Legal Classics

Every presidential election matters. But the election of 1876 had repercussions that still reverberate today. Barely a decade after the end of the American Civil War, the country was in a precarious state. Outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant’s time in the White House had been marred by rampant scandal and corruption.[1] The economy groaned under an ongoing worldwide financial crisis, known as the Panic of 1873.

Barbenheimer defined Summer 2023 and even the HeinOnline Blog couldn’t escape the movie event of the year. We gave Barbie the HeinOnline treatment last month, and so this month it’s Oppenheimer’s turn, with a special focus on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing in 1954.

By now you probably know that HeinOnline contains thousands of multidisciplinary periodicals, essential government documents, international resources, and case law. But did you know it also contains tens of thousands of classic treatises and rare books that can be found in only a handful of libraries around the world? These gems can be found in HeinOnline’s Legal Classics library and are filled with works from some of the greatest minds in history. Let’s explore this underestimated database.

We’re excited to announce the release of our newest database in HeinOnline: the Law Academy Project. Compiled by editor Dr. Joel Fishman, this is a comprehensive collection of works exploring the history of the Law Academy of Philadelphia, one of the first law schools in the United States. The Law Academy Project is now available to all subscribers of HeinOnline’s Legal Classics database, and it can be accessed as a subcollection of Legal Classics and from the HeinOnline Welcome page as its own database.

The twentieth century had just begun, but the press would quickly christen the bombing of the Times building the “crime of the century.” To understand how a bomb came to be in Ink Alley that October night, one must step back to examine the bloody and brutal history of America’s labor movement.

A scabby, itchy pustule that left behind a permanent scar on the outside of the upper arm—as the main side effect of the smallpox vaccine, this scar was often used as a “vaccination passport,” proving inoculation for millions of Americans in the wake of vaccination mandates at the turn of the 20th century, when the highly contagious smallpox disease pummeled through communities. By 1980, the World Health Organization declared that this often-deadly virus which had been circulating the world for over 3,000 years had been eradicated.

Most would agree that the future of the human race depends on the capability of its offspring. At the turn of the 20th century, with the rise of the eugenics movement, this premise was taken to a logical yet dismal conclusion: the human race could be improved if only the genetically superior were allowed to reproduce.

Fun fact! At the start of each new year, thousands of U.S. copyrights expire. As we all rang in 2021 a couple of weeks ago, every single work published in 1925 subsequently entered the public domain—most notably, perhaps, the acclaimed classic The Great Gatsby.