The Military Legal Resources collection is now available online. You might recall that this collection has been through a few significant changes over the years, but it has finally found a home as a Library collection, where it is linked through the catalog and the Law Library’s U.S. Law Digital Collections.
New finding and navigation aids will be added soon, but for now please take a look at the extensive metadata to browse through all that this collection offers. My blog post from two years ago describes more about what this collection offers, including all editions of The Army Lawyer, the Military Law Review, and the International Review of the Red Cross; legislative histories; the personal library of Brigadier General Lieber; and hearings, inquiries, and war crimes trials from the U.S. Civil War through the Vietnam War.
Many thanks to our friends across the Library of Congress and in the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School for making this possible!
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Comments (5)
It’s very sad that the older format (aggregated links to specific trials) has been disbanded in favor of exclusively offering the searchable database format. It should have been possible to offer both versions of the materials. Now, to recapture the handy aggregation of specific subsets of materials, such as the Green Series from Nuremberg (the NMT trials), you now need to type “Green Series” into the search box, and when you do, the volumes appear out of order and with no volume 7 at all. Similarly, the former aggregation of Vietnam-era proceedings is now gone, as are the other groupings. Would it not be possible to give users a choice between searching all and finding pre-grouped materials? My students always found the pre-grouped materials quite approachable, and my fear is that the searchable database will be daunting to them.
It’s unfortunate that the older webpage for “Military Law” has been removed and reshaped in this way. The older site aggregated materials in an extremely useful way. It was formerly under this URL: https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/
Thank you for your comments about this collection. The older format was no longer technologically sustainable, so we had to update and move the items to our newer format. We faced a few bumps in the road with the migration, but we should have our finding aids added within the next few weeks. Thank you!
I have to agree with Mr Richter. The new format is practically unusable compared to the old format. I am fortunate to have used the old format so I know what your collection contains but my students will not be so fortunate. What new finding aids are you offering to make this more usable? I did
not see them when I visited this site. It’s a real shame that what was a key research tool is now so difficult to use.
Thank you for your comments. The navigation aids can be found by clicking on “Articles & Essays” (https://www.loc.gov/collections/military-legal-resources/articles-and-essays/), where you will find the material divided into three main categories: those items created/published by the JAG school organized by publication, historical materials organized chronologically, and military law and legislative histories organized thematically. There is also an index to the collection available. If you need any help finding material or have ideas for future aids that would be helpful to your students, please contact us through Ask a Librarian so that we may help!