Locating Historical Legal Materials: Three Databases to Try

Do you need to search criminal cases from the 1800s? Or find state statutes from 1903? What about an old English treatise on contract law? Tracking down historical legal materials can be difficult, but there are a number of online sources available to aid your research. An impressive number of old legal texts, reporters, and documents have been digitized and are accessible through a variety of UNC Libraries databases. Check out these resources to get started!

LLMC Digital

Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) Digital is a database that preserves historical legal resources. It is a great database to try if you are having a difficult time locating a particularly old legal document. LLMC Digital houses various legal collections including both primary and secondary resources. The legal collections are as follows: U.S. Federal Government (constitutional, legislative, executive, judicial, and general), U.S. States and Territories, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Other Countries, International Law and Organizations, and Special Focus Collections (e.g. ancient legal systems, early state records, Native American collection, Roman law, etc.).

You can browse documents in the database by selecting “Browse Collections” in the “Online Service” tab of the main page. You can also search across collections if you are unsure which collection would include relevant legal documents. The historical documents in your search results list appear as digitized images. You can browse your document of interest by manually clicking through the pages, or you search within the document using the full-text search tool in the bottom left of the page.

The Making of Modern Law

Gale Cengage Learning provides a set of databases that index and preserve historical legal content with the title The Making of Modern Law. Database topics include Foreign, Comparative, and International Law, c. 1600-1926; Legal Treatises, 1800-1926;Primary Sources, 1620-1926; Primary Sources II, 1763-1970;Trials, 1600-1926; U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978. Each database has a similar search interface, with the ability to conduct a basic or advanced search. Users may also want to try browsing alphabetically by author or document title since many older legal materials have unexpected or non-intuitive titles.

HathiTrust

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions that provides access to digitized materials from libraries across the world. HathiTrust’s collection includes more than 16 million unique volumes, with more than 6 million volumes in the public domain. These volumes are free to view and download with an internet connection. Volumes that are still protected by copyright may not be available for download unless the owner has given permission for use. Among other materials, HathiTrust has scanned thousands of legal texts and federal government documents, including many old documents that are often difficult to locate using other library databases. HathiTrust is also working to build a United States Federal Government Documents Registry which, once finished, will provide information about every published government document even if the document is not within HathiTrust. You can learn more about the Registry project here.

If you can’t find what you are looking for, make sure to contact a Reference Librarian.