The BC Libraries catalog can be used to locate BC's physical library collections (books, DVDs, CDs, etc.) and to link to electronic materials (e-books, BC Digital Collections, streaming video, etc.) that BC subscribes to.
The Roundtable, which meets several times each semester in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room, offers an opportunity for faculty and staff from BC and beyond to meet and discuss a pre-circulated paper in legal history.
Click the link to chat with a librarian and ask any questions that you might have or submit a request here.
BC Law Library Online Resources
The Boston College Law Library subscribes to numerous electronic legal history resources. Below is a listing of some of the more comprehensive legal history resources available to BC Law students, faculty, and staff.
19th Century Masterfile is the most comprehensive resource for finding 19th century primary sources available. The database brings together all the most authoritative indexes available for 19th century studies into one search engine. You can search over 70 core indexes to over 8,000 periodicals, millions of books, along with newspapers, patents and US and UK Government Documents.
This database aids scholars' use of early manuscripts by providing a key to abbreviations and shortened words found in manuscripts dating from the 8th century up through the 15th century.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Annotated references to books, articles, and dissertations on U.S. and Canadian history from prehistory to the present. Over 2,000 journals published worldwide are indexed, including key historical journals, as well as hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities that are of special interest to researchers and students of history.
Legislative and executive documents, many originating from the important period between 1789 and the beginning of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set in 1817.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Archive of Americana is composed of eight databases, all or a number of which may be searched simultaneously. The databases are:
American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I; Early American Imprints, Series I; Early American Imprints, Series II; America's Historical Newspapers; American State Papers; U.S. Congressional Serial Set; House and Senate Journals, Series I; Senate Executive Journals, Series I
This work lists and describes the monographic and trial literature of American law published in this country or abroad, from its beginnings to the end of 1860. It also includes works on foreign, comparative and international law if published in this country.
Colonial America will make available all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822. CO 5 consists of the original correspondence between the British government and the governments of the American colonies, making it a uniquely rich resource for all historians of the period.
Colonial State Papers provides users with access to primary source documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The earliest English settlements in North America, encounters with Native Americans, piracy in the Atlantic and Caribbean, the trade in slaves and English conflicts with the Spanish and French are all covered in this database.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Based on the English Short Title Catalogue, ECCO is an online library of over 136,000 titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 and printed in English-speaking countries or countries under British colonial rule. The majority of works in ECCO are in the English language but there are also works printed in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish and Welsh.
Includes more than 170,000 pages of legislative histories, treatises, documents, and more related to bankruptcy law in America, classic books dating back to the late 1700's, and links to scholarly articles that have been chosen by our editors due to their significance to the study of bankruptcy laws.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Incorporated into the 19th Century Masterfile database; indexes early law journal articles.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
This database indexes over 750 legal periodicals published between 1908 and 1981 in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Annual surveys of the laws of a jurisdiction, annual surveys of the federal courts, yearbooks, annual institutes, and annual reviews of the work in a given field or on a given topic are also covered.
America's leading legal history journal that encompasses American, English, European, and ancient legal history issues, and proposes to further research and writing in the fields of the social history of law and the history of legal ideas and institutions
This collection offers more than 1,400 works from some of the greatest legal minds in history. In addition to many "classics", this collection includes rare items that are found in only a handful of libraries around the world. The collection focuses on constitutional law, political science, and other classic topics. You can browse or search this large collection of classics by title, author and/or subject.
This collection includes pre-1926 treatises and similar monographs, sourced from the collections of the Yale, George Washington University, and Columbia law libraries, in the following areas: International Law; Comparative Law; Foreign Law; Roman Law; Islamic Law; Jewish Law; and Ancient Law.
Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources (parts I and II) consists of historical legal codes, statutes, regulations, and commentaries on codes from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other countries in northern Europe. Included are crucial sources of historical statutes and regulations for the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, sourced from the law libraries of Yale, Harvard, and George Washington University. (BC Access)
This collection provides digital images of every page of 22,000 legal treatises on US and British law published from 1800 through 1926. Full-text searching of more than 10 million pages provides access to critical legal history in ways not previously possible.
Based primarily on holdings of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, this product offers online access to early state codes, city charters, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Based on holdings of the law libraries of Harvard and Yale, and the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the product offers online access to these important collections.
Containing nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978, this product provides an essential primary source tool for the study of all aspects of American history as well as the U.S. judicial system.
A comprehensive, international, interdisciplinary reference work that includes approximately 1,000 articles on all aspects of legal history throughout the world from ancient to modern times. Articles deal with private law, public law, and constitutional/higher law throughout the world; each article is signed by one of the set's many noteworthy contributors, which include major scholars and experts.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Combined searching of the historical New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, NY Amsterdam News, and Chicago Defender. Look up any one of these titles individually to search only that publication. (BC Access)
HeinOnline has partnered with the Selden Society organization and the Ames Foundation to bring early English manuscripts, yearbooks and more to the forefront. In addition to primary publications from the Selden Society and the Ames Foundation, the collection includes some of the most influential digests, abridgments, and modern encyclopedias that formed the foundation of English law, and had enduring effects on the development of law in America.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
This collection contains a historical economic foundation of regulations, laws, bills, hearings, debates and other legislation with access to more than 2,000 volumes.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
Established in 1957 as the first English-language legal history journal. The journal remains devoted to the publication of articles and documents on the history of all legal systems. The journal is refereed, and members of the Judiciary and the Bar form the advisory board.
Includes reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, originally published in approximately 13,800 bound volumes.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
This library includes The Supreme Court in United States History by Charles Warren, Early History of the Federal Supreme Court by W.H. Muller, and other works.
A collection of contemporary and historical documents. Resources, useful for the study and the understanding of the documents, are presented.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
This database contains searchable full-text PDF scans of U.S., English and international trial collections, including Howell’s State Trials, American State Trials, Nazi war crimes trials, famous individual trials such as Baby M, Sacco & Vanzetti, and Leopold and Loeb, and related treatises on jury trials and criminal evidence.
BC Access: Resource is available via computers connected to the BC network. Off-campus access requires a BC username and password, and is available to the BC Community only (current students, faculty and staff.)
The Boston College Law Library subscribes to numerous electronic legal history resources. Below is a listing of some of the more comprehensive legal history resources available to BC Law students, faculty, and staff.