legal history

New Zealand's Lost Cases

New Zealand's Lost Cases is a project located at the Victoria University of Wellington, which involves the identification and collation of early New Zealand cases from newspapers, manuscript collections, archives and judges notebooks.  The site currently holds details of all Supreme Court and Court of Appeal cases for the period 1842-1869, along with information on the sources used. The Cases database can be searched by keyword or using an advanced search option; most entries include transcripts of the original source. 

Irish legal history: an overview and guide to the sources

A bibliographic essay compiled by Janet Sinder, originally published in Law Library Journal in 2001. The essay is made available via BrooklynWorks, the scholarly repository of Brooklyn Law School. The essay lists sources for researching Irish legal history from the earliest days of the Brehon legal system to the date of publication. Brief explanations of the Irish legal system are provided. The essay is available as a free to download PDF.

Peter Forskaal: Thoughts on Civil Liberty

Website dedicated to and celebrating Peter Forsskål's influential treatise Tankar om borgerliga friheten (Thoughts on Civil Liberty) published in Sweden in 1792. Forsskal's work contributed to access to information and the abolition of prior censorship which was established in 1766 by law in Sweden. The site gives information about the history of the work, access to the original pamphlet text and in English translation and in several other languages. Details of events related to freedom of information, civil liberties and the legacy of Peter Forskaal are provided.

Haitian Law Digital Collection

The Haitian Law Digital Collection provides access to digitised versions of Haitian legal documents. The collection forms part of the Digital Library of the Caribbean a “cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean” administered by Florida International University in partnership with the University of the Virgin Islands and the University of Florida. The site currently offers documents from the mid nineteenth century through to 2007 including legislation, government publications and periodicals.

Timor-Leste: Older legislation

This section of the Timor-Leste Courts website provides access to older laws which are no longer in effect in Timor-Leste. The Official Bulletin of Timor (Boletim Oficial de Timor), which publishes legislation and other official documents, is available from 1883 to 1975 (in Portuguese). The Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 is also provided, again in Portuguese, together with the Indonesian Penal Code in English and Indonesian.

Bibliothèque numérique Cujas

Online library of more than 150 digitised works from leading French law library Bibliothèque Cujas in Paris. The selected titles cover the medieval period and the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The majority cover the law of France, but 30 are about German law. All the works are searchable by title, author, subject and date; full-text searches are available for some works. All can be browsed by title and filtered by period or subject. They are in pdf format. Most are in French, but some are in Latin or German and the site interface is in French.

Nederlandse Grondwet

This website gives an overview of the development of the Dutch Constitution, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and provides information about pending changes. It includes translations of the current Constitution into English, French, German and Spanish, but most of the content is in Dutch. To find the translations, keep clicking on the links under each article of the current Constitution (‘Huidige Grondwet’).

Table of Regnal Years of English Sovereigns

The number of the regnal year is part of the citation for an old English statute; this table gives the exact dates of every regnal year from 1066 up to 1962. It is accompanied by an introduction explaining the various dating systems which have been used in England. The table and introduction have been reproduced from Sweet and Maxwell’s ‘Guide to Law Reports and Statutes’, 4th edition, 1962, and made available online by Harvard Law School Library.

Subscribe to legal history