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Legal Information and the Development of American Law:
Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring

Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley

Researching American Legal History in the Digital Age

Morris Cohen (Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School)

The renaissance of interest in American legal history has been greatly aided by a variety of new developments in the materials and methods of legal research. Legal history has become a new center of attention in American legal education and scholarship and has attracted similarly enhanced interest in university history departments. Fortunately, this comes at a time when increasingly sophisticated research techniques and sources are gaining wide acceptance in the legal community generally. This paper will survey the effect those advances are having on research in American legal history.

We must begin with the realization that research sources will vary considerably over the five hundred years of American legal history. As American law has developed, its sources changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. It see those changes most vividly, it may help to divide American legal history into the following four periods, based on changes in the way law, and information about law, was disseminated.

  1. From the beginning of American settlement (approximately 1620) to the Federal Constitution (1789);
  2. From 1789 to the 1880s (i.e., to the introduction of several new publishing schemes);
  3. From the 1880s to 1975 (the latter being the approximate beginning of significant Use of electronic legal research (i.e., Lexis and Westlaw); and
  4. From 1975 to the present (the period marked by extensive use of electronic legal Research sources and methods.

Then divide coverage into the following topics:

  • English Legal Background
  • Case Law
  • Statutory Law
  • Constitutional Law & History
  • Legal Language
  • Biographical Material, Personal Papers & Manuscript Collections
  • Literature of Crimes and Punishments
  • Federal Government Documents
  • Court Records
  • Practice Materials (court rules, forms & manuals)
  • Other Secondary Sources
    • monographs
    • periodicals
    • newspapers
  • American international law & foreign relations
  • Civil Law
  • Bibliographic Searching
  • Coordinating Genres