Juridical Tracts Collection

September 09, 2025

If you were a university student in Europe in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, you would write your papers in Latin, the accepted language for scholarly communication at that time. Many 17^th and 18^th century student-authored dissertations were published, and scholars and book collectors worldwide have collected them over the years, sometimes binding them into volumes.

The Library has eighteen of these bound volumes, containing 417 titles that are the work of hundreds of students and over 200 years. We know who wrote them, and in many cases the professor who supervised the work, but we do not know who collected and bound them, when they did so, or why. Some volumes have meticulously-written tables of contents, others have marbled end papers, and all have a shelving location label in Russian, likely from time spent in another library collection that is unknown to us.

Many libraries in Europe have collected copies of these Latin dissertations. Some American libraries, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan, have collected them, as well, and some are at the Library of Congress. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley has some, but the bound Latin dissertations at CSUN are the only substantial collection including these titles in the western United States. They are a primary source for understanding how law, religion, history, and politics were viewed, taught, and debated in Europe over a 200-year period of intellectual and cultural development.

Most of the works were authored by law students, and the variety of subjects addressed is wide. Some address contemporary legal issues, while others analyze historical law, including comparisons of Roman law and local German law. Papers focus on inheritance and succession, marriage law, judicial process, property issues, fire prevention, hunting, smuggling, and shipwrecks. Non-legal topics include history, the House of Guelf and the Templars, political science, the selection and appointment of judges, and various theological topics, including John the Baptist, the appointment of bishops, Jewish law, and the infallibility of the Catholic Church. 

The volumes also contain some essays, poetry, obituaries, tributes, and one long complaint by a Swiss professor about an article published about his work in a 1734 French journal. The earliest title in the collection, Panegyricus Christiano Quarto Daniæ, Norvegiæ, Vandalorum, Gothorumque regi &c., a tribute to King Christian IV of Denmark, was published in 1601. The latest, a law dissertation called De Retorsione Speciatim Quoad Geradam, was published in 1804. It is the only 19^th-century publication included.

At least one publication, Disputatio Politica de Pace, Ejus Natura, Constitutione & Conservationhas been recognized as a fictitious dissertation in another library’s catalog record, possibly created as satire. Further study is necessary to determine if there are other fictitious or mock dissertation examples.

Student authors studied at universities in Switzerland, Germany, and France. Most have German names, with an occasional Italian or Hungarian name turning up. Author names are generally written in a Latin form on title pages (Gottfried Barth is Gothofredo Barthio, John Jacob Faesch is Joh. Jacobus Feschius, etc.) Many dissertations have two names on the title page: that of the supervising professor, or praeses, and also of the student, or respondent. Student authors were typically in their late teens or early 20s at the time of publication, like many college students today. 

Almost all of the titles in the collection exist at other libraries, but many were cataloged in languages other than English, especially when the text itself was in Latin, German, Greek, Hebrew, or French, so we created new English-language records when necessary, in consultation with previously-published indexes and bibliographies about these types of sources.  In many cases, the supervising professor is listed ahead of the student author on the title page, so both names are searchable as creators in OneSearch. 

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