Thursday, March 25, 2010

Professor Pepper Prepares for Class

Jordon Steele, the Archivist of the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has announced, on the Library’s blog, the opening of a collection on the course materials of George Wharton Pepper. As Mr. Steele explains:
Philadelphia scion George Wharton Pepper was an accomplished figure in American legal history. As a student at Penn, he helped found the Daily Pennsylvanian in 1888, the university's student-run newspaper. After studying the law under prominent Philadelphia attorney George Biddle, Pepper ran his own successful law practice in Old City. A first-rate legal mind, Pepper was a founding member of the American Law Institute (whose archives, coincidentally, are located at the Law School). Later, he also entered politics, and served as our United States Senator from 1922 to 1927. And, amidst all his professional achievements, he found time to teach at the Law School from 1893 to 1910.

I processed a small collection of papers from Insurance Law courses Pepper taught in the late 1890s. The collection includes Pepper's lecture notes, class hypotheticals, and a syllabus-referred to as a "synopsis"-from the 1897 term.
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