors or law and lawyers alike that handled and read this one volume; the trips in bags to home for night study; the usages in some many law classes when professors would enter with armfuls of law books all marked with pieces of paper sticking out from all ends. This one, put together by Day (1777–1855), who attended the first law school opened in the United States: Litchfield Law School, Litchfield, Connecticut (opened in 1773, the school closed in 1833).
But mostly this volume of legal knowledge, like so many others, sat - and sits - on constant sentry duty in a law library watching over student body after student body, the one succeeding the other, as faces came and went, some close by some far, some looking and even, once in a while, a fleeting hand on this spine pulling it out to catch its wisdom. This, even as the student went from ink-wells and candles to Ipods and Facebook.
So may of these volumes now collect dust but still hold silent vigil over the lawyers of the future in the law schools of the land.
The era of the hard copy, printed law report comes to an abrupt end in the information tsunami of the Internet but, still, we revere from whence we came. Perhaps only the older attorneys of those amongst us, we can see the beauty and power of the law report as it once was.
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