American Legal History Research Guide

Researching legal history requires a different set of skills and materials than traditional legal research. The books in the general overview section are useful both as substantive accounts of American legal history and examples of seminal works in the field, demonstrating strong methodological approaches to their subjects. Some of the resources in this guide may be familiar. There are useful legal history resources in both LexisNexis and HeinOnline. However, you should not end your research there. Make sure to check the section on Historical Research Databases, which contains abundant resources less familiar to many law students. 

General Overview

• Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law
• Kermit L. Hall and Peter Karsten, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History
• Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (This work is in two volumes)
• Kermit L. Hall, Paul Finkelman, & James W. Ely, Jr, American Legal History: Cases and Materials

Encyclopedias and Biographical Resources

• Roger K. Newman, ed., The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law
• Kermit L. Hall and James W. Ely, eds., The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions (2 ed.) (also available as an electronic resource)
• Donald T. Critchlow & Philip R. VanderMeer, editors in chief, The Oxford encyclopedia of American political and legal history

Methodology

• Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings, eds., Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodologies

Historical Research Databases

Academic Sites

• Avalon Project. Yale University's Avalon Project contains documents dating back to the 1800s, covering subjects such as law, politics, history and economics.
• LLMC (Law Library Microfilm Consortium).  From their Mission Statement: "LLMC is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to the twin goals of, preserving legal titles and government documents..."  See their digital collections for preserved materials.
• DigitalGeorgetown. "DigitalGeorgetown is the unified portal for Georgetown University’s institutional repository and digital collections, providing online access to scholarly academic resources, rare and unique digitized special collections, and more."

Blogs

• Legal History Blog

Presidential Papers

• James D. Richardson, A compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897
• GPO, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Select presidents from Hoover to Obama)

Early American Legal History, 1600-1880

• G. Edward White, Law in American history
• Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
• William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America
• Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., A companion to American legal history
• Kunal M. Parker, Common law, history, and democracy in America, 1790-1900 : legal thought before modernism
• Robert M. Reed, Colonial law in America
• Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The many legalities of early America
• Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and people in colonial America
• William E. Nelson, The common law in colonial America
• David Hackett Fischer, Albion's seed: four British folkways in America
• Melvin I. Urofsky, Paul Finkelman, eds., Documents of American constitutional and legal history
• Morris L. Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law
• Herbert A. Johnson, Imported eighteenth-century law treatises in American libraries, 1700-1799

The New Deal

For a good general overview of the New Deal, see Eric Rauchway's The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. Rauchway includes a very helpful table of the Major federal acts of the Great Depression and the New Deal.