Online Legal History Sources

Getting started, books and theses, journals and newspaper articles, finding cases, statutes and codes, finding & using archival sources, blogs and web resources, getting help, reference works.

  • Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History

Restricted Access: HarvardKey or Harvard ID and PIN required

Harvard Law School Research Guides

More detailed resources on legal history can be found in these pages and research guides created by Harvard Law School Librarians:

  • Harvard Law School Historical & Special Collections
  • Research Guide for Federal Legislative History To find additional early congressional documents and sources for legislative history, please consult this research guide.
  • [HLS] Legal History: American Legal Education by Mindy Kent Last Updated Oct 20, 2023 69 views this year
  • Critical Legal Studies by Harvard Law School Library Research Services Last Updated Sep 12, 2023 391 views this year
  • Harvard Law School Graduates: A Biographical Research Guide by Lesley Schoenfeld Last Updated Jan 3, 2024 1501 views this year
  • History of Harvard Law School & Harvard University: Selected Resources by Lesley Schoenfeld Last Updated Mar 14, 2024 443 views this year
  • Law and Society by Harvard Law School Library Research Services Last Updated Jul 13, 2023 424 views this year
  • Nuremberg Trials Collection at Harvard Law School by Sarah Wharton Last Updated Feb 9, 2024 405 views this year
  • Online Legal History Sources by Mindy Kent Last Updated Sep 12, 2023 125 views this year
  • Sources for Early American Legal History by Mindy Kent Last Updated Oct 16, 2023 111 views this year
  • United Kingdom Legal Research by Deanna Barmakian Last Updated Nov 16, 2023 699 views this year
  • Women in the Legal Profession by Emilyn Brown Last Updated Jan 19, 2024 118 views this year

Other Online Research Guides

These guides from other law schools may be helpful when identifying resources. Links may be restricted, but we may have Harvard access to the databases. Check Harvard E-Resources for access.

  • American Legal History Online (University of Chicago Law)
  • Legal History on the Web (Duke)
  • Guide to Online Databases in Legal History (Georgetown)

Legal Texts & Treatises

Early treatises can be an important source for discovering the law and early cases.

  • Hein Online:Seldon Society Publications and the History of Early English Law
  • Hein Online:Scottish Legal History: Featuring Publications of the Stair Society
  • Making of Modern Law Legal treatises from the United States and Great Britain. more... less... Legal Treatises comprises over 21,000 works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on British Commonwealth and American law, with 14,900 titles from the nineteenth century and 7,100 titles from the years 1900 to 1926. It covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature. The monographs and materials in Legal Treatises include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches. The collection is of interest to scholars and patrons interested in domestic and international law, legal history, business and economics, politics and government, national defense, criminology, religion, education, labor and social welfare, and military justice. The database provides for simple and advanced searching, and for browsing by author, title, and subject terms.
  • LLMC Digital LLMC includes a number of treatises in it's Multi Jurisdictional Subject Collection. The British Empire Studies Collection includes a number of works relevant to the colonial period.
  • Hein Online Legal Classics The HeinOnline Legal Classics Library is a digital collection of many of the most highly regarded works written on American law, published in this country or abroad, from its beginnings to the end of 1860. It also includes American works on foreign, comparative and international law. The collection is based on titles listed in the Bibliography of Early American Law, by Morris L. Cohen. Additional titles have been selected from the AALS Law Books Recommended for Libraries, plus a number of additional early British and Commonwealth titles.

General Historical Collections

These comprehensive collections of online texts include treatises, pamphlets and primary legal materials.

  • 18th Century Collections Online - SEE: Eighteenth Century Collections Online Extensive collection of eighteenth century British sources, not limited to law. Useful for the colonial period.
  • Early American Imprints, Series 1 (1639-1800) Comprehensive collection of works published in America between 1639 and 1819. more... less... This resource is based on the microform collection of books, pamphlets and broadsides issued in America from 1639 to 1800, recorded in Charles Evans' American Bibliography and Roger P. Bristol's Supplement to Charles Evans' American Bibliography, which includes material on virtually every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America. The database provides for simple and advanced searching, and for browsing by a variety of subject terms, genre, author, and printer/publisher. Searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text is associated with each page image.
  • Google Books
  • Early English Books Online
  • Find a Database: Historical Collections Selected list of Harvard databases useful for legal history research
  • Google Books: Advanced Search

Theses and Dissertations

  • Dissertation Abstracts - SEE: Dissertations and Theses Full Text (ProQuest)
  • Index to Theses in the UK and Ireland

Online Legal History Journals

Indexes, bibliographies and abstracts.

In-Library only. This resource is available on campus at the Harvard Law School Library.

  • Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 (Law Login Required) 1908-1981 more... less... This retrospective database indexes over 750 legal periodicals published in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Annual surveys of the laws of a jurisdiction, annual surveys of the federal courts, yearbooks, annual institutes, and annual reviews of the work in a given field or on a given topic will also be covered.
  • America: History and Life (ABC-CLIO) Indexes journal articles vrom approximately 2000 publications on American and Canadian history. more... less... America: History and Life is the primary bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present, covering over 2,000 journals published worldwide. In addition to all key English-language historical journals, America: History and Life coverage includes selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals, and a targeted selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to articles, the database includes book and media reviews and citations to abstracts of dissertations.
  • Historical Abstracts (ABC-CLIO) Indexes approximately 2000 journals on topics related to history (excluding U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to present more... less... http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:amhislif
  • IMB - SEE: International Medieval Bibliography

Historical Newspaper Sources

  • Newspaper & News Collections List of newspapers and collections available at Harvard selected and annotated by HLS Librarians.
  • Guide to Using Harvards Newspaper Resources
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers Includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other major newspapers. Dates of coverage vary by title.
  • Historical Newspapers Online Indexes, including full-text of the London Times 1800-1870 more... less... Historical Newspapers Online, produced by Chadwyck-Healey, contains three major historical resources: Palmer's Index to the Times which covers the period from 1790 to 1905 in The Times; The Official Index to the Times which takes the coverage forward from 1906 to 1980; The Historical Index to the New York Times which covers The New York Times from 1851 to September 1922.
  • Times (London, England) - SEE: Times Digital Archive Digital archive of the complete contents of The Times of London from 1785-1985
  • America’s Historical Newspapers Digital collection of historical newspapers including Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922; African American Newspapers, 1827-1998; and Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. more... less... Full-text database of newspapers published in the United States. Includes titles from all 50 present states, in various, separately searchable, series: Early American Newspapers Series 1-10, 1690-1922; 20th-Century American Newspapers Series 1-3, 1690-1993; African American Newspapers, 1827-1998; Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection, 1799-1971 and Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. OCR-generated ASCII text is associated with each page image. Searchable by key word; searches may be limited by date, era, article type, language, place of publication, and newspaper title.

Journal Collections

  • JSTOR more... less... Includes all titles in the JSTOR collection, excluding recent issues. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.
  • HeinOnline more... less... http://heinonline.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/HOL/Help?topic=lucenesyntax
  • Academic Search Premier (Harvard Login) more... less... Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). Full text is available for more than 3,600 of the publications and is searchable.
  • Find a Journal at Harvard Search by journal title, article title or location to locate print or online journals at Harvard

Sources for Early Case Law

Several historical databases include early case reporters and collections of laws:

  • Hein Online: English Reports Full Reprint (1220-1867) Reprint of over 100,000 significant early English cases. Finding tools allow searching by nominative citation and case name.
  • LLMC Digital LLMC Digital includes a number of early U.S. case law reporters organized by state. It also includes non-US primary legal materials organized by jurisdiction. Content varies by country. Tools on the home page let you jump to a specific nominative reporter citation or search by case name.
  • 18th Century Collections Online - SEE: Eighteenth Century Collections Online Extensive collection of eighteenth century British sources, not limited to law. Includes some early case reporters and digests.

Using Nominative Reporters

Case citations from early works can be hard to decipher. Early collections of case decisions were cited by the name of the clerk who reported the cases, and citation formats were not standard.

Here are some tips for finding and interpreting early nominative and non-standard citations:

  • Check the source of your citation to see if the author provided a table or guide to the abbreviations .
  • Use an abbreviation index,  or dictionary to decipher difficult abbreviations.
  • If possible determine the jurisdiction .
  • For U.S. Federal and State cases, check Table 1 of the Bluebook.
  • Try finding the case cited in a more modern source with standardized citations.
  • Search case databases by party name instead of citation. Look for  alternate spellings of the party names.

Subject Digests

Digests are a useful tool for finding case citations organized by subject. Digest can cover a court, a jurisdiction or a subject. 

  • Century Edition of the American Digest Covers cases from 1658-1896

Deciphering Legal Abbreviations

  • Prince's Bieber dictionary of legal abbreviations : a reference guide for attorneys, legal secretaries, paralegals, and law students / by Mary Miles Prince. Location: Ref Desk KF246 .B46 2009
  • Cardiff Index of Legal Abbreviations The Cardiff Index of Legal Abbreviations is a searchable online database of English language legal publications. It is particularly useful for identifying citations of cases, statutes and legal periodicals from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States

Notable and Historical Trials

Accounts and documents for notable trials were sometimes published in books, newspapers or pamphlets. Others have been gathered into historical databases. Other trial documents can be found in libraries and archives.

  • Search   HOLLIS or WorldCat for your case name and the word " Trial "
  • Search  newspapers for accounts of the trial. This research guide gives tips for using Harvard's newspaper collection
  • Search historical full-text databases. 
  • Search the web - schools, universities, historical societies, museums and other interest groups sometimes post information on famous trials. 
  • Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 Published trial transcripts and pamphlets recounting sensational trials. It draws from the collections of Harvard, Yale, the Library of the Bar Association of New York and the British Library more... less... Comprising more than 7,000 titles--and almost two million fully searchable pages, Making of Modern Law: Trials contains digital images of books and pamphlets, official and unofficial trial documents and materials, legal transcripts, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations from the early seventeenth century to 1926. Drawn from the law libraries at Harvard and Yale, as well as from the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the materials include not only published trial transcripts, but also popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, adultery and other crimes. Almost all of the works reproduced are English language and were published in Great Britain or the United States.
  • American State Trials Seventeen volume set containing excerpts and transcripts from selected criminal trials from the 17th to the early 20th century.
  • Crime in New York: 1850-1950 Digitization project of the Lloyd Sealey Library at John Jay College. The project includes a searchable digital index their microfilm collection of The Trial Transcripts of the County of New York 1883 - 1927. The microfilm is available to borrow via ILL. The online collection also includes 150 full-text transcripts, available as searchable PDF's files linked to the web-index.
  • Hein Online World Trials Library
  • Hein Online World Trials Library Guide Includes published trial transcripts and court documents of historical interest. Also includes monographs analyzing famous trials and biographies of noted trial lawyers. A
  • The Old Bailey Online - Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674-1913 Searchable edition of the records of thousands of criminal trials held at the Old Bailey in central London.

HLSL Historical & Special Collections

Our Historical and Special Collections department has also digitized some significant and historically interesting trial records and accounts. Additional digital collections from HSC can be found on their web page.

  • Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection The Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection—comprised of manuscript materials and photographs—offers researchers invaluable insight into the Japanese War Crimes Trial -- one of the most important trials of the twentieth century.
  • Nuremberg Trials Project The Library holds over one million pages of documents related to the war crimes tribunals held after World War II. The Nuremberg Trials Project combines document imaging, document re-keying, and document analysis to create a database of information about the trials, and a Web interface that will allow searching of the documents and the trial transcripts themselves, with links to the various evidentiary documents used in the trials. The first stage of the project presents documents from and relating to the Medical Case--more commonly known as the Doctors' Trial--which was Case 1 of the NMT trials.
  • Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders Digitized edition of the Harvard Law School Library's collection of crime broadsides spanning the years 1707 to 1891. The broadsides include accounts of executions for such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason. Many of the broadsides vividly describe the results of sentences handed down at London's central criminal court, the Old Bailey, linked above.
  • Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the US & UK 1815-1914 Digitized versions of over 420 separately published trial narratives from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections.

U.S. Statutes

  • Hein Online: U.S. Code Complete coverage of the US Code back to its initial publication in 1925. Also includes the Early Federal Laws Collection
  • Hein Online: US Statutes at Large
  • Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926 Contains state and municipal codes, constitutional material and other legal history sources. more... less... Comprising 1,360 titles--and almost two million fully searchable pages—drawn chiefly from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926 contains digital images of cases, statutes and regulations that have shaped American legal history. The digital archive includes early state codes (compilations of laws arranged alphabetically by subject); city charters (enacted and proposed charters and ordinances in American municipal jurisdictions); law dictionaries (important for investigating the history of legal concepts or interpreting the meaning of older documents); digests (indexes to reported cases, arranged by subject); and the published records of the American colonies (more than sixty titles of records and documents that have been transcribed, edited, printed, and indexed by six generations of scholars). The database provides for simple and advance searching, and for browsing by author and title.
  • Hein Online: Session Laws Complete session laws for all 50 states
  • HeinOnline State Statutes: A Historical Archive Coverage varies by state.
  • Hein Online: New York Legal Research Library Includes New York Codes Prior to 1923
  • LLMC Digital LLMC Digital includes early codes, session laws and other state documents organized by state.

UK Statutes

British statutes are cited by regnal year and chapter. Regnal year refers to the year of a monarch's reign. 

For example, 2 Hen. 5, c. 7 refers to the 7th act passed in the 2nd year of the reign of King Henry V which, according to the regnal year chart, was 1414.

  • Hein Online: English Reports: Statutes of the Realm Includes Vols. 1-11 (1235-1713)
  • Early English Laws
  • Sweet & Maxwell - Regnal Years (PDF) Table to convert regnal years to calendar dates

Combined Sources for Early Statutes and Codes

Several historical databases include statutes and codes:

  • 18th Century Collections Online - SEE: Eighteenth Century Collections Online Extensive collection of eighteenth century British sources, not limited to law. Includes some case reports. Includes several editions of Ruffhead's English Statutes at Large. Useful for the colonial period.

Constitutional History

In addition to the databases listed under Statutes and Codes, the following sources can be useful for state and federal constitutional history.

  • Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention (Library of Congress)
  • American State Papers
  • The NBER/Maryland State Constitutions Project
  • World Constitutions Illustrated (HeinOnline) Access via Harvard Key. HeinOnline World Constitutions Illustrated provides access to contemporary and historical documents and resources of interest to scholars researching the constitutional and political development of the nations of the world. World Constitutions Illustrated includes, for each nation represented copies of the current constitution in its original language format accompanied by at least one English translation, secondary materials related to constitutional law and history, and links to online sources such as Portals to the World and official government websites. Jurisdiction: Global

Primary Sources at Harvard

Finding Primary Source Material in Harvard's Archives and Libraries

Primary sources available at Harvard include both published source material, such as correspondence and diaries,  and archival materials.

Harvard's special collection libraries and archival repositories are a great source of unique and rare books, historical manuscripts, documents, photographs, maps, artifacts, and numeric data.

Start in HOLLIS

The HOLLIS Catalog contains the records of published sources and of many of the manuscript and document collections located in Harvard's libraries and archives.

Note:  Not everything is included in HOLLIS, so in addition to searching HOLLIS, we recommend that you contact the individual repositories for additional holdings information.

HOLLIS Advanced Search Strategies:

Use both  Author  and  Subject  searches to find the papers of an individual.

Search by  Author  or using  Author Keywords  to find annual reports, proceedings, minutes, etc. produced by an organization.

Add the term " sources " to a subject word search.

Limit by  Resource Type  such as Archives/Manuscripts

  • HOLLIS Advanced Search
  • HOLLIS for Archival Discovery

 How can you locate specific documents within an archival collection?

Most manuscript and archival collections have a finding aid that provides detailed information about the collection.

Use HOLLIS for Archival Discovery  to locate finding aids which describe the contents of faculty papers and other manuscript collections at Harvard.

  • HOLLIS for Archival Discovery LibGuide Information on the structure and functionality of Harvard Library's platform for searching special collections and archival materials, as well as search tips.

How Are HOLLIS & HOLLIS for Archival Discovery Different?

  • HOLLIS gives you brief catalog records for books, journals and other library materials, including summary records of manuscript collections.
  • HOLLIS for Archival Discovery gives you detailed finding aids that describe entire manuscript collections. 

Compare the HOLLIS record and the finding aid for the Law Library's collection of Joseph Story's papers:

  • Joseph Story's Papers (HOLLIS Record)
  • Joseph Story's Papers (HFAD Record)

Planning your archival visit

If you are planning a visit to an archive or special collection, make sure to contact them directly before visiting. Many items are stored off site or need special arrangements for use, so give as much lead time as possible.

  • A Survival Guide for Archival Research Tips for archival researchers from Barbara Heck, Elizabeth Preston, and Bill Svec, "A Survival Guide for Archival Researchers" from the December 2004 issue of Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Society

Visiting Historical & Special Collections at HLSL

To schedule a research visit in the Root Room, create a HOLLIS Special Request account which will allow you to place requests to view HSC's material from within HOLLIS.

Next, fill out an appointment request form at least 1 business day in advance and tell us when you would like to visit. 

Note that two days advance notice are required for visual materials and modern manuscripts (e.g. faculty papers) as they are stored offsite. 

  • Getting Started in HOLLIS Special Request
  • HSC Appointment Request Request an appointment with Harvard Law School Library's Historical & Special Collections
  • Harvard Law School Historical & Special Collections Start your research into HLS History with the resources compiled by Harvard Law School's Historical & Special Collections

HLSL Collected Papers (Digitized)

The following collections of papers related to the history of the Harvard Law School have been digitized.

To find other collections, search HOLLIS for Archival Discovery.

  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Suite A collection of digitized documents and images from five manuscript collections and three image groups held by the Harvard Law School Library.
  • Law & Society Since the Civil War: American Legal Manuscripts from the Collection of the Harvard Law School Library (Harvard Key) Part of ProQuest History Vault. Collection includes digitzed papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Richard H. Field, Roscoe Pound, Sheldon Glueck, William H. Hastie & Zechariah Chafee Jr.

Other Archives and Manuscript Collections

Archives & special collections at harvard.

  • Harvard University Archives
  • Harvard Library Locations & Hours Filter location by Features>Special collections and archives
  • Harvard Guide to Manuscripts and Archives Use this detailed guide to locate archives and manuscript collections both within and outside of Harvard.

Finding Archives & Special Collections Outside of Harvard

  • Archive Grid ArchiveGrid is a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. ArchiveGrid data is primarily focused on archival material descriptions for institutions in the United States.
  • Archive Finder Archive Finder is a current directory which describes over 220,000 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. more... less... Archive Finder is a current directory which describes over 200,000 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. ArchiveFinder combines ArchivesUSA, a directory of archives including the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (1959 to 2006), searchable indexing of the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States and the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and descriptions of additional collections and online finding aids.

Online Document Collections

  • American Memory (Library of Congress)
  • The Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
  • Primary Documents in American History (Library of Congress)
  • The Anglo American Legal Tradition
  • Studies in Scarlet
  • The Roman Law Library

Blogs and Current Awareness

  • Legal History Blog
  • SSRN Legal History e-Journal
  • Edinburgh Legal History Blog
  • Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History Blog
  • Harvard Law School Program of Study: Legal History

Contact Us!

  Ask Us!  Submit a question or search our knowledge base.

Chat with us!  Chat   with a librarian (HLS only)

Email: [email protected]

 Contact Historical & Special Collections at [email protected]

  Meet with Us   Schedule an online consult with a Librarian

Hours  Library Hours

Classes  View  Training Calendar  or  Request an Insta-Class

 Text  Ask a Librarian, 617-702-2728

 Call  Reference & Research Services, 617-495-4516

  • Last Updated: Sep 12, 2023 10:46 AM
  • URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/onlinelegalhistory

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

Georgetown Law

Library electronic resources outage May 29th and 30th

Between 9:00 PM EST on Saturday, May 29th and 9:00 PM EST on Sunday, May 30th users will not be able to access resources through the Law Library’s Catalog, the Law Library’s Database List, the Law Library’s Frequently Used Databases List, or the Law Library’s Research Guides. Users can still access databases that require an individual user account (ex. Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law), or databases listed on the Main Library’s A-Z Database List.

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American Legal History Research Guide

Introduction.

  • Resources to Start Your Search
  • Secondary Sources, General Overviews, & Miscellaneous Resources
  • The Founding Era
  • Slavery and the Abolition Movement
  • The Civil War, Confederate Resources, & The Reconstruction Era
  • Washington DC Archival Sources
  • Links to Other Georgetown Legal History Guides

Key to Icons

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Welcome to the Georgetown University Law School’s research guide for American Legal History.  Georgetown University offers a wealth of resources related to legal history research.  This guide is designed to help patrons access the University’s materials both via print and online access to various databases of digitized materials.

The library has a substantial collection of American legal history materials in several locations.  The materials housed in the Special Collections Department of the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library are noted in the library catalog with a location of SPEC COLL and a status of SCCR Use Only indicating that Special Collections items may be used only in the Special Collections Reading Room (Williams 210).  There are also many useful resources in the library’s microform collection as well as electronic sources for research.

If you are a member of the Georgetown University community, please feel free to schedule a research consultation with the Special Collections Librarian .  Patrons may also seek assistance from the Reference Desk .

Navigate the pages at the side (or top, if you are on a mobile device) of this guide to find in depth sources, many primary in nature, regarding specific eras of note in legal history as well as a great set of locations to begin your research.  Aside from those detailed sections of the guide, don’t forget to explore the following broader resources.  Starting with the library’s own catalog there are a variety of ways to find and access materials from the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library page.  You can also use the  WorldCat  database, a mega-catalog database, to locate resources which may not be available at the Law Center, and then use our  Inter-Library Loan  service to request the resources which you need. Among the useful research resources available here in the library are  Lexis Nexis ,  Westlaw ,  HeinOnline , Index to Legal Periodicals, Index to Legal Periodicals Retro, JSTOR, Academic Search Premier and Project Muse . While individual sources of note will often be specifically identified throughout this guide, it is of critical importance to search generally through the aforementioned resources (particularly HeinOnline) as the offerings they have cannot be indexed wholly within a research guide.  When researching American legal history, consult early English print and electronic resources which are very useful and relevant. Links to these resources are interspersed throughout this guide as well.

Special Collections

Special Collections Photo

Special Collections Williams Law Library, 2nd floor

Update history.

Created 11/13 (ES & EK) Updated 07/19 (ND)

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  • © Georgetown University Law Library. These guides may be used for educational purposes, as long as proper credit is given. These guides may not be sold. Any comments, suggestions, or requests to republish or adapt a guide should be submitted using the Research Guides Comments form . Proper credit includes the statement: Written by, or adapted from, Georgetown Law Library (current as of .....).
  • Last Updated: Feb 2, 2024 5:52 PM
  • URL: https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/americanlegalhistory

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Legal History

How we are involved.

legalhistory-3.jpg

The Law School is home to one of the world’s great programs in the study of legal history. The history of law offers indispensable insights into the character of our legal systems. Historical materials appear throughout the Law School’s curriculum with specialized courses addressing topics in the history of legal systems around the world.

More About Legal History

Legal History Fellows

legalhistory-2.jpg

The Law School hosts an exceptional range of curricular offerings in legal history and a special forum that brings legal history scholars from around the world to Yale to present on cutting-edge work in the field in a collegial setting suited to searching dialogue and debate.

Course Offerings

Legal History Forum

Yale University Department of History

Law Library

The  Yale Law Library  boasts one of the world’s finest legal history collections. This growing collection is designed to both support and stimulate research and teaching in legal history.

Yale Law Library Rare Book Collection

Rare Books Blog

Legal History Research Guides

Scholarship Repository: Yale Law Special Collections

Scholarship Repository: Yale Law School Oral History Series

We want you to think of Yale not just as the place you received your legal education, but as one of the places where you found your moral compass.

All Areas of Interest

Area of Interest Legal History

From the legal framework of ancient Athens and the legally rich traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to the long development of the English common law and the genesis of the U.S. Constitution, to the ensuing and enduring struggle for civil rights, the ways that different peoples have ordered their societies over the course of human history continue to influence modern legal theory and practice. Harvard Law School students enjoy unparalleled opportunities to study the historical evolution of law as contextualized within a larger world of social movements and political, cultural, and economic change.

From Harvard Law Today

Hls professors, nikolas bowie.

Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law

Maureen Brady

Tomiko brown-nagin.

Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law

John C. Coates

John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics

Christine A. Desan

Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law

Charles Donahue

Paul A. Freund Professor of Law

Noah R. Feldman

Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law

William W. Fisher

WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law

Idriss Fofana

Assistant Professor of Law

John Goldberg

Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence

Annette Gordon-Reed

Carl M. Loeb University Professor

Janet E. Halley

Eli Goldston Professor of Law

Jon D. Hanson

Alan A. Stone Professor of Law

Morton J. Horwitz

Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Emeritus

Elizabeth Papp Kamali

Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law

Duncan M. Kennedy

Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus

Adriaan M. Lanni

Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law

Richard J. Lazarus

Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law

Anna Lvovsky

Professor of Law

Kenneth W. Mack

Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law

Bruce H. Mann

Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law

Intisar A. Rabb

Stephen sachs.

Antonin Scalia Professor of Law

Kristen A. Stilt

Mark tushnet.

William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus

Laura Weinrib

Fred N. Fishman Professor of Constitutional Law

Visiting Professors & Lecturers

Yas banifatemi.

Lecturer on Law

Marco Basile

Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law

Alexander Chen

Daniel r. coquillette.

Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History

Tom G. Donnelly

Daniel farbman.

Visiting Associate Professor of Law

Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Visiting Professor of Law

Havva Guney-Ruebenacker

Tamar herzog.

Harvard University Affiliated Professor

Elizabeth Katz

Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Visiting Professor of Law

Martti Koskenniemi

William D. Zabel ‘61 Visiting Professor in Human Rights

Andrew Lanham

Mary d. lewis, andrew mergen.

Emmett Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law in Environmental Law

Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights

Anne Orford

Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization

Hassaan Shahawy

Daniel l. smail, research programs and centers, animal law & policy program, berkman klein center for internet and society, foundations of private law, julis-rabinowitz program on jewish and israeli law, program in islamic law, program on law and society in the muslim world, related courses, modal gallery.

William & Mary Law School

  • Wolf Law Library
  • Research Guides
  • Topical Research Guides

American Legal History Research

by Fred Dingledy Updated December 2023

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Subject Queries-- Constitutional History--United States Courts--United States--History Federal Government--United States--History Law--United States--History Law and Legislation--United States--History Law and Legislation--United States--States--History Practice of Law--United States--History

Library of Congress Call Numbers for American Legal History issues: KF351-KF373, KF4502, KF4510, KF4541 . Browse the shelves under these call numbers to locate relevant treatises.

To search for materials from other libraries, use the Worldcat database. Selected Books Dinan, John J. State Constitutional Politics: Governing by Amendment in the American States. Available as ebook . KF4555 .A25 D56 2018

Friedman, Lawrence M. American Law in the 20th Century. Available as ebook . KF385 A4F7 2002

Friedman, Lawrence M. A history of American law. 4th ed. Available as ebook . KF352 .F7 2019

Fruchtman, Jack. American Constitutional History: A Brief Introduction. 2d ed. KF4541 .F78 2022

Grossberg, Michael, ed. The Cambridge History of Law in America. KF352 .C36 2007 (3 vols.)

Hadden, Sally E., and Alfred L. Brophy. A Companion to American Legal History. Available as ebook . KF352 .C66 2013

Hall, Kermit. The Magic Mirror: Law in American history. 2nd ed. KF352 .H35 2009

Klarman, Michael J. The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. Available as ebook . KF4541 .K53 2016 

Lynch, David (Judge). T he Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic : Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story, and Thompson. KF8750 .L96 2018

John B. Nann & Morris L. Cohen. The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History. Available as ebook . KF240 .N36 2018

William E. Nelson. E Pluribus Unum : How the Common Law helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776. Available as ebook . KF361 .N46 2019

Orren, Karen & John W. Compton, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution. KF4550 .C36 2018

The Oxford encyclopedia of American political and legal history. Reference JK9 .O94 2012

Sheppard, Steve, ed. The History of Legal Education in the United States: Commentaries and Primary Sources. 2 vols. KF273 H535 1999

Tsai, Robert L. America's Forgotten Constitutions. KF4541 .T73 2014

Urofsky, Melvin I. and Paul Finkelman, eds. Documents of American constitutional and legal history. 3rd ed. KF4502 .D635 2008

Urofsky, Melvin I. A march of liberty : a constitutional history of the United States. 3rd ed. KF4541 .U76 2011

White, G. Edward. American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction. KF352 .W478 2014

White, G. Edward. Law in American history. Volume 2 and Volume 3 available as ebooks. KF352 .W48 2012

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Subject Queries-- Constitutional History Legal History United States -- History

Indexes articles from academic law reviews and bar journals.

Online  coverage: 1908-present.

Full Text Articles American Journal of Legal History (via Hein Online: 1957-2016) American Journal of Legal History (via Oxford Univ. Press Journals: 1996-present) Law and History Review (via Hein Online - most recent three years indexed-only) Westlaw    American Journal of Legal History (AMJLH) (1994-present) Law & History Review (LHISTR) (1996-present)

Swem Library Databases >> History   List of databases designed for historical research available to William & Mary students and faculty.

World Wide Web Resources

Govinfo.gov The Government Publishing Office's (GPO) official web portal for access to federal government publications. Among other things, it provides access to historical versions of the Congressional Record and the Federal Register. Its collection is not complete yet, but GPO is continuing to work on filling historical gaps.

J. Willard Hurst Collection Hosted by the University of Wisconsin Law Library, this collection contains the notes, papers, and publications of J. Willard Hurst, generally considered the father of modern American Legal History. Many of the items have been digitized and are available on this website.

Legal History Blog Blog of Prof. Mary L. Dudziak, Professor of Law, History, and Political Science at U. of Southern California. Prof. Dudziak's blog covers new developments and publications in the field of legal history.

Library of Congress Digital Collections Searchable database of digitized documents and pictures plus descriptions of other items in the Library of Congress's collection. Limit to the subject "Government, Law & Politics" under "Refine Your Results" on the left-hand side of the page.

The National Archives Access documents published online by the Archives, and use the site's research tools to find print resources located at Archive facilities. This website also has links to the websites of Presidential Libraries, another useful resource for historical research.

Women's Legal History This site is an online supplement to the book "Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz", but it also contains a database of biographical information on groundbreaking female attorneys.

American Association of Law Libraries Legal History & Rare Books Special Interest Section A special interest group within the national law librarians' association that focuses on legal history. Their newsletter has discussions of important books in legal history and reviews of recently-published books that discuss legal history.

American Society for Legal History Website of the American Society for Legal History. Includes information on joining the society, meetings, and information on Society publications and discussion lists.

Society created to collect and preserve the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Their website has information on how to join the society, as well as articles, short movies and quizzes about the Court's history.

Book cover

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences pp 1–27 Cite as

Historical Sociology of Law

  • Marta Bucholc 2  
  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online: 26 April 2022

35 Accesses

The chapter offers and overview of historical sociology of law, focusing on the sociological studies of the official law. It unfolds the main themes in historical sociology of law ordered by research traditions and demonstrates the plurality of paths along which historical-sociological studies of law developed. The introduction briefly outlines the philosophical prehistory of sociohistorical approaches to law centers on the connection between the law and the state, on the one hand, and the law and morality, on the other, as a durable motif of ancient philosophy reiterating in contemporary social sciences. It is followed by a presentation of three paradigms in sociology of law, inspired by Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Niklas Luhmann. The role of historical material and the scope of sociohistorical insights in each of these distinct theoretical approaches is exemplified by a brief discussion of the main contributions of each of the three theorists, indicating the further research directions they inspired and the main branches of law which they influenced. The final section includes a synoptic summary of the path of historical sociology of law and concludes with a tentative glance into the future, arguing for a cultural turn in the historical sociology of law and the necessity of its further interdisciplinary connectivity.

  • Sociology of law
  • Legal history
  • Michel Foucault
  • Pierre Bourdieu
  • Niklas Luhmann

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the support of the Polish National Science Centre (2019/34/E/HS6/00295).

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Marta Bucholc

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Bucholc, M. (2022). Historical Sociology of Law. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_55-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_55-1

Received : 30 November 2021

Accepted : 06 January 2022

Published : 26 April 2022

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

Print ISBN : 978-981-15-4106-3

Online ISBN : 978-981-15-4106-3

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  • HIST 1911: Pacific History
  • HIST 1921: The History of Law in Europe
  • HIST 1925: Europe and its Other(s)
  • HIST 1943: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: Indigenous Political Struggle since 1890
  • HIST 2080: Medieval Law: Graduate Seminar
  • HIST 2260: Central Europe: Graduate Seminar
  • HIST 2442: Readings in the History of the U.S. in the 19th Century: Graduate Proseminar
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  • HIST 2474: American Legal History: Law and Social Reform, 1929–1973
  • HIST 2475: Legal History Workshop
  • HIST 2480A: The Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Graduate Seminar
  • HIST 2484A: Crime and Punishment in the History of the Americas: Graduate Seminar
  • HIST 2484B: Crime and Punishment in the History of the Americas: Graduate Seminar
  • HIST 2709: Themes in Modern Sub-Saharan African History: Graduate Proseminar
  • US-WORLD 38: Forced to be Free: Americans as Occupiers and Nation-Builders
  • US-WORLD 42: The Democracy Project

*Please be sure to check the Courses section of the History Website for more information on which of these courses count towards the History concentration and secondary field. Also, while we endeavor to keep this list current, it may not reflect all courses actually offered.*

Welcome to the Legal History Program!  This page is designed to help you navigate Harvard's many opportunities to study legal history. As you will see, our interests extend across a range of times, places and areas of concern. First, you will find a list of faculty and graduate students with an interest in legal history. They should be a resource for mentorship, advising and instruction. Reach out to them. Second, we have compiled a list of courses that touch on aspects of legal history. Regardless of whether you are interested in the Civil Rights Movement, democracy or feudalism, you should find something of interest. While many of our courses are taught through the history department, you are also encouraged to consider offerings from HLS and other departments. Finally, please take a look at our upcoming events. We hope you will join us.

Legal history matters.  Legal history sits at the cross-roads between disciplines. Its study enriches our understanding of both past societies and our own. We ask how law changes. How have the rules that govern our lives developed? How have they been resisted? How have they been changed? Studying legal history also opens our eyes to alternatives. We see how functioning societies of the past embraced solutions quite foreign from our own. On the one hand, this may make us question—even if we do not reject—the logic of our methods. On the other hand, comparison helps us to understand the importance of features of our society, and the consequence of changing them. Studying law in historical context makes us aware of whom law serves. What groups have leveraged law? What groups has law failed? Who makes law and what sectors of society does it reflect? In short, we see how law and society interact. 

Finally, studying legal history helps us to understand our contemporary world. It empowers us to actively engage with the debates of the day. Our courses explore how marriage has   changed over time. Our faculty study how immigrants and minorities have been treated by, and themselves altered, states. Our students learn what democracy has meant and what it can mean. Together, we consider the role and power of judges, lawyers, legislators, organizers and ordinary citizens. 

Regardless of whether you plan to concentrate in history, are thinking about law school or just want to take a class, we look forward to meeting you. 

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The history department at Duke has an unusually strong cohort of scholars with expertise in the history of legal institutions, legal culture, and the relationship between law and society.

Our greatest strength lies in American legal history. Duke historians focus on areas as various as the relationship between legal authority and social hierarchies in the American South, including divisions based on race and gender, regulation of business and the credit system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and early American property law. Outside of the United States, the department boasts numerous faculty whose research overlaps with this growing and dynamic field. Duke now has historians who grapple with legal development in Renaissance Italy, early modern Germany, the early modern British Empire, the eighteenth-century Caribbean, nineteenth-century France, Muslim West Africa from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, and twentieth-century Brazil, especially with regard to labor law, as well as the impact of maritime law on modern warfare. Although the interpretive concerns and methodological approaches of these scholars differ significantly, they all tend to focus on the interactions between legal institutions, doctrines, and values on the one hand and economic, social and cultural experience on the other.

Duke offers a joint JD/MA degree to law students interested in simultaneously pursuing graduate work in history. We offer graduate seminars in legal history as part of our general doctoral curriculum, and a number of our PhD students also pursue research in the field. In the past and present, our graduate students have tackled topics as various as the moral and legal meanings of violence amidst the English Civil War, legal culture in early British India, divorce in eighteenth-century Mexico, infanticide in the early American Republic, freedom suits by antebellum American slaves, the development of commercial law in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian Ocean basin, the dynamics of legal activism within the American Civil Rights Movement, and agricultural regulation in twentieth-century America. 

Duke's libraries, in conjunction with those of other area universities, have impressive print and archival holdings in the history of law, with a particular strength in the legal history of the American South. Our legal history community is also enriched by a large number of scholars who are based in other Duke departments and schools (especially the departments of cultural anthropology and political science, and the Law School) or at other area universities (NCCU, NCSU, and UNC-Chapel Hill). This broader group of historians meets several times a semester at the Triangle Legal History Seminar (TLHS), an interdisciplinary faculty-graduate student seminar that discusses pre-circulated work-in-progress by area and visiting scholars. Seminar topics range across all historical eras and every region of the world. Edward Balleisen also maintains a web portal, Legal History on the Web , which offers links to a wide array of online resources in legal history.

Edward J. Balleisen

The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History

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The study of legal history has a broad application that extends well beyond the interests of legal historians. An attorney arguing a case today may need to cite cases that are decades or even centuries old, and historians studying political or cultural history often encounter legal issues that affect their main subjects. Both groups need to understand the laws and legal practices of past eras. Law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The book provides an overview of legal history research, describing the U.S. legal system and legal authority. It is essential reference is intended for the many nonspecialists who need to enter this arcane and often tricky area of research.

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  • Chase Stephens law enforcement research

History PhD candidate uncovering full story behind integrated Alabama law enforcement

Chase Stephens

Chase Stephens, Auburn University PhD candidate and instructor, is among a renowned group of civil rights researchers in the Department of History . With his dissertation, Stephens hopes to add to the conversation around the impact of Bloody Sunday, specifically on state law enforcement.

"In digging through prominent works on the civil rights movement, prominent works on Bloody Sunday, I noticed no one talks about the aftermath," Stephens said. "The advancements you get in the '60s and early '70s with Black men increasingly becoming police officers, it's not possible without the civil rights movement. It's not possible without the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act."

Stephens' research centers around NAACP v. Allen, the lawsuit that would lead to Alabama’s integrated state police force . In 1972, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. – the civil rights champion behind school integration – found discriminatory hiring practices in state law enforcement.

Johnson ordered the Alabama Department of Public Safety to hire one Black state trooper for every white state trooper hired until the force was made up of 25% Black troopers. The state resisted the quota for years, arguing that Black applicants weren't qualified, and that the quota discriminated against white troopers.

The lawsuit eventually appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986, which upheld Johnson's ruling. Meanwhile, Stephens said the hiring quota allowed Black Alabamians to represent their community, contribute to society and pursue new economic opportunities.

"Denying them access to law enforcement positions either through elected positions like a sheriff, or employment positions like a local beat cop, or even in the state police, they were denied a chance and therefore, denied true equality," Stephens said. "When it comes to labor, nobody's doing these jobs because you're going to make a six-figure salary with all the benefits. But it's an economic opportunity that offered some upward mobility that was not found in manual labor positions or custodial work in the state government, jobs that had been historically almost reserved for Black laborers."

For more than 20 years, various judges reinforced the hiring quota and expanded its scope so that Black troopers would be promoted to leadership positions at the same rate as their white counterparts.

NAACP v. Allen also paved the way for another lawsuit, Mieth v. Dothard, which abolished the height and weight requirements to apply to be a state trooper. Previously, a state trooper had to be at least 5'9" and weigh 160 pounds. The court ruled that this requirement discriminated against women, and within a couple of years, women started becoming state troopers.

By 1995, the Alabama State Troopers reached a 25% Black force.

"Alabama, by the early 1990s, had one of the most diverse state police forces in the nation. To this day, there is a high level of diversity within the state police system, with Black men and women in high-ranking positions," Stephens said. "This doesn’t eliminate any issues within law enforcement, but it provides representation and it's not just white men in blue uniforms who you would associate with brutality and oppression."

Through his dissertation, Stephens hopes to map a more complete civil rights history by including conversations about labor, law enforcement and the relationship between state and federal government. His research thus far includes uncovering hidden patterns of resistance, interviewing state troopers who served during the hiring quota and exploring the aftermath of Bloody Sunday for law enforcement officers.

Stephens said despite its complicated history, Alabama's story of law enforcement integration should inspire.

"With my work and my research, it's not a declension narrative. It is a positive story," Stephens said. "It shows the government resisting and fighting every step of the way, almost. But at the end of the day, the naysayers and the Jim Crow leftovers, they lose, and a positive change does come about."

Find more information about the Department of History at the College of Liberal Arts website.

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Biden-Harris Administration Announces History-Making $3.3 Billion for Locally-Led Projects That Reconnect Communities as Part of President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda

More than 130 communities in 41 states and Washington, DC will benefit from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding to stitch back communities by capping highways, adding new transit routes, adding sidewalks, bridges, bike lanes and more 

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced $3.33 billion in grant awards for 132 projects through the Reconnecting Communities Pilot and Neighborhood Access and Equity discretionary grant programs as part of President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda. The funding is aimed at reconnecting communities that were cut off by transportation infrastructure decades ago, leaving entire neighborhoods without direct access to opportunity, like schools, jobs, medical offices, and places of worship. 

The Biden-Harris Administration is taking historic action to deliver for communities that have been left behind for too long. Thanks to additional funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, this investment is 18 times larger than the investments from the previous year’s standalone Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program.  Both programs are part of the President’s Justice40 Initiative . 

“While the purpose of transportation is to connect, in too many communities past infrastructure decisions have served instead to divide. Now the Biden-Harris administration is acting to fix that,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg . “Today we are proud to announce an unprecedented $3.3 billion to help 132 communities deliver better infrastructure that reconnects residents to jobs, health care, and other essentials.”

The Department has created a virtual story that spotlights communities’ stories, the historic context for the program, and the future it seeks through funding the reconnection of communities here .

In this round of funding for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot and Neighborhood Access and Equity program, the Department is awarding 72 Planning Grants, 52 Capital Construction grants and 8 Regional Planning Grants. Awarded projects include:

  • The second Atlanta grant is for The Stitch Phase 1 Implementation , a cap of Interstates 75/85, known locally as the “Downtown Connector,” will seamlessly reconnect the torn urban fabric of Downtown with a new major park, extensive transportation improvements, sustainable infrastructure, and increased affordable housing. The Downtown Connector was intentionally planned to run through established low-income Black communities as a racially charged method of ridding Downtown of “blighted” areas in favor of new commercially focused development centered around the automobile. The Stitch will provide multi-modal connections over the interstate via multi-use paths, an improved surface transportation network, and enhanced transit amenities.
  • The Reconnecting 4th Ave N: A Two-Way Vision for Reviving Legacy and Inspiring Progress project in Birmingham, Alabama was awarded a grant for a 15-block Complete Streets redesign of Birmingham’s Black Main Street. The redesign will include converting the road from one-way to two-way and will help reconnect downtown neighborhoods and businesses divided by the construction of Interstate 65 in the 1960s. The project encompasses the Historic 4th Avenue Business District, a once thriving hub of black businesses and community in Birmingham. This multimodal project will help to revive the access and connectivity that helped the community thrive prior to its conversion into a one-way street during the 1970s.   
  • The second Portland grant, I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project will be used for the project’s design and constructing the project’s main reconnecting feature—a highway cover that will support new community space and future development, while reconnecting [Lower Albina to] local streets over Interstate 5 (I-5) and providing better access to the central city and the waterfront in Portland, Oregon. Building the highway cover is an essential first step to actualizing the community’s vision and improving the transportation network in partnership with the City of Portland.
  • The Reconciliation, Regeneration, and Reconnecting the Selma to Montgomery Trail through Equitable Transportation Infrastructure in Montgomery, Alabama will reconnect the West Montgomery residents located on the Selma-to-Montgomery Trail to opportunities, access, and connectivity by addressing poor social determinants of health that exist because of segregation, redlining, and construction of Interstates 65 and 85. The project identifies many disenfranchised local communities that will benefit by enhancements to the trail. These enhancements will allow the City of Montgomery to reinvest in foundational transportation solutions in Historic West Montgomery to facilitate the renaissance of the Selma-to-Montgomery Trail community.  
  • The Reconnecting Rexburg: Planning & Designing Connections Across US Hwy 20 project in Rexburg, Idaho will address the impacts of the construction of US Highway 20, which had a profound impact on Rexburg residents when what was once a convenient and well-connected community suddenly found itself faced with a significant barrier, disrupting daily routines, and altering the dynamics of everyday life. The City of Rexburg intends to have a professional company research, assess, design, and plan the best options for reconnecting the disadvantaged communities that lie on the west side of Highway 20 with the town amenities that are necessary and important for daily living.   
  • The Chinatown Stitch project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will complete the first phase of design and construction work for a highway cap to reconnect Chinatown, a community that is disproportionately impacted by the Vine Street Expressway (I-676). Since its inception in the 1960s, the Vine Street Expressway has represented a threat to the Chinatown community and upon completion in the 1990s, the highway effectively separated the neighborhood into the commercial core of Chinatown to the south and a more industrial area to the North. The proposed project aims to address historic inequities caused by transportation infrastructure, restore community connectivity, and improve quality of life. 

The full list of Reconnecting Communities Pilot and Neighborhood Access and Equity awards can be viewed here .

These programs are part of President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative , which set the goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution. The Department prioritized applications from disadvantaged communities that demonstrated strong community engagement and stewardship to advance equity and environmental justice, and would catalyze shared prosperity project development and job creation.

Last year, in the inaugural round of the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, the Biden-Harris administration awarded grants for transformative, community-led solutions, including capping interstates with parks, filling in sunken highways to reclaim the land for housing, and converting inhospitable transportation facilities to tree-lined Complete Streets. These projects will help revitalize communities, provide access to jobs and opportunity, and reduce pollution. 

The Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program (RCP) in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has been combined with the newly-established Neighborhood Access and Equity discretionary grant program in the Inflation Reduction Act.

This joint application makes it more efficient and accessible than ever for project sponsors to apply for the historic levels of infrastructure funding made available by the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda. While Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grants can come from either program, they share important key characteristics including prioritizing disadvantaged communities — including rural, Tribal and urban communities — and improving access to daily needs and basic services.

The Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods program is an important component of the Department’s commitment to equity and the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to supporting communities marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution and strengthening equitable development. Restoring communities like those awarded grants today helps give everyone an equal chance to get ahead and opportunity to accessing jobs and essential services such as healthcare services, grocery stores, and places of worship. To find out more about what the Department is doing to support equity, see the recently update Equity Action Plan, which can be viewed here .

For more information on the Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods, the Reconnecting Communities Pilot and the Neighborhood Access and Equity programs, including additional resources and information for interested applicants and stakeholders, click here .

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  3. Introduction to English Legal History by Baker, John

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  6. (PDF) LEGAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: AN OVERVIEW

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COMMENTS

  1. Historical Research in Law

    The former is the history of lawyers' law, of legal rules and principles. Its sources are predominantly those that are thrown up by the legal process: principally statutes and decided cases, supplemented where possible with lawyers' literature expounding the rules and occasionally reflecting on them. The latter is the history of the law in ...

  2. (PDF) Historical Approach to Legal Research

    Historical approach to legal research helps untangle legal problems rooted in the past. It often provides guideposts showing how things have developed and evolved over the years. Historical ...

  3. Research Guides: Online Legal History Sources: Getting Started

    Hein Online Legal Classics. The HeinOnline Legal Classics Library is a digital collection of many of the most highly regarded works written on American law, published in this country or abroad, from its beginnings to the end of 1860. It also includes American works on foreign, comparative and international law.

  4. Historical Legal Research: Implications and Applications

    Connected with other fields of knowledge, both science and humanities, the historical method in legal research has shown great potential and benefits. 7 In the course of such use, several critical issues have arisen: what is the pattern of interaction between the past and the present; whether lessons of history should absolutely prevail as though past shall govern from the grave or whether ...

  5. The Journal of Legal History

    The 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.

  6. The Oxford Handbook of Legal History

    Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal ...

  7. Guides: American Legal History Research Guide: Introduction

    Georgetown University offers a wealth of resources related to legal history research. This guide is designed to help patrons access the University's materials both via print and online access to various databases of digitized materials. The library has a substantial collection of American legal history materials in several locations.

  8. Legal History

    The Yale Law Library boasts one of the world's finest legal history collections. This growing collection is designed to both support and stimulate research and teaching in legal history. Yale Law Library Rare Book Collection. Rare Books Blog. Legal History Research Guides. Scholarship Repository: Yale Law Special Collections

  9. Full article: What is global legal history?

    1. The 'global'. The first concern that needs to be addressed is whether every history of the emergence of a global legal regime, in the sense of a legal regime that extended over large spaces, is, at the same time, a 'global' legal history according to the standards of the field.

  10. Law and History Review

    ISSN: 0738-2480 (Print) , 1939-9022 (Online) Editor: Gautham Rao American University, USA. Editorial board. Law and History Review ( LHR ), a leading international legal history journal, encompasses global legal history issues. The journal's purpose is to further research in the fields of the social history of law and the history of legal ideas ...

  11. Legal History

    From the legal framework of ancient Athens and the legally rich traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to the long development of the English common law and the genesis of the U.S. Constitution, to the ensuing and enduring struggle for civil rights, the ways that different peoples have ordered their societies over the course of human history continue to influence modern legal theory ...

  12. On Historical and Historical-legal Research: Forms, Challenges and

    Abstract. The present study intended to understand the meaning, forms and challenges in legal-historical research to suggest a general framework for the researchers doing legal-historical research ...

  13. American Legal History Research

    The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History. Available as ebook. KF240 .N36 2018. William E. Nelson. E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776. Available as ebook. KF361 .N46 2019. Orren, Karen & John W. Compton, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution.

  14. Studies in Legal History

    About Studies in Legal History. Published in association with the American Society for Legal History, this series consists of books that grapple with key questions in legal history. The series welcomes works of unusual distinction by both senior and junior scholars. Most of the published volumes in the series deal with American legal history ...

  15. Historical Sociology of Law

    Abstract. The chapter offers and overview of historical sociology of law, focusing on the sociological studies of the official law. It unfolds the main themes in historical sociology of law ordered by research traditions and demonstrates the plurality of paths along which historical-sociological studies of law developed.

  16. Legal History

    Magna Carta, 1215. Welcome to the Legal History Program! This page is designed to help you navigate Harvard's many opportunities to study legal history. As you will see, our interests extend across a range of times, places and areas of concern. First, you will find a list of faculty and graduate students with an interest in legal history.

  17. The evolution of legal research

    The evolution of legal research. October 12, 2022 · 6 minute read. Legal research has always been a constant element of the practice of law. However, the definition of "legal research" has been anything but static over time, especially over the past decade or two. What has changed, and what does it mean for attorneys?

  18. Legal History

    The history department at Duke has an unusually strong cohort of scholars with expertise in the history of legal institutions, legal culture, and the relationship between law and society. Our greatest strength lies in American legal history. Duke historians focus on areas as various as the relationship between legal authority and social ...

  19. The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History

    Law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The book provides an overview of legal history research, describing the U.S. legal system and legal authority.

  20. Legal History

    UVA History Faculty. Fahad Bishara, economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. Emily Burrill, 20th-century West African history, history of gender and sexuality in the French empire . Christa Dierksheide, early American history, with an emphasis on empire, race and slavery. Paul D. Halliday (joint appointment with Law School), global legal history, especially England and ...

  21. Routledge Research in Legal History

    Edited By Ville Erkkilä, Hans-Peter Haferkamp. May 30, 2022. This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by dictatorial governments. The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in ...

  22. Legal research: 3-step how-to guide

    1. Identifying the legal issue is not so straightforward. Legal research involves interpreting many legal precedents and theories to justify your questions. Finding the right issue takes time and patience. 2. There's too much to research. Attorneys now face a great deal of case law and statutory material.

  23. Cases, Codes, & Legal Scholarship

    Court Records and Legal History; Cases, Codes, & Legal Scholarship; Search this Guide Search. ... "a free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility" The RI State Law Library. RI State Law Library "The library serves the reference and research needs of the bench and the bar. As a publicly funded institution committed to access ...

  24. Research in Progress in Legal History

    The list of legal history research in progress set forth below has been compiled as a service to scholars by the American Society for Legal History. It is fragmentary, but hopefully it will elicit re- ... 72 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY Vol. XVII Donald M. McKale (D., Kent State)--The Nazi Party Courts: Efforts at Discipline and Unity ...

  25. Generative AI Promises to Revolutionize Legal Research

    Another major advantage of AI-assisted legal research is the ability to ask follow-up questions. After receiving an initial answer, the user of these research platforms can ask one or more follow ...

  26. Chase Stephens law enforcement research

    Chase Stephens, Auburn University PhD candidate and instructor, is among a renowned group of civil rights researchers in the Department of History. With his dissertation, Stephens hopes to add to the conversation around the impact of Bloody Sunday, specifically on state law enforcement. "In digging through prominent works on the civil rights ...

  27. DC's fearmongering tough-on-crime law is a publicity stunt doomed to

    Tough-on-crime tactics persist despite history and research repeatedly showing that they are ineffective and detrimental to the very communities they seek to protect.

  28. Biden-Harris Administration Announces History-Making $3.3 Billion for

    Media Contact. Press Office. US Department of Transportation 1200 New Jersey Ave, SE Washington, DC 20590 United States. Email: [email protected] Phone: 1 (202) 366-4570 If you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability, please dial 7-1-1 to access telecommunications relay services.