A Multi-User Relational Database of Habeas Corpus Petitions in the American West

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While habeas corpus is primarily conceived as the constitutional protection to petition against wrongful arrest or detainment, the habeas procedure also offers petitioners an opportunity to challenge deprivations of rights and liberties. This project plans to document the use of habeas corpus by creating a relational (interactive) Database of writ of civil habeas corpus petitions in the American West from 1812 through 1924. The goal of the Database is to enable scholars and others to understand how marginalized populations utilized the habeas corpus procedure to claim rights and liberties, and to learn how they used habeas petitions to push for and expand legal reforms. The project also will document judicial decision making in these cases during this early time period of U.S. expansion and history.Employing a strategic sample of six Western states, the project will collect and encode roughly 6,000 unpublished habeas corpus petitions currently housed in federal and state archives in those sampled states. The result will be an open source and open access graph Database incorporating an indexed and quantifiable compilation of legal documents by individuals who sought to use habeas petitions to express dynamic notions of citizenship. The Database will be freely available to the general public and scholars alike, allowing for searches on the jurists and parties involved, the jurisdictions hearing the petitions, and keywords drawn from the petitions. Data from these habeas corpus petitions will inform the work of scholars and practitioners in multiple disciplines, including (among others) child and family law, federal Indian law, immigration law, labor law, race relations, criminal justice, and legal mobilization and reform.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.