Prestatehood Legal Materials Meet the 21st Century

[This guest post by Reference Librarian Wickliffe Shreve highlights the new digital version of Prestatehood Legal Materials in HeinOnline.]

Depending on your outlook, a request to do a legislative history or other legal historical research for a project can inspire dread, excitement – or perhaps a mixture of both. The Goodson Law Library's guide to Federal Legislative History helps get you started so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel...as long as the question is, of course, one of federal law. If you need to do research on a state statute or regulation, not only will you have to learn the state's government structure and legislative process, you may have to cobble together sources from the state law library, state courts, and local law schools to be sure that you have covered all your bases (see, for instance, Indiana University's State Legislative History Research Guides Inventory).

But what if your research requires looking to sources of law that existed before the state was even a state? Before there was even a "United States"? This week, HeinOnline added Prestatehood Legal Materials to its database collection. This seminal 2005 research guide, edited by former Duke Law librarians Michael Chiorazzi and Marguerite Most, has previously only been available to the Duke community as a two-volume set in our print Reference Collection (Ref.
KF240 .P688 2005). Both versions provide a comprehensive collection of legal materials from the colonial period for all fifty states, as well as New York City and the District of Columbia.

The new database version allows users to access an interactive map, and by clicking on an individual state you can access its historical legal documents. Each "chapter" is compiled by a state expert and written in their own individual style. For instance, clicking on North Carolina will bring you to "North Carolina Colonial Legal Materials," co-authored by Duke Law's Interim Library Director Melanie J. Dunshee. It provides a historical background of the development of the state's laws, as well as descriptions of and sources to help locate its constitutions, organic acts, legislative materials, executive materials, and judicial materials. The new electronic interface allows users to link out directly to web resources. Most chapters include secondary sources for additional research as well as extensive bibliographies.

For help accessing or using the Prestatehood Legal Materials database, or for more information on state research, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

--Wickliffe Shreve, Reference Librarian