UVA Law Library Launches New Digital Archive Website

Submitted by Kathryn Boudouris

CC BY Image courtesy of University of Virginia Law Library

The UVA Law Library’s Special Collections team has launched a new website for its Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project. The project began as an effort to digitize and richly describe the Law Library’s print collection of Session Papers, which includes documents submitted to Scotland’s supreme civil court from the late 1750s to the late 1830s. The Law Library subsequently established a collaborative initiative with the Library of Congress, the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and other institutions. The digital archive will make Session Papers more accessible to scholars and the public.

Session Papers tell us a great deal about life and the law in what historians call the “British Atlantic world.” As civil court records, Session Papers contain rich histories of individuals who lived in North America, the Caribbean, and Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They provide a window into how people defended their legal interests in an era of profound historical change. Virginia merchants sued their Glaswegian counterparts over trade deals that soured; formerly enslaved people sought to prevent their forced impressment into the Royal Navy during the War for Independence; and women in the post-war era laid claim to inherited property in Scotland. These are but a few of the many early American legal histories we find in the Session Papers. 

The Special Collections team and its partners have constructed a custom-built database and website to hold digitized Session Papers and unpack the stories within them. The Law Library’s project will be among the first to describe Session Papers in rich detail. The website provides many different access points for exploring the collection, including curated themes and a full-text search feature that displays snippets of relevant documents. 

For more information about the website or the Scottish Court of Session Collection, contact Loren Moulds at moulds@law.virginia.edu.

CC BY Image courtesy of University of Virginia Law Library
Clockwise from front: Loren Moulds, Randi Flaherty & Jim Ambuske.