Content start here
Hero Background Image

Resources

Center for Law, History and Culture
Center for Law, History and Culture
Explore the Center

The following list contains links to organizations, journals, archives, and full-text resources related to law and the humanities.  To recommend additions to these lists, please contact us.

Professional Organizations toggle arrow icon

A. U.S.

B. Outside the U.S.

Institutions, Institutes and Departments toggle arrow icon

A. U.S.

B. Outside the U.S.

Journals toggle arrow icon
Law and Humanities toggle arrow icon

  • The Legal Scholarship Network (publishing journals of working papers - many of which are available free of charge)

  • Baylor University Library, Baylor Collections of Political Materials

  • American Historical Association

  • Bowdoin College, George J. Mitchell Papers

  • College of William and Mary, Warren Burger Collection

  • University of Idaho Special Collections: finding aids for several judges, attorneys, law firms, and law-related organizations which were prominent in the history and development of Idaho in the late 19th and 20th centuries. An overview identifies some of the more significant collections.

  • University of Louisville Law Library: includes finding aids for the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Papers and John Marshall Harlan Papers. See also the online exhibit, A Legacy of Leadership: African American Pioneers in Kentucky Law.

  • University of South Carolina Law Library, South Carolina Legal History Collection: an overview of the collections, together with biographical sketches & portraits of major figures in the state's legal history.

  • Stanford University, Records of MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund): archives documenting MALDEF's advocacy of civil and legal rights for Mexican Americans from its founding in 1967.

  • Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland, David Hoffman web site: an in-depth examination of the career, writings, and thought of David Hoffman (1784-1854), legal writer, author, and pioneer in American legal education who was the first law professor at the University of Maryland.

  • University of Texas at Austin, Tarlton Law Library Rare Books & Special Collections: Includes descriptions of almost 80 archival collections, such as the papers of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, other state & federal appellate judges, deans & professors of the University of Texas School of Law, Law School organizations, and Walton H. Hamilton (Yale law professor & New Deal economist). Also features guides to resources on the Sweatt v. Painter case, and Aztec & Maya law.

  • University of Virginia Law Library Special Collections: guides include finding aids for papers of Supreme Court Justices Roger Brooke Taney and James Clark McReynolds, as well as papers of many Virginia law professors, alumni, and judges.

  • Washington & Lee University School of Law, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Archives: general description of the papers of Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., plus an overview of the School of Law's archives and manuscript collections of law faculty and important figures in law and public service.

  • Library of Congress Manuscript Division: a gopher server offering finding aids to dozens of manuscript collections, including the papers of federal judge John J. Sirica, NAACP president & lawyer Arthur Barnett Springarn, and Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams.

  • Research Libraries Group, Studies in Scarlet project: description of a collaborative project to create a comprehensive digital collection on 19th-century family law and domestic relationships, including both primary legal materials and historical background materials from seven major research libraries and archives.

  • Home page of Bernard Hibbitts, with i.a. downloadable papers.

B. Outside the U.S.

Archival Resources toggle arrow icon

  • The Legal Scholarship Network (publishing journals of working papers - many of which are available free of charge)

  • Baylor University Library, Baylor Collections of Political Materials

  • American Historical Association

  • Bowdoin College, George J. Mitchell Papers

  • College of William and Mary, Warren Burger Collection

  • University of Idaho Special Collections: finding aids for several judges, attorneys, law firms, and law-related organizations which were prominent in the history and development of Idaho in the late 19th and 20th centuries. An overview identifies some of the more significant collections.

  • University of Louisville Law Library: includes finding aids for the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Papers and John Marshall Harlan Papers. See also the online exhibit, A Legacy of Leadership: African American Pioneers in Kentucky Law.

  • University of South Carolina Law Library, South Carolina Legal History Collection: an overview of the collections, together with biographical sketches & portraits of major figures in the state's legal history.

  • Stanford University, Records of MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund): archives documenting MALDEF's advocacy of civil and legal rights for Mexican Americans from its founding in 1967.

  • Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland, David Hoffman web site: an in-depth examination of the career, writings, and thought of David Hoffman (1784-1854), legal writer, author, and pioneer in American legal education who was the first law professor at the University of Maryland.

  • University of Texas at Austin, Tarlton Law Library Rare Books & Special Collections: Includes descriptions of almost 80 archival collections, such as the papers of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, other state & federal appellate judges, deans & professors of the University of Texas School of Law, Law School organizations, and Walton H. Hamilton (Yale law professor & New Deal economist). Also features guides to resources on the Sweatt v. Painter case, and Aztec & Maya law.

  • University of Virginia Law Library Special Collections: guides include finding aids for papers of Supreme Court Justices Roger Brooke Taney and James Clark McReynolds, as well as papers of many Virginia law professors, alumni, and judges.

  • Washington & Lee University School of Law, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Archives: general description of the papers of Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., plus an overview of the School of Law's archives and manuscript collections of law faculty and important figures in law and public service.

  • Library of Congress Manuscript Division: a gopher server offering finding aids to dozens of manuscript collections, including the papers of federal judge John J. Sirica, NAACP president & lawyer Arthur Barnett Springarn, and Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams.

  • Research Libraries Group, Studies in Scarlet project: description of a collaborative project to create a comprehensive digital collection on 19th-century family law and domestic relationships, including both primary legal materials and historical background materials from seven major research libraries and archives.

  • Home page of Bernard Hibbitts, with i.a. downloadable papers.

B. Outside the U.S.

General Sources toggle arrow icon

  • The Bentham Project is editing and publishing the complete works of the great English legal reformer Jeremy Bentham. The site includes bibliographies of Bentham's works and a brief biography.

  • The Federal Judicial Center makes several publications of the Federal Judicial History Office available via its web site (in Adobe PDF format), including Creating the Federal Judicial System, A Directory of Oral History Interviews Related to the Federal Courts, A Guide to the Preservation of Federal Judges' Papers, and its newsletter The Court Historian.

  • H-LAW is the H-NET (Humanities Online) discussion list devoted to legal and constitutional history. Its web site includes logs of H-LAW discussions, book reviews, a directory of legal historians, and links to the American Society for Legal History, the index to Law & History Review, and other sites of interest to legal historians.

  • Iura Communia provides access to bibliographic information, texts, articles, announcements, discussion, and links relating the history of Ius Comune, the common law of continental legal systems. Most of the text is in Italian. Maintained by Mario Montorzi, Faculty of Jurisprudence, University of Pisa.

  • Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' Civil War service is documented as part of a web site devoted to the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, "The Harvard Regiment." Included is the full text of Holmes' famous 1884 Memorial Day speech

  • Legal History Connections, maintained by Prof. Bernard Hibbitts of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, offers links to Web sites on American legal history, ancient law, and English legal history. Links to legal history course materials by Prof. Hibbits and others are available via his home page.

  • NetSERF: The I nternet Connection for Medieval Resources has a sizable set of links to resources on medieval legal history, including full-text sources, essays, and bibliographies. Completely overhauled and redesigned in June 2000.

  • Roman Law Resources, by Ernest Metzger, Faculty of Law, University of Aberdeen, includes annotated links to many online Roman law texts, as well as links to other Roman law web sites, and directories of ancient law historians and booksellers specializing in Roman Law.

  • Documents for American Legal History (Robert Palmer, University of Houston Law Center)

  • Famous American Trials (Douglas Linder, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law)

  • Sweatt v. Painter Archive (Thomas Russell, University of Texas School of Law)

Court Records toggle arrow icon

  • California State Archives: general information on records of state appellate courts, constitutional conventions, and Spanish & Mexican land grants.

  • Maine State Archives, Judicial Records: historical sketches of the state's courts and an overview of the records they generate. Inventories to judicial records are in the Guide to State Agency Records.

  • Maryland State Archives: finding aids for state agency records include several for Maryland court records from colonial times to the modern era.

  • Minnesota Historical Society, Research Center: search PALS (their online catalog) for the subject "Court records--Minnesota" to see descriptions of the archives of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

  • National Archives & Records Administration: See the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States for information on the records of federal courts and the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition, their their NARA Archival Information Locator (NAIL) database has images of several important sets of source materials, such as the Rosenberg Case Files, selected U.S. District Court files, 1685-1991, and much more; check NAIL's New Additions page.

  • New Orleans Public Library, Archives & Special Collections: includes finding aids to records of colonial, territorial, state, and municipal court records. A guide to genealogical sources includes further information about court records.

  • North Carolina State Archives: brief descriptions of state and county court records are available via the links to "Historical Research" and the MARS database.

  • Pennsylvania State Archives: listing of record groups leads to finding aids for various Pennsylvania courts and law enforcement agencies, from the colonial era to the present.

  • Texas State Archives, judicial records: finding aids to records of the Texas Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, 3rd Court of Appeals, and the former Court of Appeals.

  • State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Archives Division: search ArCat (their online catalog) for the subject "judicial records" to see descriptions of the archives of Wisconsin court; descriptions for the papers of law firms and other manuscript collections dealing with legal issues are also included.

Full-Text Sources toggle arrow icon

  • The American Radicalism Collection, Michigan State University, offers scanned images of many items in the collection, with regular additions. Access is via subject and title lists. Of interest to legal historians are dozens of items published by radical groups on the Rosenberg spy case, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the Scottsboro Boys, civil rights, the Ku Klux Klan, and labor unions.

  • The Amistad Case: The National Archives presents digitized documents related to the U.S. Supreme Court case of U.S. v. The Amistad (1841), in which the Court freed a group of Africans who had taken over the Spanish slave ship on which they had been imprisoned, and cleared the Africans of murder charges in the death of the ship's captain and cook.

  • The Avalon Project, Yale Law School: "Digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government," ranging from the Code of Hammurabi to Magna Carta, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. All documents transcribed and/or translated in modern English.

  • Bracto n's De Legibus, composed in the 13th century, is the earliest known attempt to rationally describe the whole of English law. This online version of Bracton (sponsored by the Ames Foundation, the Cornell Legal Information Institute, & Harvard Law Library) is based on Samuel Thorne's edition and offers framed & unframed versions of the Latin & English text, fully searchable.

  • A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1873: Part of the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. The initial release in Mar. 1998 included full text of documents and debates from the First and Second Congresses (1789-1793), totaling about 4,400 pages of documents. Information can be browsed or searched.

  • The Constitution of the United States of America, Analysis and Interpretation: Annotations of Cases Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States to June 29, 1992: provided by the Library of Congress' CongressionalResearch Service, in cooperation with the U.S. Senate and Government Printing Office (GPO). The volume is both searchable and browsable, and contains annotated references to Supreme Court decisions in their constitutional context. It is arranged by article and amendment and is available in both plain-text and Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) formats.

  • History of Economic Thought, McMasters University: Includes the full text of selected works by such prominent legal scholars as Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, Matthew Hale, Henry Sumner Maine, Frederic Maitland, and Paul Vinogradoff.

  • New South Wales Superior Court decisions, 1788-1899: Selected, edited and annotated by Prof. Bruce Kercher, School of Law, Macquarie University, with the text taken from contemporary newspapers and manuscript sources, and accessible via case and subject indexes. These decisions fill out the generally skimpy published reports of New South Wales appellate courts for this period; see Kercher's introduction.

  • Oyez Oyez Oyez: digitized audio recordings of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, from 1955 onward; updated regularly.

  • Roman Law: An experimental site, containing two extracts from the Corpus Iuris Iustiniani with hypertext links to the corresponding glosses of Accursius. Also present are biographical sketches of a few major Roman law writers. Maintained by Thomas Rufner, University of Tuebingen.

  • Professor Thomas D. Russell, of the University of Texas School of Law, provides excerpts from dozens of documents and texts for his courses, "History of American Law" and "History of Racial Discrimination at the University of Texas."

  • Supreme Court Decisions, 1937-1975: full text of decisions, searchable, at the Government Printing Office's web site. "The database is made available to the public as a finding aid to the 'official' version in the United States Reports, therefore, GPO does not guarantee the authenticity or completeness of the data."

  • Supreme Court Opinions, 1937-Present: Cases are browsable by volume number or year; searchable by citation, title and full text of the opinions; and also include hypertext links. On the Findlaw site, maintained by the Northern California Assn. of Law Librarians.

  • The World Wide Legal Information Association, History of Law Section offers the full text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the 1689 English Bill of Rights (as of 20 Nov. 1996). Also available are a legal history time line and a "LAW Hall of Fame." All material on the WWLIA site is prepared by lawyers.

  • The University of Oklahoma: A Chronology of US Historical Documents

Books, Book Reviews, and Article Abstracts toggle arrow icon
Course Pages toggle arrow icon

 

Amistad Mutiny
Amistad Mutiny

USC Gould School of Law

699 Exposition Boulevard

Los Angeles, California 90089-0071

footer logo

Copyright © 2025 USC Gould. All Rights Reserved.