A Day at the Archives
by Robert Shindle

On Thursday, August 2, the staff of the UB Law Library spent a development day in Langsdale’s Special Collections Department. They were happy to decamp here while the carpet in the Law Library was being replaced.

WHERE’S WILL? The Law Library Staff prepares to delve into Law School history - minus their director who had left briefly to supervise re-carpeting of the Law Library.

Tom Hollowak, director of Special Collections, agreed to host a day of education and activities for the Law Library staff including:

• an overview of the mission, organization and procedures of Special Collections
• processing unprocessed archival material related to the Law School
• a scavenger hunt for prints hanging on campus (to help inventory the collection)

For some staff members it was a reunion with a workplace they departed more than 25 years ago.  From 1966 to 1981 the Law Library occupied Langsdale’s fourth floor, space now occupied by the Special Collections Department. Although the Law Library crossed Maryland Avenue to its new home in 1981, the two libraries have continued to cooperate in many ways. 

The School of Law's files processed by the Library staff consist of Series XI of the University of Baltimore Collection. After the overview, the staff dived into boxes of unprocessed law School documents ranging from catalogs, schedules of classes, faculty meeting minutes, to awards and plaques. Under the guidance of Hollowak and Robert Shindle, all of the backlog files were arranged in acid free folders and boxes, and described for future access.

Judge Giles S. Rich [photo: Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 1999]

Judge Giles S. Rich Paper

The most prominent law-related holding in the Special Collections Department is the Design Protection Legislation Papers of Judge Giles Sutherland Rich. The collection was deposited by Professor William Fryer, III in 2003.

Active in patent law for 70 years, and both a drafter and interpreter of the post-war patent statute, Judge Rich is sometimes said to have been the principal architect of modern American patent law. He was born May 30, 1904 in Rochester, New York and received his law degree from Columbia University in 1929. Practicing patent law in his family’s New York City firm, he became a recognized authority on this body of law and was appointed to draft a new federal patent statute after World War II. The law (35 U.S.C.) was introduced in Congress in 1951,  signed into law by President Truman in 1952, and became the law of the land a year after that. 

Judge Rich was nominated by President Eisenhower to the U.S. Court of Customs & Patent Appeals in 1956, served on that court for 25 years and authored A Brief History of the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals.  His court was merged with the appellate Court of Claims in 1982 creating the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on which Judge Rich served another 17 years.  He never retired from the bench and was at his death on June 15 1999, the oldest living federal judge. 

The Design Protection Legislation papers relate to an effort in the late 1980’ in which Judge Rich headed a Committee of the Bar concerned with streamlining design protection law. According to Fryer, “The legislation was extensively debated in Congress, essentially based on his committee’s work.” Judge Rich testified before a senate committee in 1987 that, “The main purpose of the bills before you is to create a more equitable, practical and workable law for the protection of ornamental designs than the inequitable conglomerate we now have, namely, inadequate patents, overprotective copyright and a great middle ground still inadequately provided for.”¹

Though the proposed legislation was not passed, Fryer states that “The issues continue to be of major importance in the U.S. and internationally.”

These papers, which came to UB four years after Judge Rich’s death, have been unprocessed and unavailable to researchers during the ensuing four years.  Pat Behles began processing the collection as part of the "Law Library Day" at the archives, and will complete the project during the fall semester. After arranging, re-foldering, and re-boxing the papers she will create a finding aid that will appear on the department’s  archives.ubalt.edu website. 

1. The Industrial Innovation and Technology Act: Hearings on S. 791 Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. 100th Congress, 1st Session 22 (1987)