Digital Collections

The Harvard Law School Library is dedicated to digitizing and making available online selections of its rare and important materials. In addition to bringing these materials to a wider audience, digitization facilitates access to unique and valuable materials while preserving and protecting fragile originals. Below is a list of the Library's current offerings of online collections.

Ames Foundation Digital Collection of Legal History

Edmund M. Morgan Papers on the drafting of the Uniform Code of Military Justice

Charles Claflin Davis Digital Collection

Digitized Scrolls from the Japanese Manuscript Collection, 1158-1591

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Collection

Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection

French Coutumes

Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection

Court of Restitution Appeals Reports

Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides

Harvard Law School Catalogs

Harvard Law School Class Photographs

The Henry Phillips Papers

Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the US and UK, 1815-1914

Legal Portraits Online

Ames Foundation Digital Collection of Legal History 

The Harvard Law Library is partnering with the Ames Foundation to create a publicly-available digital library of important materials in legal history. Projects currently available include Bracton Online, the digitization of "Statham's Abridgement", and the Foundation's massive index of the English Year Books. A project to index and produce digital images of colonial appeals to the Privy Council is in full development. Plans are also afoot to digitize the Corpus Iuris Civilis with its gloss. In addition to providing the capital for these projects, the Foundation also creates finding aids and tools for accessing texts that cannot be searched by normal scanning methods.

Edmund M. Morgan Papers on the drafting of the Uniform Code of Military Justice 

Established in 1948 by the Secretary of Defense, the Committee on a Uniform Code of Military Justice (CUCMJ) was charged with creating a single uniform code to replace the separate codes that existed for the Army and Navy. The new code would also apply to the recently created Air Force, as well as the Coast Guard and Marine Corps. Harvard Law School Professor Edmund M. Morgan served as chair for the committee and donated material he collected to the Harvard Law School Library in 1950. The digitization of the CUCMJ materials contained in the Morgan Papers is a joint project of the Harvard Law School Library, The Judge Advocate General's School Library, and the Library of Congress.  

Charles Claflin Davis Digital Collection 

The Charles Claflin Davis Digital Collection spans the years of 1897-1923 (bulk dates 1921-23) and contains materials illustrative of the work Davis did while leading the efforts of the American Red Cross in Turkey and Greece. A 1910 graduate of the Harvard Law School, Charles Davis received international praise for the relief work he oversaw as Director of the South Eastern Base of the American Red Cross from 1920-1922. The Collection includes thank you letters written to Davis, newspaper clippings, a ledger, photographs, scrapbooks, and American Red Cross Reports.

Digitized Scrolls from the Japanese Manuscript Collection, 1158-1591 

The Japanese Manuscript Digital Collection is comprised of a set of twenty-two medieval legal manuscripts and annotated facsimiles in scroll form called komonjo. Komonjo—literally “old documents”—are remnants of day-to-day legal transactions. Spanning a nearly 450 year period, these documents frequently focus on land and property issues, though they can also represent edicts and judicial rulings. Part of a large donation presented to the Harvard Law Library in 1936, these komonjo represent one of the finest collections of their type outside Japan.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Collection 

The Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Collection is a multi-year project to digitize the Library's holdings associated with Justice Holmes and his family. Phase I of the project was completed in March 2009 and included the digitization of manuscript items related to Holmes' service in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment of the Union Army, Justice Holmes’ annotated copy of The Common Law, and all items in the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Visual Materials Collection, including prints, photographs, and objects.

Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection 

The Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection—comprised of manuscript materials and photographs—offers researchers invaluable insight into the Japanese War Crimes Trial -- one of the most important trials of the twentieth century. The Papers consist primarily of correspondence written during Keenan's work as Chief Counsel in the International Prosecution Section. Most of the correspondence relates directly to the trial. The Visual Materials Collection spans the years of 1945-1947 and includes photographs of Keenan, military ceremonies and figures in Japan, banquets and celebrations, views of Japanese people and scenery, and aerial views of the Japanese landscape following the atomic bomb drops of 1945.

French Coutumes 

The Harvard Law Library collection of French coutumes contains more than 600 separate editions printed before the Revolution. It also comprises nearly twenty manuscript coutumes, including the Grand Coutumier de Normandie, a vellum manuscript dating from about 1300.

Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection 

By far, the Library's largest undertaking to date is the Nuremberg Trials Project. The Library holds over one million pages of documents related to the war crimes tribunals held after World War II. The Nuremberg Trials Project combines document imaging, document re-keying, and document analysis to create a database of information about the trials, and a Web interface that will allow searching of the documents and the trial transcripts themselves, with links to the various evidentiary documents used in the trials. The first stage of the project presents documents from and relating to the Medical Case--more commonly known as the Doctors' Trial--which was Case 1 of the NMT trials.

Court of Restitution Appeals Reports 

During the Nazi period, thousands of victims of religious, racial and political persecution were compelled to sell their businesses, houses, and other property under duress. In many cases, property was simply confiscated by the German Reich. After the war, the Western Allies agreed to restitute property taken by the various methods of Nazi spoliation. Unfortunately, they were unable to agree on a unified law for the three Western Zones of Occupation and for Western Berlin. As a result, no fewer than four different statutes dealing with this problem were enacted. The Harvard Law School Library has digitized the twelve volumes of opinions and other documents of two of these courts. An index into these digitized materials is available here.

Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides 

Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides--styled at the time as "Last Dying Speeches" or "Bloody Murders"--were sold to the audiences that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. The Library's collection of more than 500 broadsides is one of the largest recorded and the first to be digitized in its entirety. The examples digitized here span the years 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason.

Conservation and digitization of the broadsides was made possible in honor of Harvard Law School alumnus S. Allyn Peck by a generous grant from the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, a charitable endowment for the support of genealogical, local history, and other museum and library collections.

Harvard Law School Catalogs 

The Law School's collection of catalogs dates from 1835/1836--a time when there were only two members of the faculty (Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf) and 52 students. Many of the changes at the school that occurred over the next 170 years are documented in the catalogs. Offering information on faculty, courses, policies, and student lists, the catalogs are a rich source of information for researchers interested in anything from genealogy to the history of Harvard Law School and legal education. In addition, catalogs printed from 1970/1971-2005/06 showcase portraits from the School's Art Collection on the cover, and many of the catalogs printed between 1878 and 1970 have maps featuring the campus and surrounding areas in Cambridge--a useful tool to follow physical changes to the university and city.

Because the catalog has gone through three name changes since 1835, the catalogs are accessible through three different HOLLIS records.

A catalogue of the Law School in Harvard University (1835/36-1868/69): HOLLIS 11365376
The Law School of Harvard University (1878/89-1970/71): HOLLIS 374288
Harvard Law School Catalog (1970/71-2005/06): HOLLIS 374287

Beginning in the academic year 2006/2007, the course catalog is only available online through the Law School's website.

Harvard Law School Class Photographs 

A composite photograph collection representing Harvard Law School classes from 1875 to 2007, the Class Photograph collection is an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers not only studying the history of Harvard Law School, but also those researching biographies of individual students. For many Harvard Law School students, particularly those who attended the school before the advent of the Yearbook, the class pictures are the only photographic record of their time at the Law School. Individual classes can be searched for in VIA, Harvard University's Visual Information Access catalog, or the entire collection can be viewed here.

The Henry Phillips Papers, 1728-1738 

In July 1728, Henry Phillips killed Benjamin Woodbridge in a duel on Boston Common. The 17 documents that make up the Phillips Papers span the years 1728-1738 and were likely assembled by Phillips' brother Gillam for his extended lawsuit in which he tried to become sole inheritor of Henry's estate. The papers fall into three groups: legal papers that relate to Henry Phillips' duel with Benjamin Woodbridge and Phillips' subsequent flight from Boston; an inventory of Henry Phillips' estate; and legal documents and letters from Gillam Phillips' unsuccessful litigation.

Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the US and UK, 1815-1914 

Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet present images of the texts of over 420 separately published trial narratives printed in the United States or the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1914. The cases involve not only trials for murder and rape but also those for domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, adultery, and the custody of children.

Legal Portraits Online 

Legal Portraits Online contains cataloging records and images for the Library's collection of approximately 4,000 legal portrait images. These portraits include etchings, engravings, drawings, and photographs of jurists and legal scholars dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. As the most heavily used portion of the Library's visual materials, digitizing them and making them available on the Web not only greatly facilitates their access, but also significantly reduces handling of the originals, thereby helping to preserve them for the future. These portraits can also be seen by searching in Harvard University's Visual Access catalog.