Monthly Archives: April 2018

Bibliographies of Collections of British Statutes

I have now finished compiling the bibliographies of the several collections of British legislation I have used for this project. Each entry, due to the magic of Zotero, should have a link to the digitized version of the book, and each bibliography a link to the OCRd text I am currently correcting, hosted on Github.

These bibliographies are not complete, both in that there are other collections I have not made lists for, and that those I have do not list all the volumes. I have concentrated on books freely available online, and that I have used to generate the OCRd texts I am correcting. Given time, I may well expand this, but for the moment it provides at least one volume covering the period from Magna Carta until 1878. After that date, far fewer volumes are freely available, and so for all intents and purposes, the project stops there. But note that legislation for the twentieth and twenty first centuries is available via Matthew Williams marvelous datasets.

Not every law is to be found in full in these volumes. Some are abbreviated, giving the preamble, perhaps a few clauses, and a summary. Some are omitted entirely. Very few private, personal and local acts are given. And very annoyingly, volume 43 part 2 of Pickering’s Statutes at Large is the sole missing part of that long and useful series.

All this notwithstanding, I think these bibliographies will be of great help to anyone wanting to track down historic laws.

Go to the Index Page.