About this Collection
This collection includes material from the William Winthrop Memorial Library at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School External in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) External is the legal arm of the United States Army, established on July 29, 1775 External by General George Washington. Selections of their physical library collection have been digitized and made available to the public online, including primary source materials and publications in the field of military law.
New relevant materials are regularly added to this collection, in a fully searcahable and browsable format.
The collection is extensive and divided into three categories to best highlight the type of material available:
Please see our Index to the Collections for an overview of our material available within this collection.More information is available on the “Articles and Essays” pages.
JAG Legal Center & School Materials includes issues of the Military Law Review and The Army Lawyer for over 50 years and will be added to as new issues become available. It also contains deskbooks, handbooks, and training manuals for JAG officers in the military. This section highlights material specific to the school, including scrapbooks, newsletters, and theses. Finally, this section includes the Lieber collection—the personal library of Brigadier General Guido Norman Lieber and the items he inherited from his father, Dr. Francis Lieber. Francis Lieber is best known for his writing "the first modern codification of the laws of war," now known as the "Lieber Code," which was adopted by President Lincoln on April 24, 1863.
Historical Materials is subdivided chronologically, by war. The World War II material is the largest section, containing materials on war crimes trials. The material on the Nuremberg Trials contains all four major publications from the Trials: the official proceedings of the trial of the major war criminals (The Blue Series), documentary evidence and guide materials from that trial (The Red Series), the official condensed record of the subsequent trials (The Green Series), and a final report on all the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949. This section also contains reports from the Malmedy Massacre, General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s trial, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Information on the MyLai Incident can be found under the Vietnam War section.
Military Law and Legislative History includes one of the most comprehensive legislative histories known for the principal documents of military law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The legislative history begins in 1912 with the proposed Articles of War through its enactment and the first comprehensive revision in 1948 (known as the Elston Act). The collection contains selected papers of Edmund M. Morgan, a Harvard Law professor who was appointed chair of the committee selected to draft a uniform code of military justice. The collection then includes amendments to the UCMJ and the Military Justice Acts of 1968 and 1983. Finally, this page includes materials from the Manual for Courts Martial, Geneva Conventions Materials, and the Red Cross Committee and International Review, as well as legislative histories on the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act of 1974.
The Law Library has created a five-minute video introduction to the military legal resources collection, which provides instruction and tips for working with and searching this extensive digitized collection.
If you have a question regarding the Military Legal Resources, please contact the Law Library of Congress through our Ask A Librarian service.