2018 Rare Books Lecture - 25.10.18

The 2018 Rare Books Lecture was held on Thursday 25 Oct 2018 presented by Associate Professor Ann Genovese on the topic "Vulnerable Law Sources, and How to Take Care of Them".

Event synopsis

The description of legal books as ‘rare’ invokes a sense of romance: the preservation of fragments of previous centuries, in specialist archives and libraries, awaiting discovery by the assiduous scholar. My work concerns telling Australian law stories of the
past 60 years, and my archival adventures have been far less romantic, but raise urgent problems. In a time of open access the notes, books, documents, records, court files, and transcripts created closest to our own time should exist in robust proliferation, and enable myriad stories to be told about developments in our law and public life. The reality is that they might be better described as
precarious, or vulnerable.

Photo: Letters (2015) copyright Bess Meredith; image used with permission of the artist.