James Patriot Wilson docket book

The James Patriot Wilson docket book, also known as Wilson's Red Book, is a small, red leather notebook of approximately 430 handwritten pages recording Delaware court cases from 1792 to 1801, argued before the Court of Common Pleas, Court of Quarter Sessions, Delaware Supreme Court, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Court of Chancery, and the High Court of Errors and Appeals. At the end of the book, there appears to be a topical index and an alphabetical list of cases. The flyleaf reads "James P. Wilson's Notes of Cases, Written without revision or correction from 1793 to 1800."

The Red Book represents a handwritten summary of court cases tried in Delaware in the last decade of the eighteenth century. At the time, courts did not, as a rule, create written reports on the proceedings of various courts. Instead, lawyers and judges would record the proceedings in their own hand and make such personal records available to others in the legal community. Volumes such as Wilson's Red Book thus became the record for Delaware legal precedent for the common lawyer until 1837, when the first volume of legal reports for Delaware was printed. There is evidence that the Red Book was copied, in its entirety, by at least one other lawyer.

The Red Book was used by Professor Daniel J. Boorstin of Harvard Law School in 1943 for a two-volume work, Delaware Cases, 1792-1830, in which he published numerous cases documented by Wilson. Boorstin noted that Wilson's Red Book "suffers in legibility and fullness from the apparent desire of the author to provide himself with a pocket-size volume."