The Commonwealth Legal Records Project (CLRP), which began its investigations in 1990, was jointly sponsored by the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers (ACARM) and the Commonwealth Legal Education Association (CLEA), and was financed by a grant from the Leverhulme Foundation. It comprised a three year programme of research into modern legal records throughout the Commonwealth. The objectives of the study were to:-
i) analyse questions relating to the nature, extent and potential uses of legal records of all kinds;
ii) collect information about the state of legal records in selected Commonwealth jurisdictions;
iii) analyse factors relevant to devising informed policies regarding the management, appraisal, preservation and destruction of legal records and suggest guidelines;
iv) produce and disseminate the findings of the study in a form that would be useful to interested institutions and individuals in different jurisdictions in the Commonwealth, especially developing countries.
The project produced one book, Legal Records in the Commonwealth, and one major study, Legal Records in Accra (Ghana). The records listed below cover both the specific research that resulted in the production of these publications and the collection of evidence generally relating all aspects of the creation and disposal of legal records. The records were transferred to the Records of Legal Education Archives upon the project's completion in 1993 by its co-ordinators, William Twining and Clare Cowling.