Page 5 - NYLS Magazine • 2016 • Vol 35, No. 1

A CelebrAtion of Milestones
New York Law School has attained many milestones over its storied history. As the school celebrates its 125th Anniversary, it continues to mark milestones on its path forward. This past year alone, NYLS launched The Joe Plumeri Center for Social Justice and Economic Opportunity, forged a historic partnership with the Simon Business School of the University of Rochester, and introduced the new Innovation Center for Law and Technology.
The timing of the 125th Anniversary celebration seems auspicious, considering the many other significant anniversaries (legal and otherwise) being celebrated during the 2015–16 year. It also marks the 800-year anniversary of the Magna Carta; the 250-year anniversary of the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries; the 250-year anniversary of the 1765 Stamp Act; the 150-year anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House; the 150-year anniversary of the New York City Fire Department; the 125-year anniversary of Carnegie Hall; the 125-year anniversary of the Evarts Act, creating the Federal Circuit Courts; the 125-year anniversary of the invention of basketball; the 100-year anniversary of the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court and the 125-year anniversary of his famous Harvard Law Review article, “The Right to Privacy,” co-authored with Samuel Warren; the 50- year anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the 25-year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
One additional milestone recently celebrated at the Law School was the release of The Law Book: From Hammurabi to the International Criminal Court, 250 Milestones in the History of Law, authored by Associate Librarian and Professor of Legal Research Michael Roffer ’83. Covering nearly four thousand years of global legal history, the book highlights some of the most significant legal issues, cases, trials, and events that have profoundly changed our world. Fittingly, a number of milestones addressed in The Law Book bear direct connections to New York Law School through some of its many distinguished alumni and faculty. Some of those are included here.
The Law Book Highlights Columbia Professor Defects to
Establish NYLS
NYLS’s first Dean and Professor, George Chase, broke away with Theodore Dwight and other faculty from the Columbia College School of Law to found New York Law School in 1891. Among Chase’s many accomplishments was his publication in 1876 of The American Students’ Blackstone: Commentaries on the Laws of England
in Four Books, an abridged version of Blackstone’s Commentaries, used regularly as a text for teaching American law students. It was widely known as “Chase’s Blackstone.” The original Blackstone’s Commentaries, of which former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin wrote that, “in the history of American institutions,
no other book—except the Bible—has played so great a role,” is now celebrating its 250th anniversary and is one of the topics covered
in The Law Book. For many years, the Mendik Library has owned a 1938 reprint of Chase’s Blackstone. In early 2015, the Yale Law Library sponsored an exhibition titled, 250 Years of Blackstone’s Commentaries. Among the objects comprising the exhibition was the first student edition of Blackstone, published in 1876, as well as a copy of the 1938 reprint. Yale’s copy bears the 1948 annotations of a New York Law School student, Richard W. Reynolds. The accompanying image of an annotated page from the Yale copy appears in Yale’s exhibition catalog.
Magna Carta of the Labor Movement
A number of the other milestones covered in The Law Book relate to significant statutes enacted over the years. One of
the Law School’s most prominent alums, Robert F. Wagner, Class of 1900, is perhaps best known for the statute that bears his name—the Wagner Act. Officially titled the National Labor Relations Act, this cornerstone piece of New Deal legislation enacted in 1935 granted employees the right to unionize and bargain collectively,
paving the way for decades of worker protections and earning the sobriquet “Magna Carta of the labor movement.”
Robert F. Wagner, Class of 1900
An annotated page from 1948 NYLS student Richard Reynolds’s copy of Chase’s Blackstone.
fEATURES 3