Once the purview of lawyers and exclusively focused on courts and legal doctrine, legal history has become a vibrant, dynamic field that encompasses power relations, institutions, governance and the state, individual and family social relations, identities and ideology, and the lived experience of social, religious, and cultural minorities. The field is deeply interdisciplinary, featuring independent scholars, public historians, and academics in law schools, as well as departments of history, anthropology, sociology, area studies, and language and literature. It is also global in scope, with scholars studying imperial and national histories as well as broad geographic regions and comparative legal history as well. Oxford Bibliographies in Legal History aims to provide scholars with the central themes, methods, and literature—recent and classic alike—that have established legal history as a growing and increasingly diverse discipline.

Oxford Bibliographies in Legal History provides authoritative guides to the key scholarship in the field of legal history. Curated by area editors and written by experts in the field, each bibliography provides a guided selection of scholarship within legal history, along with original annotations and informative paragraphs that provide much-needed context to each citation. The bibliographies each contain a table of contents and headings, a general introduction, a commentary paragraph for each thematic subheading, bibliographic citations, and annotations. The articles are starting points for research, offering recommendations for the best texts to go to for an introduction to a topic, and providing a critical selection of the most important sources and resources. Themes covered in the collection include colonialism, gender, sexuality, conflict and war, Indigenous studies, crime and carceral institutions, and more.