California Legal History
This research guide lists resources for researching the legal history of California (see the research guide to Compiling a California Legislative History for guidance on researching the legislative history of a California law). The first section includes resources available at the Hastings Law Library and the San Francisco Public Library for locating primary and secondary sources on a California legal history topic. The second section lists various finding aids for locating primary materials. The third and fourth sections provide links to various digital and print archives where primary materials pertaining to California history are stored. These lists are not comprehensive.
Library Resources:
(The following are useful resources for finding both primary and secondary materials.)Print Resources -
- Hastings Online Catalog [suggested subjects - "California History"; "West U.S. History"; "Law West U.S. History"; "Law California History"; "History San Francisco Calif"]
- San Francisco Public Library Catalog [anyone with a Cal. ID or driver's license may obtain a library card]
- First Search [click on the ILL link in WorldCat to request a book]
- Compiling a California Legislative History [print copies are available at the Reference Desk]
Online Resources -
- 19th Century Masterfile [index of indexes; includes indexes of periodicals, books, newspapers, and government materials]
- Making of Modern Law [searchable digital collection of 19th and 20th century American and British legal treatises]
- Index to Legal Periodicals & Books [1908-present]
- LexisNexis Congressional [U.S. legislative histories and Congressional publications]
- ProQuest Research Library [journal, magazine, and newspaper articles on a range of subjects, including history and law]
- LegalTrac [index of law journals and legal newspapers, searchable by subject]
- HeinOnline [includes PDFs of law journal articles and the "Legal Classics" collection]
- JSTOR [SFPL; academic journals going back to 1838]
- S.F. Chronicle Historical [SFPL; 1900-1922]
- N.Y. Times Historical [SFPL; 1851-three years ago]
- Google Books
Bibliographies and Finding Aids:
- California State Library California History Section [search the catalog for primary sources and review the research guides for help finding resources on various California history topics, including the 1906 earthquake]
- Melvyl Catalog [contains the combined holds of all the UC libraries]
- Online Archive of California [searchable database of finding aids from the archives of numerous California universities, libraries, museums, and historical institutions]
- "California Legal History Revisited: Researching the Spanish, Mexican, and Early American Periods," in Prestatehood Legal Materials: A Fifty-State Research Guide [KF 240 .P688 2005 - Reference Desk]
- "Legal History in Southern California: A Review Essay," in Western Legal History, vol. 3, pp. 67-77 [KF8752 9th .A15 W47 - 6th Stacks]
- "California Legal History: A Review of Spanish and Mexican Legal Institutions," in Law Library Journal, vol. 87, pp. 487-514 (1995) [available on HeinOnline]
- "California Legal History: The Legal System Under the United States Military Government, 1846-1849," in Law Library Journal, vol. 88, pp. 488-522 (1996) [available on HeinOnline]
- "California Legal History: The California Constitution of 1849," in Law Library Journal, vol. 90, pp. 447-480 (1998) [available on HeinOnline]
- Guide to the History of California (1989) [016.9794 G941 - San Francisco History Room at SFPL]
- A Comprehensive Bibliography of American Constitutional and Legal History [KF4541 .H34 1984 - 5th Stacks; vol. 4, pp. 2540-2560, discuss California]
Digital Archives:
California -
- Calisphere [digitized images of California primary sources]
- Online Archive of California [click on the "texts" link to search the ~1000 texts available online]
- Bancroft Library Collections [list of archives and digital collections available through UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, including ones on the 1906 earthquake and the Chinese in California]
- Silicon Valley History Online
- University of California History Digital Archives
- California State Library's Gold Rush Exhibit
- American Memory Project's "California as I Saw It" [first-person narratives of California's early years]
- University of the Pacific Digital Collections [includes John Muir's papers and other California history documents and images]
- University of Southern California Digital Archive
- California Underground Railroad [CSU Sacramento]
- Latino Cultural Heritage Digital Archives [CSU Northridge]
U.S. -
- A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation [U.S. Congressional documents]
- American Memory Collection
- Making of America (Cornell) [digital collection of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure]
- Making of America (Michigan)
- Avalon Project (Yale Law School) [primary source materials in law, economics, history, politics, diplomacy & government]
- U.S. National Archives
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project [Stanford Univ.]
- Legacy Tobacco Documents Library [UCSF]
- Voting America
- Nixon Presidential Library [most of the collection isn't available online]
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library [most of the collection isn't available online]
- American Radicalism Collection [Michigan State Univ.]
Local Print Archives:
(For a comprehensive list of California archives, searchable by location and subject, see the Directory of Archival and Manuscript Repositories in California (1996), which is on Course Reserve for the California Legal History seminar.)University Archives -
-
U.C. Berkeley:
- Asian American Studies Collection
- Bancroft Library Collections
- Chicano Studies Collection
- Native American Studies Collection
- Robbins Collection [primarily religious and civil law]
-
U.C. Hastings:
- Special Collections [includes the Sixty-Five Club faculty collection and the Traynor collection; contact Dan Taysom regarding access]
-
San Francisco State:
- Labor Archives & Research Center [Bay Area labor history]
-
San Jose State:
- Archival Collections
-
Santa Clara University:
- Archives & Special Collections
-
Stanford University:
- Special Collections & University Archives
- University of San Francisco:
- University Archives
- U.C. San Francisco:
- AIDS History Project
- University of the Pacific:
- Holt-Atherton Special Collections [Stockton]
Other -
- African American Museum & Archive [Oakland Public Library archive of African American history in the Bay Area]
- Cal. Academy of Sciences [archives include material on the history of science in the West]
- California Historical Society
- California State Archives [Sacramento]
- GLBT Historical Society
- Holt Labor Library
- Japanese American History Archives
- Japanese American National Library
- National Archives - Pacific Region
- Oakland History Room
- San Jose Public Library California Room [includes an online database]
- San Francisco History Center [SFPL]
- San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Library [materials documenting Pacific Coast maritime heritage with an emphasis on the S.F. Bay region]
- San Francisco Media Archive
- Society of California Pioneers [Gold Rush period]
- Sutro Library (California State Library) [geneologies and local histories]
- Wells Fargo Historical Services
- Western Jewish History Center
Created by Hilary Hardcastle, Reference Librarian - Sept. 2008