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
