The Australasian Colonial Legal History Library is now online! For more information read the article "Digitising and Searching Australasian Colonial Legal History" by G. Greenleaf, P. Chung, A. Mowbray and B. Salter. Abstract:
Australasia has
a rich and complex legal history since the first European settlement, and our
knowledge of legal practice and precedent in the colonies of Australasia is
still developing. The Australasian Colonial Legal History Library project is an
ARC-funded project being carried out by the Australasian Legal Information
Institute (AustLII) since January 2012 with input from 18 legal historians from
Universities across Australia. Cooperation with other parties who have already
built invaluable and pioneering online resources for Australasian colonial law
is an essential part of the project.
AustLII is a free access online
service which has operated since 1995 as a joint facility provided by UNSW and
UTS Law Faculties , and now provides over 500 databases, with usage of over
700,000 page accesses per day. The Colonial Legal History Library project is
therefore being built within a large and mature research infrastructure, and
this presents challenges as well as advantages. In particular, many of the
AustLII databases cover the whole period from the formation of a colony to the
present, so the databases for this Library have to be ‘virtual’ databases
extracted from this larger corpus.
The paper explains the construction,
content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012
contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven
colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases from
newspaper reports, the complete annual legislation to 1900 from three of the
colonies, plus legal scholarship concerning the colonial era. These databases
provide over 20,000 documents so far, and the Victorian Government Gazette
1851-1900 another 200,000. The Library also includes the LawCite citator, which
allows the subsequent citation history of any colonial case to be tracked,
including if cited by courts outside Australasia.
The medium term aim of
this part of the ARC project (which extends to 1950 in its full scope) is to
include all legislation, reported cases, and cases which can be ‘recovered’,
from the inception of each colony to 1900. Scholarship (old and new) and key
source materials are also being added, as budgets permit. We hope that the
Library will be a leader in the creation of legal history resources from the
colonial era.
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