Beyond the Courtroom: Preserving 45 Years of Legal History
Beyond the Courtroom: Preserving 45 Years of Legal History
Image of files in a warehouse
Image of files in a warehouse
The Century Freeway case records fill 118 boxes.
The litigation ran from 1972 until Judge Pregerson's death in 2017. Those boxes are part of the collection from CLIPI that will be archived at UCLA Library Special Collections. Additional case collections went to University of California, Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego.
October is American Archives Month, an annual observance started by the Society of American Archivists to raise public awareness of why archives matter.
It's a good reminder of why we worked so hard to find these papers a home.
A court opinion tells you who won, but it doesn't tell you how. The briefs, motions, and other documents in a case file show the strategy, the arguments that were tried, and what it took to keep a case alive for years.
In the Century Freeway case, that was 45 years.
A lot of what we were doing was new. The files are a record of what worked and what didn't. Lessons like that only help if they last, and a teacher or researcher can take more from a case file than from the opinion alone.
A year ago this month, we celebrated the archive’s gift with many of the people who built CLIPI. It was given so that students, scholars, journalists, and advocates can learn from what we did.
The Century Freeway case records fill 118 boxes.
The litigation ran from 1972 until Judge Pregerson's death in 2017. Those boxes are part of the collection from CLIPI that will be archived at UCLA Library Special Collections. Additional case collections went to University of California, Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego.
October is American Archives Month, an annual observance started by the Society of American Archivists to raise public awareness of why archives matter.
It's a good reminder of why we worked so hard to find these papers a home.
A court opinion tells you who won, but it doesn't tell you how. The briefs, motions, and other documents in a case file show the strategy, the arguments that were tried, and what it took to keep a case alive for years.
In the Century Freeway case, that was 45 years.
A lot of what we were doing was new. The files are a record of what worked and what didn't. Lessons like that only help if they last, and a teacher or researcher can take more from a case file than from the opinion alone.
A year ago this month, we celebrated the archive’s gift with many of the people who built CLIPI. It was given so that students, scholars, journalists, and advocates can learn from what we did.
Category
News
Written by
Carlyle W. Hall Jr.
Co-Founder, CLIPI
Published
Category
News
Written by
Carlyle W. Hall Jr.
Co-Founder, CLIPI
Published
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