One of our professors asked us if there is an electronic version of
Blackstone's Commentaries.
We found the following sites which have selections, but did not find the
whole thing:
(1) www.lawmart.com(-click on Digital Library, then click on Major
Treatises and then on "Commentaries on the Laws of England").
(2) www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/oxford/bstone49.html
(3) www.constitution.org/tb/tb-0000.htm (Tucker's Blackstone)
The professor replied: "I checked out these sites, and while they have
some useful information, their excerpts from Blackstone are very limited.
Is it possible that there are other sources?"
Ever obliging, we did some more checking. We searched the Avalon Project
at Yale. We checked LC's American Memory project. We called LEXIS-NEXIS
and WESTLAW. (One of the customer service reps laughed at the request, but
you never know. WESTLAW loaded the Federalist Papers for the bicentennial
of the Constitution, after -- they *could* have loaded Blackstone for some
reason.) We searched newspapers and legal news on LEXIS-NEXIS to see
whether there was a story about someone digitizing this classic work. We
surfed the 'Net some more.
We have not found what the professor seeks. So now we ask you in
law-lib-land: is anyone aware of an electronic version of Blackstone's
Commentaries? Do you even know of someone who is thinking of digitizing
the set?
This question was posed on law-lib in June 1999. At that time, the only
response I saw was a reference to a catalog of Blackstone editions
included in a microfilm set ("The Yale Law Library Blackstone Collection"
by Law Library Microform Consortium, at http://www.llmc.com/catalog8.htm).
That's not what the professor wants: he'd like Blackstone in full text.
Thank you for your assistance.
__________________________________________________________
Mary Whisner, Assistant Librarian for Reference Services
Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
whisner@u.washington.edu library's website: http://lib.law.washington.edu
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