Fascinating special issue of the journal Parliamentary History is out.  Issue 2 of volume 27 contains texts and studies relating to Parliament in the long 15th century.  Articles cover Parliamentary privilege, elections, payment, and other issues.  Three appendices cover a calendar of disputes over wages, a list of peers and members of the commons mentioned in the documents, and and a list of parliaments from 1376-1514.

This period includes the period of the devestation and depopulation relating to the Black Death, the War of the Roses, and the rise of the Tudors.

One of the great early American examples of a lawyer ensuring that unpopular defendants got a fair trial, even defendants with whom the lawyer may have disagreed took place in Boston in 1770.  The lawyer was John Adams and the defendants were the British soldiers who were accused of murder from their involvement in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770.

 The Law Library of Congress has posted copies of three published accounts of the records and transcripts of the trial, a history of the Massacre and trial, and a character sketch of Adams that includes his Speech on the Boston Massacre.

Great reading on one of the great ethical responses of the revolutionary bar!!

It has always seemed that history is the area of research best suited for the heavy use of technology.  A new wiki on English medieval legal documents confirms this again!

The notice of the wiki, published on the listserv of the American Association of Law Libraries Special Interest Section for Foreign, Comparative and International Law says, "Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532).  What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!"

She has created a wiki for this project.  The wiki can be found here:  http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php.

She hopes that you will take a look and participate.