For more than four years, I’ve been working on a digital legal history project called 9CHRIS – the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System. The potential for historical analysis that comes from having some 40,000 briefs and transcripts available is what keeps me perpetually interested in continuing to improve this project. Each time I open one of the documents, I think of the potential that such rich detail can offer to historians and others studying the West, especially the relationship between western places, western residents, and the law.

As I’ve noted before, manuscript records collected by the census can be fascinating and informative windows to the past. They can be used to learn more about groups of people that appear only occasionally in the historical record, and since they are generally well-structured, they can be used (with care) to ask data-driven historical questions. When most historians think of using historical census sources, it’s the forms from the decennial census of population that come immediately to mind.

I’ve created a system to help index digitized court records from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. These documents, which include legal briefs and trial transcripts, can be a fascinating source for western history. They were saved by the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, then digitized by the Internet Archive, and span the period from 1891 to the late 1960s. Head over to 9CHRIS, the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System and have a look!