From the Archives

by Melissa Backes and Cynthia Arkin
Biddle Law Library
University of Pennsylvania

Greetings from the ALI Archives! This is the first installment of what we hope will be a regular column describing the resources and uses of the ALI Archives at the Biddle Law Library.

Since the Institute’s inception, many of its members, Directors, Presidents, and Reporters have had close ties to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Lewis, Goodrich, Pepper, Mikell, Bohlen, Schwartz, Segal, Hazard, Reitz, Burbank, and Mooney are just a few of the names that grace the rosters of both institutions. The ALI was once housed in the Penn Law School and the two are now just a few blocks apart. That is one of the reasons why it was so fitting when the Penn Law School and the ALI agreed to collaborate in establishing the ALI Archives at the Biddle Law Library.

In June of 1994, 386 metal file-cabinet drawers and approximately 120 large cardboard cartons were transferred from the ALI storage facility to the top floor of the Biddle Law Library’s closed stacks, where four rows of shelving units had been removed to create a work space for the project. The filing cabinets were old, corroded, and rusty. Many were bent and difficult to open. We spent weeks moving the contents of the drawers and cartons into archival boxes. Once the archival boxes were on the shelves, the real work on the project began.

We went through every box numerous times: first to remove excess copies, then to unfold and uncrease, clean off the dirt, dust, and mold, and remove metal clips and staples from our precious cargo. The documents were transferred into acid-free folders while we made preliminary inventories. Once the inventories were complete, we could organize the material within the boxes by subject or project, and, within the folders, alphabetically or chronologically. With organization came vastly greater possibilities for access. We designed a database that would help us turn this enormous inventory into a whip-smart finding aid. At the end of this first phase of the project the ALI Archives contained 630 archival boxes of material that richly documented 75 years of the Institute’s history and drafting. The ALI Archives at the Biddle Law Library were then ready to open for research.

Once everything had been organized and cataloged, the immense research value of the collection was unmistakable. Researchers came from England, Germany, Japan, even Texas! They were delighted by the opportunity to read correspondence, notes, meeting minutes, comments, and annotated drafts created by the drafters of the Restatements, the UCC, the Model Codes, and the Tax Projects. Some were doctoral candidates writing dissertations on subjects like the history of human-rights law. Most were law professors writing journal articles or book chapters on topics like the history of the UCC, early Business Associations, or the Restatement of Contracts. Many were practicing lawyers who telephoned, in the middle of cases, to ask frantic questions like “when and why was the phrase ‘subject to the control of the court’ added to § 46, Comment h, of the Restatement Second of Torts?” All were extremely grateful for the existence of the ALI Archives.

Meanwhile, the collection continues to grow. When we finished with the first part in 1998, the finding aid listed only two Restatements, and the bulk of the UCC papers went no further than 1958. Now we have material on Restatement Third and UCC revisions into the 1990s, and the value of the collection to researchers has been greatly enhanced by the establishment of the NCCUSL Archives at Biddle (one-stop shopping for all of your uniform-law research needs). In the future, we look forward to creating a more advanced web version of our database finding aid and, of course, continuing to process and catalog new additions to the Archives while providing reference and research assistance to scholars from around the world.

If you have any questions for or about the ALI Archives, please call the Archivist, Melissa Backes, at (215) 898-5011, or the Director of Special Collections, Cynthia Arkin, at (215) 898-7418.