The Hampton L. Carson Collection Illustrative of the Growth of the Common Law

His other substantial collection, The Hampton L. Carson Collection Illustrative of the Growth of the Common Law compiled by Mr. Carson over a fifty-year period, covers the evolution of Common Law from its thirteenth century origins to the end of the nineteenth century. It is the largest collection of materials on the subject ever assembled by a single individual, and numbers over 19,000 items. It contains books, manuscripts, autograph letters, and portraits. In addition to copies of Magna Carta from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, copies of the Domesday Book and first editions of the legal treatises of Granville, Bracton, Fortescue, Littleton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone, it contains pamphlets, portraits of famous legal personages and places( including members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Lord Chancellors of England; Kings and Queens of England) famous prisons, and court houses of England. When Mr. Carson died on July 18, 1929, the collection of Pennsylvania materials was left to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the collection on Common Law was presented to The Free Library of Philadelphia “to be cared for, preserved and maintained for the use of legal and historical students…in perpetuity.”