Library guides: Law: Legal History

Legal History

Australian Federation Law Library (1901-1950) (via AustLII)
This Library includes databases of the Australasian Legal History Libraries.
WorldLII Federation Law Library
Conciliation and Arbitration; Conscription; History of Federation; Separation of Powers; White Australia Policy.

Australian Colonial Law Monographs (via AustLII)
This database contains law monographs published in Australia pre-1901 (1846-1900).
Australasian Colonial Legal History Library (pre-1901) (via AustLII)
This Library includes databases of the Australasian Legal History Libraries.

Australian Constitutional History
Via WorldLII
Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK)
Museum of Australian Democracy
Records of the Australasian Federal Conventions of the 1890s
Debates and Proceedings of the Australasian Federation Conference, Melbourne, 6-14 February, 1890; Debates of the National Australasian Convention, Sydney, 2 March–9 April 1891; Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention of 1897/8 in three sessions.

The American journal of legal history (via HeinOnline)
1957 to present.
History of International Law (via HeinOnline)
Searchable database which offers access to more than 500 titles and 550,000 pages, and is updated frequently, dating back to 1690 on international law subjects such as war & peace, the Nuremberg Trials, law of the sea, international arbitration, Hague Conferences and Conventions and much more.

Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective : 1908-1981 (EBSCOhost)
Covers legal journals published between 1908-1981 from the US, Canada, Great Britian, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
JSTOR
Full text journals, books, images, and primary sources from the humanities, social sciences and life sciences.
JSTOR is a fully-searchable database containing ebooks and current and back issues of scholarly journals in a wide variety of subject areas, concentrated in the arts, social sciences and humanities. JSTOR offers access to various discrete subject-based collections.

Legal Classics Library (via HeinOnline)
Searchable database which offers access to more than 1400 works from some of the greatest legal minds in history. Including classics and rare items, the collection focuses on constitutional law, political science, and other topics.

Making of modern law : Legal treatises 1800-1926 (Gale Primary Sources)
Originally derived from two essential reference collections for historical legal studies, the Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections. Provides digital images on every page of 22,000 legal treatises on US and British law published from 1800 through 1926.
Full-text searching on more than 10 million pages provides researchers access to critical legal history, including casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches and more.

Oxford Scholarship Online. Law
Cross-searchable library containing the full text of Oxford University Press books in the areas of public international law; constitutional and administrative law; philosophy of law; criminal law and criminology; human rights law; EU law; legal history; law of obligations; comparative law; company and commercial law; environmental and energy law; legal profession and ethics; employment law; intellectual property, IT, and media law; competition law; medical law; private international law; family law.

Australasian Modern Legal History Library (1951-2000)
This Library includes databases of Australian legal history accessible via AustLII.

Digitised Newspapers and More
Trove - National Library of Australia. A good source of historical legal decisions is the law reporting in the old newspapers.

The Prosecution Project
This project will produce a rich understanding of how crime has been prosecuted in Australia. It will also tell us much about Australian history – how people lived, how they behaved, how they dealt with conflict and tragedy, how legal and political institutions responded to crime and its consequences. This project is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC Laureate Fellowship, 2013-18) and Griffith University.

Australian States (via WorldLII)
Legal history.
Australian States Founding Documents (via WorldLII)
Original texts, transcripts and information relating to various constitutional and other legislative documents of the 19th and 20th century (Documenting a Democracy).
Legge's Supreme Court Cases (NSW) (AustLII)
This database contains Legge's Supreme Court Cases (NSW)(NSWLeggeSC) (1830-1863).
Queensland Historical Legal Collection
Hosted by Queensland University of Technology Library
Queensland Law (Historical Legislation)
The Queensland Law Collection contains historical Queensland legislation and other legal materials relating to Queensland.

Access to Law - Legal History
Legal Resources selected & annotated by
Inner Temple Library
Avalon Project
Yale Law School. Documents in law, history and diplomacy.
Legal History on the Web
Duke University
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
Timeline of the history of international law
At present there are 104 items, each with some brief introductory or explanatory text and a link to free OUP content.
WorldLII Legal History by Country
Includes Law Journals & Blogs and Other Indexes