Notebooks written by students at the Litchfield Law School are among the primary sources for understanding the influence of English law in this country. The notebooks provide rich documentation of how the common law and elements of English law were presented, explained, and compared with American law in a formal classroom setting during the Early Republic. The digitization project described here, the first large-scale digitization initiative undertaken at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, with the cooperation of the Litchfield Historical Society, is intended to organize, describe, and analyze those notebooks with a web site containing a database, bibliography, inventory, and links to images. The Litchfield student notebook project was intended not only to create digital surrogates of important historical sources, but also to inform future digital legal history projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The generation of legal historians working in the opening decades of the twenty-first century have an opportunity to use digital technology to bring the sources of legal history to a wider audience of scholars and to facilitate the research of future scholars for many generations to come. I say this because, commencing in 1999, I compiled a searchable database of identifying information about and content of the 22,318 reports in the Year Books, cases decided in England's courts of common law between 1268 and 1535. With the generous support and sponsorship of the Ames Foundation, my database has become an online scholarly resource used frequently by researchers and students of English legal history and other disciplines. This has been the most rewarding experience of my scholarly career. Projects such as the one I undertook, and which I call “big legal history,” can require a number of years to complete, as in my case, or else a team of scholars whose contributions all need to be closely coordinated. Because the compilation of large digital resources does not fit the typical career path of most legal historians, I offer here an account of the origins of my project, some of the choices that I had to make at its outset, the progress that I made, and the rewards that I have received along the way.

The Prosecution Project <https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/> is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Project's comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

The criminal justice system of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England has been likened to a corridor of connected rooms or stage sets. At each stage in the judicial process—from detection and apprehension through to trial, sentencing, and punishment—decisions were made that might remove the accused from the system entirely, or propel that person further along the process into a number of possible outcomes. That decision making (including the identity of the decision makers and the criteria upon which their decisions were based) has been the subject of much historical study. Less attention has been given to the individual experiences—the singular journeys—of the accused through this labyrinthine process. This is in large part because of the inherent evidential and methodological difficulties of reconstructing judicial pathways and the wider criminal lives of offenders. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker note, the archives of criminal justice were created to manage the bureaucracy of prosecution and punishment, not to reveal the criminal's navigation of that system. Tracing an individual offender's journey through the judicial process (and that person's life beyond) therefore entails piecing together fragments spread almost randomly across hundreds of thousands of pages.

The shortest trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings is precisely eight words in length. In February, 1685:

Habeas corpus arrived in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 1840s and 1850s when it appeared in the kingdom's legislative proceedings, in the 1852 Constitution, and in a published legal decision. However, a description of the transmission and transplantation of a common-law concept to a particular place in the Pacific Ocean does little to explain how people in the kingdom used habeas corpus. Habeas corpus circulated widely in the kingdom between 1852 and 1892. Did the application of the writ in Hawai'i change the conceptual architecture of habeas corpus? Legal historians have several different methods to find out how habeas corpus functioned and how judges, lawyers, and litigants molded the writ's legal identity. Reading the published judicial opinions preserved in print volumes or subsequently digitized in databases provides a window into the way judges construed habeas corpus. The archival records of the legal cases illuminate how local lawyers and ordinary litigants wielded habeas corpus to achieve their goals. In addition to these traditional methods of legal and historical research, computer code identifies conceptual patterns in a digitized corpus of the kingdom's legal decisions. Each of these methods—close reading, archival research, and computational analysis—represent different angles on the operation and legal content of the writ.

This article reviews and reflects on the use of the geographic information system (GIS) as a tool, or geographic information science (GIScience) as a research methodology, and associated techniques of analysis in an empirical study-in-progress on the law and history of early twentieth century British Hong Kong. The article begins by introducing the study and its objectives, as well as the rationale for adopting GIS/GIScience as one of its research methodologies. It then highlights the preliminary findings of the current project and compares them with those of earlier research on the legal history of early twentieth century Beijing using GIS. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in adopting such a digital tool and methodology in historical research. It concludes by reflecting on what GIS can help scholars understand about the social history of law in Hong Kong, beyond what is already known, and how specialists in law, history, and geography can collaborate in a digital law and history project involving the use of GIS. This article also gives an overview of the use of GIS in conducting empirical research in the humanities (including but not limited to history and legal history research) and points to digital sources and web sites useful to researchers who may need tools and data to launch a GIS study in law and history.

As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay's Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating London's Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.