LibGuides: Law: Legal History

Squire Librarian

David Wills

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Contact:

Squire Law Library
10 West Road
Cambridge
CB3 9DZ

- 44 1223 330077

Using old books and materials

Please consult this guide for advice on using old materials to ensure their preservation.

Handling Special Collections Material

Digital resources

The following digital resources are particularly useful for legal historical research:

Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world's largest library on microfilm of the printed book available through its imprint Primary Source Microfilm.
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HathiTrust (Global Public Domain only) This link opens in a new window The HathiTrust Digital Library is a shared repository of works digitized by more than 50 research library members. The catalog provides information about more than 5 million books and journals and is growing daily. More than 2.5 million titles are in the public domain so may be viewed in full text.
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window HeinOnline is a digital collection of legal materials organized into several modules which are listed on the HeinOnline Welcome screen. View a module by clicking its link. Click Search to view a module's search screen or locate a document by citation using a module's Quick Link template. HeinOnline modules may be browsed and searched. The HeinOnline Advanced Search feature allows you to conduct keyword searches based on the Lucene Search Syntax. HeinOnline provides access to a work's complete contents. Documents are represented in both high quality image and OCR text formats. As a cost saving measure, HeinOnline does not review the OCR scanned text for errors. Once you are viewing a document, use the Print Options link located in the toolbar just above the document to print or download the current page or the entire document. Documents may be printed using the HeinOnline HPrint utility or downloaded and printed as a pdf file. HeinOnline adds citation information to the footer of each page. HeinOnline does not provide special commands or formatting for emailing documents. Once you have saved a document to your disk in pdf format, use your email client to email the document as an attachment.
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Making of Modern Law : Legal Treatises This link opens in a new window Legal Treatises comprises over 21,000 works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on British Commonwealth and American law, with 14,900 titles from the nineteenth century and 7,100 titles from the years 1900 to 1926. It covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature. The monographs and materials in Legal Treatises include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches. The collection is of interest to scholars and patrons interested in domestic and international law, legal history, business and economics, politics and government, national defense, criminology, religion, education, labor and social welfare, and military justice. The database provides for simple and advanced searching, and for browsing by author, title, and subject terms.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window 60,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2012.
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Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources This link opens in a new window

Anglo-American Legal Tradition - digitised images of Corum Regis Rolls

British History Online This link opens in a new window British History Online is a collection of printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval, early modern, and modern history of the British Isles. These resources cover ecclesiastical and religious history, intellectual and cultural history, local history, urban development, economic history, parliamentary history, and administrative and legal matters.

Maitland Legal History Room

The Maitland Legal History Room in the Squire Law Library includes an extensive collection of historical legal treatises, the nominate law reports, abridgments, statutes and other documents of interest to legal historians of English law but there is also material on the common law, European continental law and public international law.

The Maitland Room is closed access so please speak to a member of staff at the enquiry desk.

University Library

Various historical legal material is also held in the Rare Books Room and the Manuscripts Room at the University Library. The material held in Rare Books (such as very old editions of treatises and textbooks) can be located via the iDiscover catalogue and then requested to be fetched.

The University Archives also holds some historical material from local courts, a brief summary of which is given on the Manuscripts and Archives webpages.

Some legal history e-journals

Click on the covers to access the content

Maitland Legal History Room

The Maitland Legal History Room opened in 2004. Follow this link for an article in Lawlink about the opening.

Centre for English Legal History

The Centre for English Legal History was established in 2012 to provide a hub for researchers working in legal history across the University of Cambridge.

Legal Biographies

The Squire has a dedicated legal biography collection including texts on lawyers, politicians and judges. Many of the volumes have been donated to the library and are shelved in the Librarian's Office. The books are catalogued on iDiscover but for a snapshot of material available see the excel spreadsheet below.

Biographies shelved in the Librarian's Office

Resources for My Subject

Law: Legal History

Legal History at the University of Cambridge

Squire Librarian

Using old books and materials

Digital resources

Maitland Legal History Room

University Library

Some legal history e-journals

Maitland Legal History Room

Centre for English Legal History

Legal Biographies