University of Maryland librarians and a professor creates a tour of

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Nov 30, 2006 by Cynthia Di Pasquale

Lawyers could spend years making their way from Baltimore's law schools into its law offices and courthouses without ever really knowing the tradition they've followed.

Now, though, librarians and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law have created a tour of Baltimore's legal history that can be taken online or on foot.

The tour was initially developed for historians attending a conference co-sponsored by the law school earlier this month.

"We wanted to create a tool that people visiting for the conference initially could use and then something we could leverage for other visitors to the campus," said Bill Sleeman, the library's assistant director for technical services.

The tour guide can be downloaded from the library's Web site. It includes a map for those who choose to make the approximately 1 1/2 hour trek around downtown Baltimore.

Starting at the University of Maryland law school at Baltimore and Paca streets, the tour continues to the adjacent Westminster Hall and Burial Ground where many famous Marylanders were buried from the late 1700s through the early 1800s. James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, is buried there. So is Samuel Smith, a financier and politician.

It then moves through Baltimore's West Side, covering several blocks along Fayette Street once owned by John Eager Howard, a politician who wanted the state capital moved from Annapolis to Baltimore.

It continues on to the spot of the original courthouse, where the Battle Monument now stands in an island on Calvert Street; then south on Calvert, which was once a "lawyers' row."

In 1800, 14 of Baltimore's 16 lawyers kept offices on Calvert between Fayette and Baltimore streets, Sleeman said.

"I like having people go past lawyers' row," Sleeman said. "People don't think of Baltimore as a location for a lot of the early Supreme Court attorneys, but so many of the federal-period attorneys lived and worked in Baltimore." They included Robert Goodloe Harper, William Pinkey and Philip Barton Key, as well as Luther Martin, who defended Aaron Burr against treason charges and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase against impeachment.

The tour winds past the location of the original University of Maryland's Law Institute, Thurgood Marshall's law offices, and the federal courthouse, to end at the University of Maryland School of Social Work on Redwood Street. The University of Maryland School of Law was once located on that spot.

Narrowing the list of what to include in the tour was a monumental task, Sleeman said. He developed the tour along with law professor David Bogen.

"We wanted enough sites that it would cover the span of legal history in Maryland," he said. "We wanted some from the federal period. We wanted some that would cover the civil rights movement - something that would run the gamut of things that took place in Baltimore."

On the corner of Fayette and Charles, for example, Hooper's Restaurant once stood. A group of black students, including present- day Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell, staged a sit-in at the whites-only restaurant in 1960 and were arrested. The legal case made its way to the Supreme Court and back to the state Court of Appeals, and was instrumental in ending segregation in the state.

Sleeman hopes that people other than those affiliated with the law school or legal community will take the tour - either online or by foot. He also hopes they will follow electronic links to historic documents from the law school archives.

"There's so much to see and learn about Maryland history," he said.