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

Sweeping across the social and political landscape of the northeastern United States during the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Antimasonic Party has earned a modest immortality as the first “third” party in American history. In pamphlets, speeches, sermons, protests, and other venues, Antimasons lambasted the fraternal order of Freemasonry as undemocratic, inegalitarian, and un-Christian, reviling it as a threat to the moral order and civic health of the Early Republic. Because they believed that the fraternal organization largely controlled all levels of government, antebellum Antimasons first created a social movement and then an independent political party. Even before the full emergence of modern mass democratic politics, Antimasons demonstrated the benefits of party organization, open national nominating conventions, and party platforms. Scholars with otherwise different perspectives on the “party period” tend to agree that Antimasonry had an important impact on what became the first true mass party organizations—the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs—and helped push the political culture in a more egalitarian and populist direction.

At the close of World War II (WWII), Winston Churchill suggested summarily executing the remaining Nazi leadership. Franklin Delano Roosevelt disagreed, insisting on prosecuting them in an international military tribunal. This is considered the “birth” of International Criminal Law (ICL), following a consensus that “[t]he Nazi atrocities gave rise to the idea that some crimes are so grave as to concern the international community as a whole.” A few earlier instances of penal action against violators of the laws of war are acknowledged, but they are dismissed as unrelated to current ICL, because (presumably) these cases are sporadic domestic legal actions that lack a common doctrine.

Speaking at the Travancore legislative assembly on February 2, 1938, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar said: “The federation contemplated in the Government of India Act (1935) was founded on the recognition of the fundamental idea that the Ruler alone represents his state and that the Ruler is the government of the state.” Travancore was one of the oldest princely states in India, which antedated the British occupation and claimed a dynastic rule uninterrupted by any foreign or domestic powers. Its history of constitutional reforms and economic advancement enabled it to occupy a pivotal position in colonial India. As the Dewan (prime minister) of Travancore, Sir C.P. played a crucial role in the constitutional debates on the political form of postcolonial India, especially federation, in the last two decades of the British Empire in India. He argued that Indian states were inherently sovereign, and that the only locus of sovereignty in the states was their rulers. In doing so, he imagined a future Indian federation predicated on the idea of divisible sovereignty, which was given constitutional effect by the Government of India (GOI) Act (1935). Sir C.P.'s expositions on the sovereignty of the states and Travancore's constitutionalism offer analytical lenses to recuperate a history of imperial constitutionalism and the grand political project it enabled: Indian federation.

Reformers in much of the common law world have recently turned their attentions to laws pertaining to murder and manslaughter; however, perceptions of the past maintain a hold. In England and Wales, the Coroners and Justice Act (2009) abandoned notions of provocation that developed in the seventeenth century, instead stipulating that “loss of control” would serve as the means of mitigating charges of murder to a lesser offence. If a person has reasonable grounds for losing control, of a sort that accords with contemporary norms and values, that loss of control can be adduced as a partial defense on a homicide charge. Concerns about blaming victims and gender bias have helped shape the shift away from provocation defenses. Whether a married woman's sexual infidelity might in some way serve as a partial defense that moderates her husband's killing of her from murder to something less serious has proven especially controversial. (The reverse, a wife killing an adulterous husband, receives far less attention, but then women kill their partners for any reason far less often.) Drafters of the 2009 act expressly abandoned the older notion that sexual infidelity constituted sufficient provocation to mitigate charges in a husband's killing of his wife. Angry, jealous men killing their spouses in revenge or a passionate rage might no longer cite infidelity as sufficient provocation to kill. Some people, including lawmakers and judges, expressed concerns about the change. One MP (and later attorney general) complained that “thousands of years of human experience and history should be jettisoned for a piece of political correctness.” He need not have worried: recently, the decision in R. v. Clinton (2012) reintroduced the substance of the defense in a new guise, seeing a wife's adultery not as provocation, but as a trigger for a husband's understandable “loss of control.” Among other factors, the Court of Appeal alluded to “experience over many generations” in treating a man's suspicion of his wife's sexual infidelity as reasonable grounds for mitigation.

In 1974, gay father Bruce Voeller sought visitation with his three children after divorcing his wife. The New Jersey family court held a six day trial that centered on expert witness testimony as to whether Voeller's homosexuality would be detrimental to his children. Drs. Richard Green and John Money testified on Voeller's behalf, whereas Voeller's ex-wife called Dr. Richard Gardner, who concluded that “‘the total environment to which the father exposed the children could impede healthy sexual development in the future.’” In his opinion, which imposed strict limitations on visitation, the judge focused on the opposition within the American Psychiatric Association (APA) over the decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, reasoning that psychiatrists' inability to agree on how to define or classify homosexuality indicated that it was impossible to know what effect Voeller's homosexuality would have on his children. The court consequently concluded that the medical controversy, combined with “the immutable effects which are engendered by the parent-child relationship, demands that the court be most hesitant in allowing any unnecessary exposure of a child to an environment which may be deleterious.” The court imposed visitation restrictions to prevent the children from being in “any homosexual related activities,” which included prohibiting Voeller from ever introducing his partner to the children.

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.