research on legal history

The American Society for Legal History

is an international academic society dedicated to fostering scholarship and teaching in the many fields of legal history around the world.

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series

Announcing the 2023 book and article prize winners.

Please join us in celebrating an amazing year of scholarship!

Announcing the 2023 Preyer Scholars

Learn more about their work here

Announcing the 2023 Hurst Fellows

Read more about this year's fellows and the Hurst institute

Congratulations to our 2022 Prize winners!

Honorary fellows of the aslh - 2022.

Read the full citations here

2021 ASLH Prize Winners and Honorees

We are absolutely delighted to announce the Society's 2021 prize winners and honorees.

2021 ASLH Election Results

The ASLH has recently elected a new president-elect, new board members, and new nominating committee members.

New ASLH Fellowships

The ASLH has created new fellowships honoring distinguished scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of legal history.

Upcoming Conference — New Orleans, November 4-6, 2021

Please join us at the InterContinental Hotel, steps away from the historic French Quarter and the riverfront. The complete program and information on vaccination and social distancing measures are now available.

Wallace Johnson First Book Program

The Wallace Johnson First Book Program brings together 6 first book authors in even-numbered years. The program meets throughout the year, first at the ASLH Annual Meeting, and then both virtually and in person over the next 12 months, culminating in a lightning round session at the following annual meeting. The next Johnson Program will be held in 2022.

Hurst Summer Institute

The Hurst Summer Institute is a two-week gathering of 12 early career scholars held biennially in June of odd-numbered years. The Hurst is convened by a well-known senior legal historian and is designed to provide a supportive and substantive environment for those at the outset of their careers as legal historians. The next Hurst will be held in Madison, Wisconsin in June 2021.

ASLH supports members and the broader field of legal history in many ways. The Society offers a number of dissertation, book, and article prizes, as well as research grants for early career scholars. Many of these awards are made through the generosity of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation; others are funded by members’ donations and dedicated funds. ASLH also provides limited start-up funding for new or early stage ventures in legal history for up to three years.

Publications

ASLH sponsors the Law and History Review (LHR), a quarterly peer-reviewed journal and accompanying online venue, The Docket. The editor-in-chief of LHR is Gautham Rao. The official book series of the Society, Studies in Legal History (SLH), publishes monographs in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. Editors of SLH are Holly Brewer, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Michael Lobban, and Reuel Schiller.

Our Upcoming Conference — San Francisco, CA

October 24–26, 2024

Latest News

January 3, 2024

ASLH (Virtual) Book Club: New Member Page

November 1, 2023

2023 Election Results

October 31, 2023

Congratulations to the 2023 Book and Article Prize Winners!

October 22, 2023

2023 Final Program

Become a member.

The ASLH supports our members in many ways, including offering a variety of awards and fellowships, and funding of proposals and projects. In many ways, including offering a variety of awards and fellowships.

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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.

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Sources for Early American Legal History

Getting started, books and journal articles, finding cases, statutes and codes, getting help.

Because legal citation and publication didn't become regularized until the 19th century, researching early cases and laws can seem overwhelming. This guide contains suggested sources to help get you started.

Archives Links

If the material you need isn't available here, it might be available from the state or federal archives. 

• U.S. National Archives
• Archives Library Information Center- Directory of State Archives Directory of state libraries and archives, provided by the U.S. National Archives.

Online Research Guides

• Legal History Resources (University of Michigan)
• Legal History Guides: Anglo American Juries (Georgetown Law)
• History of Crime and Punishment (Georgetown Law)
• Legal History (University of Chicago Law)
• Legal History (University of Texas Law)
• American Legal History Online (University of Chicago Law)

Print Research Guides

• Bibliography of Early American Law (BEAL) by Morris L. Cohen Call Number: Reference KF1 .C58 1998 ISBN: 1575882337 Publication Date: 1998 In print and online via the Hein Online Legal Bibliography Collection
• The lawyer's reference manual of law books and citations by Charles Soule Call Number: Reference KF240 .S68x 1953 Publication Date: 1953

• Pimsleur's Checklists of basic American legal publications by edited by Marcia Singal Zubrow. Call Number: Reference KF2 .P56x Publication Date: 1984-

Finding Articles

• 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.
• America: History and Life (ABC-CLIO) Indexes journal articles on American 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.
• Law Journal Library (HeinOnline) Access via HarvardKey. Full-text, page image access to law reviews and journals. Coverage begins with a journal’s first volume but does not usually include its most recent issues. Use the HeinOnline ScholarCheck citator to locate bar journals and law reviews that cite an article.
• Legaltrac Access is available on the Harvard Law School campus. Off-campus access is available to current HLS affiliates and controlled by Harvard Key. LegalTrac provides citations to articles in over 1,000 legal periodicals published since 1980. LegalTrac covers law reviews, bar association journals, legal newspapers, and international legal journals. It also covers law-related articles from about 1,000 additional business and general interest titles. Geographical coverage includes the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
• Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (EBSCO) Access via HarvardKey. The Index to Legal Periodicals & Books (ILP) provides citations to articles in over 800 legal periodicals, including law reviews, bar journals, yearbooks, institutes, and government publications. In 1994, ILP began indexing legal books and now includes approximately 2,000 per year. Check access in Westlaw.

Historical Newspaper Sources

• 20th Century American Newspapers, Series 1 more... less... Digital archives of the following newspapers:##•The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana; 1923-1988)##•The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio; 1923-1991)##•The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon; 1923-1987)
• 19th Century U.S. Newspapers more... less... Full-text database of ca. 500 urban and rural U.S. newspapers, published between 1800 and 1899. Contains approximately 1.7 million pages of content, which can be viewed as articles or full-page images.
• 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.

Theses and Dissertations

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

Books About American Legal History

There are many books written on American legal history. These two give a general overview. You can also search or browse HOLLIS for more specific titles.

• Transformation of American Law 1780-1860 by Morton Horwitz In print at Law School KF366 .H6 (HOLLIS:00344228)
• Cambridge History of Law in America (3 volumes) Also in print at Law School KF352 .C36 2008x (HOLLIS:011381138)
• Link to more HOLLIS results for Law--United States--History

Historical Legal Treatises

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

• HeinOnline The Legal Classics Library contains a number of historically significant treatises more... less... http://heinonline.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/HOL/Help?topic=lucenesyntax
• 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.
• 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
• 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.
• HOLLIS Classic Search HOLLIS to identify possible print sources. Use the expanded search to combine your subject keywords and a date range.

Nominative Reporters

If you find case citations in early cases and treatises, they often don't follow the modern standardized citation format.

Early collections of case decisions were cited by the name of the clerk who reported the cases. For example, you may see Marbury v. Madison cited as 1 Cranch 137 after William Cranch, the reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801-1815.  Frequently, the  nominative report was later renumbered or republished into one of the modern official reporters. Marbury is now cited as 5 U.S. 137.

Here are some tips for finding and interpreting early nominative reporter cites:

• *If possible determine the jurisdiction.  Table 1 of the Bluebook lists many of the nominative state and federal reporters by jurisdiction.
• *Use an abbreviation index or dictionary to decipher the abbreviation.
• *Use tools to search case databases by party name instead of citation. Check alternate spellings of the party names.
• *Try finding the case cited in a more modern source with standardized citations.
• *Check the treatise to see if the author provided a table or guide to the abbreviations used in the text.

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

Subject Digests

Digests are a useful tool for finding case citations organized by subject. Use these general digests to identify early cases, or search HOLLIS or full-text databases to find subject-specific digests.

• United States Annual Digest for the years... Print: At the Law School Depository Covers 1847-1888 Selected volumes available on Google Books See also http://hollis.harvard.edu/?itemid=|library/m/aleph|008204146
• Century Edition of the American Digest Covers cases from 1658-1896

Sources for Early Case Law

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

• HeinOnline Several Hein Online libraries include early case reporters, including: * Legal Classics Library *New York State Legal Research Library *The English Reports more... less... http://heinonline.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/HOL/Help?topic=lucenesyntax
• LLMC Digital LLMC Digital includes a number of early case law reporters organized by state. 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.
• Google Books Some early reporters are available on Google Books
• HOLLIS Classic Search HOLLIS Classic to find nominative reporters that you haven't been able to locate in a database. *Use the expanded search *Search for Subject = Law Reports AND Keyword = [reporter's last name]

Legislative History Sources

If you are looking for sources for congressional documents and other legislative history materials, please see our Federal Legislative History Guide.

• Research Guide for Federal Legislative History To find additional early congressional documents and sources for legislative history, please consult this research guide.

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)

Sources for Early Statutes and Codes

Several historical databases include statutes and codes:

• HeinOnline Several Hein Online libraries include statutes and codes reporters, including: * Legal Classics Library *New York State Legal Research Library *The English Reports (including the Statutes of the Realm) *U.S. Code and Statutes at Large *State Session Laws more... less... http://heinonline.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/HOL/Help?topic=lucenesyntax
• LLMC Digital LLMC Digital includes early codes, session laws and other state documents organized by state.
• 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.
• 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)
• CIS State constitutional conventions [microform]. Law School Mic KF4530 .C57x 1979 (Drawer 867)
• The NBER/Maryland State Constitutions Project Online portal to the texts of state constitutions
• Sources and documents of United States constitutions, edited and annotated by William F. Swindler. Law School KF4530 .S94
• Sources and documents of United States constitutions, second series / edited and annotated by William F. Swindler. Law School KF4530 .S68 1982
• World Constitutions Illustrated (HeinOnline) Access via Harvard Key. HeinOnline World Constitutions Illustrated provides access to contemporary and historical documents, as well as 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 including official government websites. Jurisdiction: Global

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7 Historical Legal Research: Implications and Applications

• Published: January 2020
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Study of history of laws and legal systems unravels their social dimensions and gives insight into the dynamics of economics, communitarian ethos, and the cultural trajectory beneath them. History unravels the growth of legal concepts, ideas, conscience of the community underlying the law, political and social movements which produced the law, and international relations, which shaped the law at the national and international levels. Within this discussion on historical legal research, the chapter discusses the following points: ( a ) the interrelated nature of internal legal history, which focuses on evolution of law making, and external legal history, which contextualises law in its social milieu; ( b ) how archival research, which is a part of historical study, should be conducted by examining the authenticity of the document, relation with events, and central proposition emerging in the discourse; ( c ) the building up of knowledge of the legal system by legal historians, judges, and scholars have through historical study; and ( d ) the application of internal and external criticisms to archival data in legal disputes involving historical disagreements.

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• 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 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.

Los viajes de las ideas sobre la cuestión criminal hacia /desde Argentina

Volume 24,  Máximo Sozzo, Jorge Núñez (eds.) Los viajes de las ideas sobre la cuestión criminal hacia /desde Argentina " class="more mpg-icon mpg-icon-right2" href="/publications/gplh-24?c=1935773">more

Seeking Capture, Resisting Seizure. An International Legal History of the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (1826–1845)

Volume 22, Adriane Sanctis de Brito more

Law and Diversity: European and Latin American Experiences from a Legal Historical Perspective. Vol. 1: Fundamental Questions

Volume 21, Peter Collin, Agustín Casagrande (eds.) more

Towards a Democratic Franchise. Suffrage Reform in the Twentieth-Century Bahamas

Volume 20, Stephen B. Aranha more

Staatsangehörigkeit und Rassismus. Rechtsdiskurse und Verwaltungspraxis in den Kolonien Eritrea und Deutsch-Ostafrika (1882–1919)

Volume 19, Nicola Camilleri more

Celebrar lo imposible. El Código Civil en el régimen jurídico de la propiedad: Córdoba entre fines del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX

Volume 18, Pamela Alejandra Cacciavillani more

• Other Web Gateways to Legal History

Library Research Guides/General Reference Resources

• Primary Source Databases/Web Archives
• Law & Popular Culture
• Chronologies
• Publishers with Legal History Lists
• Workshops, Seminars, and Working Groups
• Scholarly Associations and Networks
• Graduate Programs in Legal History/Law and Society
• Reading Lists
• Fellowships
• Job Market for Legal History
• Article / Book Companion Websites

Library Guides

• Roman Law Resources , Ernest Metzger, University of Glasgow Extremely rich compilation of bibliographies, teaching resources, and links related to the history of Roman law.
• Research Guide in English Legal History , Duke Law School Primarily an overview of non-electronic sources in English law.
• Legal History Resources Online , University of Melbourne Comprehensive overview of Australian legal history.
• Legal History -- Crime and Punishment Research Guide, Georgetown University Law School Extensive overview of primary/secondary sources and internet resources, with a strong emphasis on the English and American experience.
• American Legal History Research Guide, University of Chicago Law School Another large and comprehensive research guide, with especially extensive overviews of archival collections related to law available in the Chicago area, either at research libraries or government archives; includes a very useful description of extant manuscript court records for the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and the federal government housed at the Great Lakes Branch of the National Archives.
• Guide to Manuscripts, Special Collections, Harvard Law School Overview of Harvard’s manuscript holdings in legal history.
• Women’s Legal History Biography Project , Stanford Law School Extensive biographical information on women lawyers in America, with bibliographies, some primary source texts, and numerous links.
• International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing, and Justice , Ian Bridgely and Clive Emlsey, Open University Extensive overviews of scholarly literature and primary sources related to all facets of the history of criminal justice, with a focus on the U.K. and the British Empire. Useful links to related websites.
• Anglo-Indian Legal History , Mitch Fraas, University of Pennsylvania Includes extensive bibliographies of primary sources, links to primary sources and discussions of the topic area, and some of Fraas’ own research notes. Focused on early colonial period.
• Mitra Sharafi’s South Asian Legal History Resources , Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin-Madison Extremely rich compilation of published primary sources and law articles, along with a research guide to case law, information about Indian colonial lawyers, bibliography of secondary sources, research notes, and Sharafi’s perspectives on the field from the sitemaker, and plentiful links. Weighted toward the later colonial period.
• India Legal Research Guide: Introduction , Sunil Rao, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law Library Extensive overview of “Indian primary and secondary legal resources (primarily federal) available at the UW Law Library and online.”
• Research resources on Israeli legal history , Tel Aviv University Guide to Israeli legislation, case law, and secondary sources and links to primary documents. Some links to legal history databases outside Israeli context as well.
• Deutsches Rechtswoerterbuch , The Heidelberg Academy of Sciences Compre­hensive dictionary of historical German and West Germanic legal terms. Default German text with English and French translations available.
• Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Jurists , Ames Foundation An updated and refined version of Kenneth Pennington’s Medieval and Early Modern Jurists: A Bio-Bibliographical Listing. It includes lists of manuscript libraries arranged by work and author.