Digital Asian Legal History

Looking for great websites on the legal history of Asia? Here are some favorites from scholars working on the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia.

For websites that cut across Asia (often with an imperial focus), check out:

·                     Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s Islamic     Family Law project website

·                     the archive reviews on Dissertation Reviews

·                     the Center for Research Libraries’ overview of databases on comparative law(including historical materials)

·                      Rohit De and Fei-Hsien Wang's History and the Law website, Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge

·                     the Environment, Law, and History blog

·                     the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law (by subscription), a colonial-era journal that surveyed law across the British Empire (1918-51)

·                     Heinonline (by subscription)

·                     various websites on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, like this, this, this,this and this

·                     LLMC Digital including individual country collections

·                     Stanley N. Katz, ed., Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (by subscription)

·                     the Times Digital Archive, 1785-2008, covering the Times of London (by subscription)

·                     the Village Histories Project, for biographical entries on legal professionals in Asian history

·                     the World Legal Information Institute website, especially for these sections organized by country, region, case law, law journals, lawyers and legislation 

On the legal history of the Middle East, here are some useful links:

·                     Encyclopædia Iranica on the historically Persianate world—from the Caucasus to Central and South Asia

·                      Islamic Heritage Project for digitized manuscripts, maps and published texts from Harvard’s collections, including rare Ottoman sources

·                     JPress for historical Jewish newspapers in many languages

·                     Gale’s Middle East Online Series 1: Arab-Israeli Relations, 1917-1970 (by subscription)

·                     LLMC Digital under individual country names

For South Asia, my favorites include:

·                      the writings of Upendra Baxi, 1960-2008

·                     Ceylonese and Sri Lankan law reports through LawNet

·                      Donald R. Davis’ Cooperative Annotated Bibliography of Hindu Law and Dharmaśāstra 

·                     Digital Himalaya

·                     Digital South Asia Library

·                     Mitch Fraas’ Anglo-Indian Legal History website (focusing on the Company era)

·                     Indian law reports available via Indian Kanoon (open access), as well as on Indlaw andManupatra (both by subscription)

·                     colonial and post-colonial legislation via Laws of India and legislation.gov.uk

·                       LLMC Digital under individual country names

·                     Pakistani legal sources (by subscription)

·                     South Asian Digital Archives and Collections on the History and the Law website

·                     my website of South Asian Legal History Resources (focusing on the Raj)

·                     Vivek Srinivasan’s search engine for India’s Constituent Assembly debates, 1947-50

·                      Proquest’s Times of India’s digital archive, 1838-2001 (by subscription)

Sneak preview: At the University of Wisconsin Law School, we are creating a digital archive of Marc Galanter’s documents on the Indian and American litigation surrounding the 1984 Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. The project began in 2014 to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the accident.

On Southeast Asia, scholars recommend:

·                     LLMC Digital under individual country names, including recent additions for Myanmar(Burma)

·                     NewspaperSG for historical newspapers from the Straits Settlements, Singapore and Malaya

·                     Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog on Dutch legal history, including colonial legal history

·                     Thai and Southeast Asian legislation via Thailand Law Forum

·                     Nurfadzilah Yahaya’s Index of Arabs in Southeast Asia, 1915-20 (from the British Library)

Finally, on East Asia, here are some great websites:

·                     Chinese Legal Documents Series of the International Society for Chinese Law and History

·                     East Asian Digital Archives and Collections on History and the Law website

·                     Judicial Archives of the Chinese Torture / Supplices Chinois website

·                     Korean Law and History Project

·                     “Legalizing Space in China” Project website

·                     LLMC Digital under individual country name

·                     the North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, an English-language newspaper published in Shanghai circa 1910

·                     the Taiwan-based Scripta Sinica database

·                     “South Korean Law Research on the Internet” on NYU’s GlobaLex website

·                     Waseda University’s Japan Law database

 (Thanks to everyone who contributed, including Binyamin Blum, Joe Dennis, Charles Kim, Jason Morgan, David Schorr, Nurfadzilah Yahaya, and Fei-Hsien Wang.)