(Extracts from speech by the Honorable Robert M. Bell, Chief Judge, Maryland Court of Appeals & Chairman, Maryland Hall of Records Commission, at the Court and Legal History Network Affinity Luncheon at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for State and Local History, Baltimore, Maryland, October 2, 1999) [For the full text, see http://mdsa.net/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/011600/011654/html/msa11654.html] 

Some recent publications by working judges in Maryland, such as Jim Schneider's A Century of Striving For Justice, The Maryland State Bar Association, 1896-1996 (1996), and Judge John Carroll Byrnes' edition of Histories of the Bench & Bar of Baltimore City (1997) are excellent examples of how members of the judiciary itself are helping to promote appreciation of the history of our legal system. Indeed in Baltimore City there is a Baltimore Courthouse and Law Museum Foundation that principally through volunteers maintains exhibits in the restored Orphans Court chamber in the Baltimore City courthouse, in addition to sponsoring publications like that of Judge Byrnes. In Anne 

It is my privilege to serve as the Chief Judge of the highest court in Maryland which too has a long and distinguished history of members active in the preservation and promotion of judicial history. Our most recent addition to the court, Judge Glenn T. Harrell, Jr. along with his colleague Judge Alan M. Wilner, their former colleague and now Federal Judge Diana G. Motz, Assistant Attorney General Robert Zarnoch, and other distinguished members of the bench and bar produced a play of six significant Maryland appellate cases. Documents pertaining to these cases and the script for the play are now available on line through the Maryland State Archives web site and in a CD edition  (see handout and 
http://mdsa.net/ecp/45/00029/html/harrell.html). 

The historical record upon which our understanding of these cases is based is still unfolding and must be considered a work in 

Preserving and making accessible judicial history is a two-fold task. We need to be certain that we explain well the value of the judicial record to ensure that there will be a deeply imbedded cultural rationale for its preservation. No one understood this better than a predecessor of mine, former Chief Judge Carroll T. Bond, whose artful opinion in the Donald Gaines Murray case permitted the integration of the University of Maryland Law School, within the then Supreme Court standard of Plessy v. Ferguson, by arguing that in the absence of separate but equal facilities, the school had to admit Murray. 

Most of you are aware of the prestigious series of American Legal Records that the American Historical Association began in 1933 with income from the Littleon-Griswold Fund. The first publication in the series was the Proceedings of the Maryland Court of Appeals, 1695-1729, edited by Judge Bond and Professor Richard B. Morris. 

In his foreword to the volume, Professor Evarts B. Greene explains its purpose: 

the common interest of jurists and historians in the study of American legal history has long been neglected; but during the past few years there has become a fuller appreciation of what may and should be accomplished through the cooperation of these two groups of scholars. ... 

Unfortunately the judicial records and collateral material, without which [the evolution of the American system of justice] cannot be accurately traced, have, for the most part remained inaccessible and the decisions of our nineteenth-century courts often show serious misunderstanding of early American practice.  The first step to the correction of such misunderstanding must be to rescue from the 

this committee, representing the legal, as well as the historical, profession, agreed after extended discussion to inaugurate a series of volumes hitherto unpublished sources for American Legal history, each volume to include suitable editorial matter intended to clarify the text and to suggest its bearing upon the development of political, economic, and social, as well as strictly legal, institutions. ...

As Judge Bond points out in his introduction:

The number of judicial records left by the early Maryland colonists, and the amount of judicial business recorded in them, may surprise those
who suppose that pioneers and frontiersmen in all times and places tend to become independent of the law.  For it seems to be demonstrated that, removed as these people were from the environment of their civilization, and relaxed as that civilization must therefore have been, in some degree, they were nevertheless tenacious of regulation by law, and prone to litigation. .... 

As a consequence [of the inaccessibility of the records] studies of the early legal history of the province have thus far been restricted to a few sources of information, and can hardly be said to have penetrated far beyond beginning points and outlines.  For prosecution of further study, the record here reproduced will be an especially helpful one, because it presents a view of proceedings in all the principal courts of the  province, assize, county, provincial, and appellate. .... 

The Proceedings of the Maryland Court of Appeals 1695-1729 set a high standard for bringing the judicial record into easy reach of teachers and the interested public, and, in the context of the other volumes in this series and similar state projects, greatly enhanced our understanding of the value of the legal record as a vital component of our history. Ironically, there is another moral to the story of this volume to which we also must pay heed. A book that was 

To rectify this problem and to make such valuable editions of the judicial record searchable and accessible, the Maryland State Archives will be reproducing this volume of Court of Appeals records in electronic form on its web site as a new addition to the Maryland Legal History series of the Archives of Maryland
(http://www.archivesofmaryland.net, User Name: guest, Password: guest; see handout). With help from the Maryland Information Technology Fund, the Archives has created an electronic classroom in which the most important of our legal records from the earliest times will be made available as a permanent electronic archives. 

In order to write and teach about the history of the Judiciary, by far the most daunting and yet crucial task before us is preserving and accessing the records themselves in cost effective ways that do not impede the course of justice itself.  The complexity and enormity of the judicial record itself can clog the system and get in the way of the efficient delivery of justice long before its historical relevance is understood, unless there is a creative and comprehensive archival program that weeds through the mass of data, once exclusively paper, and now increasingly electronic, preserving that which is of value and quickly disposing of that which is ephemeral and only administratively useful for a limited time. Who makes those decisions and with what resources it is accomplished are critical questions that the Judiciary in Maryland has attempted to answer through strengthening a state-wide archival program that cuts across legislative, executive, and judicial boundaries. 

One of the ways we have been able to cooperatively approach the problem of modern electronic management and the effective preservation of the electronic record while improving the public services provided by the court system is through the use of a land records improvement fund created by the legislature. In all courts, oversized materials present major problems of care and access. In Maryland, for 

Apart from the fact that such records take up a considerable amount of expensive storage space, and apart from the reality that every time one of these records is consulted it deteriorates further in the hands of those who retrieve it and those who use it, there is the further issue of how to make such vital land records easily and permanently accessible without escalating staff and maintenance costs. Fortunately the emergence of the Internet and the web and the wisdom of the legislature in creating the land records improvement fund from a portion of all land record recordation fees has led to the implementation of a pilot project designed by the State Archives that brings all such recorded (and some unrecorded) oversized material easily to 

What is unique about the plat program is its flexibility as a dynamic recordation and retrieval service that can be continuously improved by the Archives, the clerks, and the users themselves. For example, the quality of the recorded copies of oversized materials varies considerably according to use and storage practices. Often the record copy is supplemented by copies in better condition elsewhere, either made by the courts for reference purposes or for use by other agencies, such as planning departments. Even private surveyor's records at times prove vital to interpreting and enhancing the official record copy. In addition, historical county maps and the original land surveys recorded with the colonial and state Land Office will be scanned and linked to the county court records. Finally, when the public has questions about the 

As we attempt to properly care for the historical records of the judiciary and the whole of our legal system, perhaps another valuable lesson we must learn from the current world is the need to be both interesting and brief. I doubt that we will have any difficulty in making judicial and legal history interesting to almost any audience.  Too much of the reality of life is packed into our court records. Brevity is another matter. Judges and lawyers (even archivists) are not noted for their brevity. So let me defy tradition with this concluding thought: 

If we do not find ways in which to engage the general public in a better understanding of what we do and have done as judges and as participants in the legal process, we will be contributing materially to the weakening of the whole system of American Government, not just the Judiciary. Clearly with what we already know about our records and our past, the preserving and telling of our history holds great promise. It is simply up to all of us who care to make it happen.