Winner, Abraham Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic Book Award, in recognition of this "monumental contribution to scholarship," $5,000 cash prize, March 2001.
Finalist, The eLincoln Prize at Gettysburg College, February 2001.
"The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition is the culmination of fifteen years of archival combing, scrupulous research, and clear organization. . . . The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition makes a major contribution to the archival data on President Lincoln and some of the major events of frontier life in the 19th century. In many respects the editors of this edition provide a template for digitizing important historical documents that are quickly deteriorating in paper form."
James T. Carroll, Iona College
Journal of the Association for History and Computing, September 2002 Read entire review
"The collection fascinates not just because of the documents it makes available for researchers, but because of the way it presents them. Searchable images of 96,000 pages of nineteenth-century Illinois legal documentation represents a new kind of archive.
"The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln should be of interest to anyone researching the antebellum era. The editors have made documents usually locked away in courthouse vaults accessible, not just physically accessible, but understandable. The promise of the computer age is that historical resources will be more widely available, not just to senior scholars with big grants, or dissertation writers with little grants, but to all manner of students. These records should be used by high school and college students, professors at teaching colleges as well as the faculty at the leading research institutions."
Christopher Waldrep, San Francisco State University
Law and History Review, Summer 2002 Read entire review
"the results vastly exceeded the most optimistic projections. . . . the editors of the Lincoln Legal Papers did a superb job not only in making Lincoln's documents available, but in taking advantage of the possibilities inherent in electronic publishing to make them easily accessible, even for the novice computer user. . . . The most impressive aspect of the publication, besides its sheer size, is the efficiency of its search tools. . . .
"If the editors of the Lincoln Legal Papers did no more than fill out the picture of the sixteenth president's law practice, they would have performed a valuable, if narrow, historical service. What they have produced, however, is also a work of social history that affords remarkable insight into the role of law and lawyers in the frontier era of Midwestern settlement."
Gerald J. Prokopowicz, The Lincoln Museum
Documentary Editing, December 2001 Read entire review
"This marvelous collection stands as a model for what modern editing can do. . . . This is documentary editing at the highest level."
Phillip Shaw Paludan, University of Kansas
Journal of American History, September 2001 Read entire review
"The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln is extraordinary in every sense of that much overused word. It is difficult to find any other word that accurately describes the contours of this publication. Tens of thousands of books have appeared on all aspects of the life of Abraham Lincoln, and tens of thousands more will appear in years to come. I am certain, however, that no publication—past, present, or future—will rival this one in terms of its breadth and depth of detail. . . . This documentary edition is a prototype for the future of both documentary editing and scholarly research."
Timothy Walch, Herbert Hoover
Presidential Library
Journal of Illinois History, Summer 2001
Read entire review
"The Lincoln Legal Papers Project has released the fruits of years of painstaking labor . . . to give us an extraordinarily complete picture of Lincoln's law practice. . . . At long last we have a truly comprehensive, detailed record of the practice of an antebellum career attorney."
Brian Dirck, Anderson University
H-Net Review, January 2001
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entire review
"While the past decade has been a golden age of new Lincoln documentary discoveries and editions, nothing has been more golden than the massive project of the Lincoln Legal Papers to assemble, edit, and publish as-nearly-complete as possible written record of Abraham Lincoln's legal practice."
Allen C. Guelzo, Templeton Honors
College at Eastern College
The Lincoln Herald, Winter 2000
"I have been charmed, delighted, instructed, and a bit overwhelmed by this fascinating collection, which offers the first complete and comprehensive documentation of Abraham Lincoln's law practice. Its 5,100 cases, totaling 210,000 pages, make it possible to trace Lincoln's evolution from a small-town lawyer to one of the most influential attorneys in Illinois. Superbly arranged, indexed, and cross-referenced these easy-to-use records will be a major source for all future Lincoln studies. They are equally important to every legal historian as a unique record of a nineteenth-century law practice. I cannot recommend them too highly."
David Herbert Donald, Professor of
History, Emeritus
Harvard University
"The new edition of The Lincoln Legal Papers is a vivid and welcome reminder of
the power of electronic technology to transform and enhance the quality of
scholarship. In this instance, the editors have summoned that technology to
present the entire available record of Abraham Lincoln's legal practice,
uniformly viewed by legal historians as of rare value in understanding the
political, social, and economic dynamics of pre-Civil War America in general and
Illinois in particular. What distinguishes this electronic edition, however, is
the ease of access to the core issues raised by the legal materials, the ready
way in which scholars can take major categories of Lincoln's law practice (such
as property, contracts, and criminal law) and search them, and how easy to read
the handwritten materials that are digitally reproduced. There is also a
considerable body of non-legal materials included in the edition that brings
context to the entire project. The editors have performed their tasks with
obvious care and the result is a major breakthrough in the field of historical
editing and a singular contribution to scholarship on Lincoln, the law, and
American life in the mid-nineteenth century."
Kermit L. Hall, Provost and Vice
Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Professor of History
North Carolina State University
"Good social historians have long recognized that there is gold
to be mined in legal documents. However for years this meant plowing through
dusty files in courthouse basements, taking painstaking notes, only occasionally
being able to Xerox documents. Now the world is changing and a magnificent
collection of legal papers reflecting all the years of Abraham Lincoln's law
practice is available on DVD-ROM, indexed so that any inquisitive social
historian, historian of gender, historian of the family, can begin to mine gold
at her own computer. The possibilities now available to such historians are
vastly expanded by this Complete Documentary Edition.
Anne Firor Scott, W. K. Boyd Professor, Emerita, Department
of History
Duke University
"Using the eminently user-friendly interface, within minutes of
loading the software researchers can be searching this database by name, date,
jurisdiction, and a wide variety of interesting and important subjects, from
African Americans and Agriculture to Weapons and Women. Each case is admirably
summarized, and just a click away are high-resolution reproductions of the
documents themselves, in all their fascinating and messy detail. This is an
incomparable resource for legal, social, and cultural history. The Law Practice
of Abraham Lincoln is the most extraordinary documentary collection I know for
the history of young America.
John Mack Faragher, Professor of History
Yale University