Law and Life, with Hansard's Parliamentary Debates and Caribbean Law

Proclamation par Toussaint Louverture, General en Chef de l’armee de Saint-Domingue, aux Administrations Municipales de la Colonie et a ses ConcitoyenThe Digital Library Center has been working on getting legal materials online for the Caribbean and from other areas in our collections. Most recently, we’ve added to our law collection with Hansard’s British Parliamentary Debates, which are one of the best sources of the political record for the United Kingdom [1803-1891]. We’re almost done digitizing the 2nd series [1820-1830, 25 volumes] of the Debates, and later projects will digitize the rest provided they’re still in need. The University of Southampton is also working on Parliamentary Publications and related materials.
In addition to Hansard’s, the University of Florida Digital Collections includes Florida Law, with publications from the Florida House of Representatives and Florida Water Law, a cooperative project to develop and maintain a history of water management in Florida.
The Digital Collections also include law and legal materials from many Caribbean countries and organizations:

Along with the legal materials for the Caribbean, the Digital Library of the Caribbean includes newspapers (with historical newspapers like The Mid-Ocean from Hamilton, Bermuda in 1899, more recent news with Unite published in English and French from the Haitian Unity Council and the Dominica Star, and recent newspapers as well), audio, video, and all sorts of other materials like Annales du Conseil Souverain de la Martinique (Annals of the Sovereign Council of Martinique) and Nouvelliste, a daily journal for Haitian commercial, agricultural, and literary information.
Even with all of these materials, we’re actively much, much more including British Caribbean materials for countries when they were British Colonies. As we load more materials, it’s really interesting to see how the law is influenced by and impacts everyday life in the newspapers and art in the literature of the time and after.

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