MUSEUM TO HOLD LEGAL TREASURES

The Law School faculty has decided to provide a room as a Law School Museum in the new addition to Langdell Hall, which is soon to be started, according to an announcement made by Dean Roscoe Pound Hon, '20. Historic legal documents, curios, relics, and paintings of great interest and value have been coming into the possession of the Law School for many years and these will form the basis of the collection, which will be unique in legal educational circles.

Letters written by all the Chief Justices of the United States from the time of John Marshall to the present are among the most valued documentary contents of the collection. Portraits of nearly all of the prominent Justices, past and present, procured in the course of the last few decades will be included in the museum.

The Law School has a number of portrait medals the most valued being one of Sir Francis Bacon. Another medal of interest is one given by Sir Edward Coke to a friend upon his own appointment as Attorney General to King James I of England. It was the Custom at that period to distribute such medals as a memorial of important events in the lives of great statesmen and judicial officers.

The most recent and one of the most prized gift is a calfskin safe deposit box, once the property of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, and containing various legal papers. Among the contents are a bank bill portrait of Chief Justice Shaw and a number of autographed letters of the great justice, including one to Governor Edward Everett, written in 1839, and indorsing John Knapp for election to a state office.

Gainsborough will be among the artists whose work finds a place in the Law School collection. His portrait of Sir Thomas Plummer was purchased by the Law School two weeks before his "Blue Boy" brought a price of $200,000 at an English sale.