legal history

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This section of the Timor-Leste Courts website provides access to older laws which are no longer in effect in Timor-Leste.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, with 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.

English Reports Table

Alphabetical table of nominate reports giving the corresponding volume numbers in the English Reports, together with each report’s abbreviation and the time period and court that it covers. The table is provided by Lancaster University Library.

British History Online

Digital library of British historical sources from the 11th to 19th centuries, provided by the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Includes an Administrative and Legal History section, with acts of the Privy Council, the Statutes of the Realm, records of the courts of quarter sessions and assize courts, the Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum and many other materials.

National Archives

The National Archives is the UK government’s official public archive, a repository of documents going back more than 1000 years. Its website includes Discovery, a catalogue of its holdings with more than 20 million descriptions of records created by central government and the courts of England and Wales. Some of the records in the The National Archives have been digitised and may be downloaded from the site, for a fee. Archived government webpages are also available, free of charge. The website provides a large collection of research guides, several of which are on legal topics.

Kiribati sources of law information

From the Kiribati section of the PACLII database. Authored by Professor Don Paterson, this webpage contains information regarding the legislative history and development of Kiribati, and lists the authoritative sources of legal information for pre-independence laws and post-independence laws, consolidated legislation, legislation held by USP, government gazette, law reports, unreported cases and collected materials.

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