ENGL 4595: Literature and Law

• A Short History of Women's Property Rights in the United States

• Library of Congress Overview
• Excerpt from The Lily

• Emily F. Reiger, Womanly Properties: Possession and Redemption, 38 WOMEN'S RTS. L. REP. 1 (2016).
• Joseph A. Custer, The Three Waves of Married Women's Property Acts in the Nineteenth Century with a Focus on Mississippi, New York, and Oregon, 40 OHIO N.U. L. REV. 395 (2014).
• B. Zorina Khan, Married Women's Property Laws and Female Commercial Activity: Evidence from United States Patent Records, 1790-1895, 56 J. ECON. HIST. 356 (1996).
• Norma Basch, The Emerging Legal History of Women in the United States: Property, Divorce, and the Constitution, 12 SIGNS 97 (1986).

American Jurisprudence 2d (available through NexisUni)
An encyclopedia of United States law that provides quick and general information to answer simple legal questions and includes cross-references to relevant primary law. Legal encyclopedias are a good place to start research in an unfamiliar area of the law.

Credo Reference
An online reference library that provides access to over 500 highly-regarded, scholarly reference book sfor all subject areas. Credo Reference also has the tools to find sources for further research and to access thousands of images, charts, graphs and more.

• Married Women in Early America: Fight for Property Rights and Child Custody (1848)

HeinOnline Legal Classics
​Includes thousands of works from some of the greatest legal minds in history including Joseph Story, Jeremy Bentham, William Blackstone, William Holdsworth, Henry Maine, Federick William Maitland, Frederick Pollock, Benjamin N. Cardozo, and many more.

Library of Congress's Digital Collections
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts in its collections. Their website provides public access to over 300 digital collections.

• ​American Women: Resources from the Law Library