About Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926Subject Contains over 10,000 items (about 2,000,000 pages) with facsimile copies of trial books, most in English and originallly published in the United States or Great Britain, including unofficially published accounts of trials; official trial documents, briefs and arguments reprinted or bound as separate publications; and official, separately published records of legislative proceedings, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations. The literature include sensational accounts of murder, adultery, divorce, and duels along with important cases of constitutional law, commercial law, impeachment, treason, and other topics. Trial accounts are an excellent source for information about the lives of ordinary people not documented in chronicles that focus on key figures of an era. Stories that we tend to think of as distinctively modern were present to much the same extent in past centuries although they might be omitted from genteel writings and official documents. The literature of legal transcripts and sensational trial accounts has long provided a franker and less expurgated account of the rougher aspects of human existence, including: violence; psychological and social abberations; sex; poverty and greed; and corruption and scandal. Sources
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