The Avalon Project is a

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

of documents relating to

law Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

and

diplomacy Diplomacy comprises spoken or written communication by representatives of states (such as leaders and diplomats) intended to influence events in the international system.Ronald Peter Barston, ''Modern diplomacy'', Pearson Education, 2006, p. ...

. The project is part of the

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by '' U.S. News & Worl ...

Lillian Goldman Law Library The Lillian Goldman Law Library in Memory of Sol Goldman, commonly known as the Yale Law Library, is the law library of Yale Law School. It is located in the Sterling Law Building and has almost 800,000 volumes of print materials and about 10,000 ...

. The project contains online electronic copies of documents dating back to the beginning of history, making it possible to study the original text of not only very famous documents such as '' Magna Carta'', the

English Bill of Rights The Bill of Rights 1689 is an Act of the Parliament of England, which sets out certain basic civil rights and clarifies who would be next to inherit the Crown, and is seen as a crucial landmark in English constitutional law. It received Royal ...

, and the

United States Bill of Rights The United States Bill of Rights comprises the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Proposed following the often bitter 1787–88 debate over the ratification of the Constitution and written to address the objections rai ...

, but also the text of less well known but significant documents which mark turning points in the history of law and rights. The site has full search facilities and a facility to electronically compare the text of two documents. It also hosts ''Project Diana: An Online

Human Rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

Archive''.

References

{{reflist

External links

The Avalon Project

YLS Avalon Project
Digital history projects Discipline-oriented digital libraries American digital libraries Legal documents Yale Law School Digital humanities projects