A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1873 - Part of the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. The initial release in Mar. 1998 included full text of documents and debates from the First and Second Congresses (1789-1793), totaling about 4,400 pages of documents. Information can be browsed or searched.
American Radicalism Collection - Michigan State University, offers scanned images of many items in the collection, with regular additions. Access is via subject and title lists. Of interest to legal historians are dozens of items published by radical groups on the Rosenberg spy case, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the Scottsboro Boys, civil rights, the Ku Klux Klan, and labor unions.
American Society for Legal History (ASLH) - Dedicated to fostering scholarship, teaching, and study concerning the law and institutions of all legal systems, both Anglo-American and those that do not operate in the Anglo-American tradition. Founded in 1956, the Society publishes Law and History Review and Studies in Legal History, a series of book-length monographs available to ASLH members at substantial pre-publication discounts. In addition, the Society sponsors H-Law, an online discussion network.
Ames Foundation - Based at Harvard Law School. Supports research into English legal history through publications (notably the Year Books of Richard II) and grants. Site includes a catalogue of their publications.
Amistad Case - The National Archives presents digitized documents related to the U.S. Supreme Court case of U.S. v. The Amistad (1841), in which the Court freed a group of Africans who had taken over the Spanish slave ship on which they had been imprisoned, and cleared the Africans of murder charges in the death of the ship's captain and cook.
Bennett Statutory Collection (Cornell University Law Library) - Collection of statutory material. Contains complete sets of the statutory codes and session laws, from the inception of legislation forward, for each jurisdiction including the: British colonies, U.S. territories prior to statehood, Thirteen original U.S. states, Fifty current U.S. states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Virgin Islands.
Bentham Project - Publishing the complete works of the great English legal reformer Jeremy Bentham. The site includes bibliographies of Bentham's works and a brief biography.
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) - Full online text of the commentaries, first edition, with corrections and footnotes. The Commentaries were long regarded as the leading work on the development of English law and played a role in the development of the American legal system. They were in fact the first methodical treatise on the common law suitable for a lay readership since at least the Middle Ages. The Commentaries are often quoted as the definitive pre-Revolutionary War source of Common Law by U.S courts; in particular, the United States Supreme Court quotes from Blackstone's work whenever they wish to engage in historical discussion that goes back that far, or further (for example, when discussing the intent of the Framers of the Constitution). Also see Wikipedia article.
Bracton: De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae - Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England attributed to Henry of Bratton, c. 1210-1268. The work (commonly known now simply as Bracton) attempts to describe rationally the whole of English law, a task that was not again undertaken until Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in the eighteenth century. The work is remarkable both for its wealth of detail and for its attempts to make sense out of English law largely in terms of the ius commune, the combination of Roman and canon law that was taught in the universities in Bracton's time.
California State Archives - General information on records of state appellate courts, constitutional conventions, and Spanish & Mexican land grants.
Espionage Act of 1917 -
A United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It prohibited any attempt to interfere with military operations, to support America's enemies during wartime, to promote insubordination in the military, or to interfere with military recruitment. In 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Schenck v. United States that the act did not violate the freedom of speech of those convicted under its provisions.
The Espionage Act wreaked havoc on the American political left, destroying the young American Socialist party and one of its most progressive unions, the Industrial Workers of the World. Many others, including intellectuals, journalists, film producers and pacifist religious figures were also prosecuted. Prison terms were long, and some political prisoners died in federal jails. The abuses under the law were legendary, and mark a sad day in U.S. history.
The law broadly prohibits any publication by anyone (newspapers included) of information related to national security, which may cause an "injury to the United States". It is being considered for possible use again by the Obama administration and its Attorney General Eric Holder for the purpose of punishing and reigning in WikiLeaks whistleblowers.
Famous Trials - Maintained by Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law.
Federal Judicial Center - Makes several publications of the Federal Judicial History Office available, including Creating the Federal Judicial System, A Directory of Oral History Interviews Related to the Federal Courts, A Guide to the Preservation of Federal Judges' Papers, and its newsletter The Court Historian.
H-LAW - The H-NET (Humanities Online) discussion list devoted to legal and constitutional history. Its web site includes logs of H-LAW discussions, book reviews, a directory of legal historians, and links to the American Society for Legal History, the index to Law & History Review, and other sites of interest to legal historians.
History of Economic Thought, McMasters University - Includes the full text of selected works by such prominent legal scholars as Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, Matthew Hale, Henry Sumner Maine, Frederic Maitland, and Paul Vinogradoff.
Iura Communia - Provides access to bibliographic information, texts, articles, announcements, discussion, and links relating the history of Ius Comune, the common law of continental legal systems. Most of the text is in Italian. Maintained by Mario Montorzi, Faculty of Jurisprudence, University of Pisa.
Journal of Legal History- Founded in 1980, is the only British journal concerned solely with legal history. It publishes articles in English on the sources and development of the common law, both in the British Isles and overseas, on the history of the laws of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and on Roman Law and the European legal tradition. There is a section for shorter research notes, review-articles, and a wide-ranging section of reviews of recent literature.
Journal of Southern Legal History - Published annually by the Georgia Legal History Foundation, Inc. The Journal explores, analyzes, and depicts the history of law, the legal culture and profession, and the courts, including federal courts, in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas.
Law and History Review (LHR) - America's leading legal history journal, encompassing American, English, European, and ancient legal history issues.
Law, Humanities and Culture - Publishes abstracts of working papers, articles accepted for publication, and books on legal topics examined from a wide range of humanities perspectives. Editors: Richard T. Ford and Janet E. Halley, Stanford Law School.
Legal History and Philosophy - This site is intended to include materials not easily found at other sites on the internet. Sources currently include Sir Edward Coke, the Laws of the Cherokee Nation, Learned Hand, Francis Lieber, Abraham Lincoln, the Code of Hammurabi, the 1648 Laws of Massachusetts, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederick Pollock, and Michael Dalton.
Legal History Blog - Scholarship, news and ideas in legal history. By Mary L. Dudziak and Alfred Brophy.
Legal History on the Web - Provides an annotated overview of online legal history resources in English, from all historical periods and regions of the world.
Legal History Project - Central clearing-house for legal history knowledge and education. resources and links:
Library of Congress Manuscript Division - Includes finding aids to dozens of manuscript collections, including the papers of federal judge John J. Sirica, NAACP president & lawyer Arthur Barnett Springarn, and Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams.
National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) - See the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States for information on the records of federal courts and the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition, their their NARA Archival Information Locator (NAIL) database has images of several important sets of source materials, such as the Rosenberg Case Files, selected U.S. District Court files, 1685-1991, and much more. Also see National Archive News.
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Legal Memoranda and Opinions -
The Department of Justice has released previously undisclosed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memoranda and opinions from the Bush administration era. Some of the opinions had been withdrawn or superseded. For others, a warning was issued that "caution should be exercised" by the executive branch "before relying in other respects" on
their recommendations.
Oyez Oyez Oyez - Digitized audio recordings of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, from 1955 onward; updated regularly.
Roman Law - An experimental site, containing two extracts from the Corpus Iuris Iustiniani with hypertext links to the corresponding glosses of Accursius. Also present are biographical sketches of a few major Roman law writers. Maintained by Thomas Rufner, University of Tuebingen.
Roman Law Resources - These pages are dedicated to Roman Law, the legal system invented by the Romans more than 2000 years ago.
The most significant part of this collection are some fragments of the Corpus Iuris (collection of laws initiated by Emperor Justinian) with apposite parts of the gloss of Accursius.
Selected Web Sources for Legal History - A selective guide to legal history resources on the World Wide Web, with special emphasis on archives and rare book collections relevant to legal history.
Supreme Court Opinions, 1937-Present - Cases are browsable by volume number or year; searchable by citation, title and full text of the opinions; and also include hypertext links. On the Findlaw site, maintained by the Northern California Association of Law Librarians.
Unreported Decisions of the Privy Council - This site provides surviving archival material regarding 17 unreported appeals from the Australian colonies to the appeals committees or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from 1809 to 1850.
Women's Legal History - The Robert Crown Library Staff in collaboration with Professor Barbara Babcock and her students have created this website as a resource for all who are interested in the subject of women lawyers in the United States.
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