In Traveling the Beaten Trail: Charles Tait’s Charges to Federal Grand Juries 1822–1825, a concise and essential addition to the Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library, authors Paul M. Pruitt Jr., David I. Durham, and Sally E. Hadden capture the life, achievements, and legacy of federal judge Charles Tait. Throughout his colorful career, Tait left an unmistakable impression on Alabama politics. He had a major influence over the federal bar and its practice, and he also made it his personal responsibility to educate the public. Traveling the Beaten Trail offers a brief biographical account of Charles Tait’s life, highlighting various noteworthy events, such as the array of professions he undertook—from professor, to planter, to lawyer, to senator. The remainder of the text focuses on in-depth analyses of Tait's grand jury charges for 1822, 1824, and 1825.
 
About Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library
This collection offers a series of edited documents that contribute to an understanding of the development of legal history, culture, or doctrine. Series editors Paul M. Pruitt Jr. and David I. Durham have selected a variety of materials—a lecture, diaries, letters, speeches, a ledger, commonplace books, a code of ethics, court reports—to illustrate unique examples of legal life and thought.

Paul M. Pruitt Jr. has been on staff at the University of Alabama School of Law’s Bounds Law Library since 1986. He has served as a Special Collections Librarian for almost that long. Pruitt is coeditor and contributor to the Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library. He is the author of Taming Alabama: Lawyers and Reformers, 1804–1929, and the editor of New Field, New Corn: Essays from the Alabama Legal History Seminar. Pruitt also teaches two courses at the University of Alabama’s School of Law, “From Domesday to the Black Death: English Legal History” and the “Alabama Legal History Seminar.”
 
David I. Durham has served as the Curator of Archival Collections at the University of Alabama School of Law’s Bounds Law Library since 2000. His book A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808–1892, explores the role of a political and social moderate in a polarized society. He is coeditor and contributing author to the Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library, a series devoted to topics in legal history. Durham also teaches courses in Alabama history, early southern history, and the history of Brazil through the University of Alabama’s Department of History.
 
Sally E. Hadden received her undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, prior to entering the graduate program in history at Harvard University. She completed her doctorate and law degrees at Harvard, where she began working on her first book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, which examines the intersection of law and the history of slavery and race before 1865. She is also the coeditor of Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History and A Companion to American Legal History. Hadden also serves on the editorial board of the Law and History Review and on the executive committee of the American Society for Legal History. Her forthcoming book is on legal professionals in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston in the eighteenth century.

“In spite of its brevity, there are layers of interesting questions just below the surface scratched by Pruitt, Duham, and Hadden. In bringing Charles Tait and his grand jury charges to light, the authors illuminate not just the man, but an era in Alabama when federal judges took seriously their responsibilities for adjudication as well as civic education.”
—The Alabama Review