As part of its holdings of legal art and visual materials, the
Harvard Law School Library owns a collection of over 4000
portrait images of lawyers, jurists, political figures, and
legal thinkers dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth
century. Although most of these prints, drawings, and
photographs depict legal figures prominent in the Common Law, a
significant number portray jurists and legal educators
associated with the Canon and Civil Law traditions. The
collection is particularly strong in images of eighteenth and
nineteenth century British and American lawyers, ranging from
such well known historical figures as William Blackstone, Jeremy
Bentham, John Marshall, and Joseph Story to many lesser known
jurists and legal educators. The collection also contains images
of many graduates of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School.
Librarian Eldon R. James and Dean Roscoe Pound began the
collection in the first quarter of the twentieth century as an
adjunct to the School's "basic collection" of pa