American Legal History
A guide to help researchers begin finding primary law and secondary sources on American Legal History
About This Guide
This guide is intended to help NSU College of Law students research American Legal History by locating primary and secondary resources. This guide will focus on finding electronic resources that students can access through the law library.
American Legal History Research
Legal historical research consists largely of reviewing both primary and secondary sources:
Primary Source: a record created by a person with firsthand knowledge of the event or person reported on, or that were created contemporary with the events described.
Examples: audio/visual recordings, contemporary newspapers/magazine articles, journals, letters and diary entries, transcripts of speeches, research data, artifacts.
Secondary Sources: Sources that are one step removed from primary material. These often analyze or interpret a historical event and use primary resources to do so.
Examples: Law review articles, data analysis, documentaries, scholarly articles, academic textbooks, reviews.
Getting Started
A Brief American Legal History in a Nutshell by
A Brief American Legal History is an accessible survey of the law throughout American history, written for lawyers and law students without an historical background as well as for those interested in American history without law school training. The book begins with the English influence on American law, then considers how law affected the split between two countries; how slavery was a bedrock economic principle by the revolutionary era; how lawyers influenced the Constitution; how the law accommodated the transportation revolution of the early 19th century; and how it failed to avoid--and perhaps exacerbated--the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. The book proceeds to explain how the Supreme Court enfeebled the Civil War constitutional amendments and ratified post-Reconstruction "Jim Crow" laws maintaining racial segregation not only of Blacks but also Asians. Also examined is how the conservative Court and invoked constitutional law to challenge efforts to enact wage and hour labor legislation and ratified the "special status" of women while denying them the right to vote, hold office, or enter professions. One of the features of the book is that it surveys common law developments throughout American history. In the 20th century, the Court stopped vetoing socio-economic legislation, and the political process revolutionized labor law during the New Deal. In the 1960s, the Warren Court not only held state segregation unconstitutional, it bolstered rights to a free press, and established individual liberties in privacy, criminal procedure, and the right to vote. From the 1970s until into the 21st century, courts generally upheld the environmental law revolution, although the Roberts Court has recently erected what may be substantial obstacles, recalling the Court's impediments to labor legislation in an earlier century. The 21st century conservative Court constitutionalized unlimited campaign contributions, recognized individual gun possession, crippled voting rights legislation, erected new protections for religious liberty, and allowed partisan gerrymandering, to say nothing of stopping a recount in the presidential vote, thereby in effect appointing a president. And, of course, the Court's new supermajority's bombshell was its overruling of the right to abortion in 2022. The Court's new reliance on a "shadow docket" has allowed it to intervene in a variety of controversies without issuing opinions, drawing criticism as a threat to democratic decisionmaking. The intersection of law and politics, a theme throughout the book, has never been more apparent.
Call Number: online onlyISBN: 9781685617028Publication Date: 2023-06-28
American Law and the American Legal System in a Nutshell by
This book, suitable as a primer for foreign LLMs -- or as an introductory survey for American students of both procedural and substantive law -- is a comprehensive, though concise, survey of the American legal system -- its structure and its methodology.
Call Number: online onlyISBN: 9781634606455Publication Date: 2020-12-07
The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History by
The study of legal history has a broad application that extends well beyond the interests of legal historians. An attorney arguing a case today may need to cite cases that are decades or even centuries old, and historians studying political or cultural history often encounter legal issues that affect their main subjects. Both groups need to understand the laws and legal practices of past eras. This essential reference is intended for the many nonspecialists who need to enter this arcane and often tricky area of research.
Call Number: online onlyISBN: 9780300235685Publication Date: 2018-06-19
Search Engines and Library Catalogs
- NovaCat - The NSU Libraries CatalogSearch NovaCat for books, media, periodicals, and electronic resources.
- WorldCatSearch WorldCat for books, articles, and other resources that may be found in other libraries.
- Shark Search - Search the NSU LibrariesSearch Shark Search to find books, ebooks, databases, journals, reports, and articles available from the NSU Libraries. To search using Shark Search, use the link provided for the Alvin Sherman Library's home page and enter your search terms in the main search bar.