The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources is digital archive of the published records of the American colonies, documents published by state constitutional conventions, state and territorial codes, municipal codes, city charters, law dictionaries, digests, and more. Note that the term "primary sources" is used not in the historian's sense of a manuscript, letter or diary, but rather in the legal sense of a case, statute or regulation. The collection brings together many important documents that have been lost, destroyed, or previously inaccessible to researchers of American legal history around the world.

Primary Sources consists of two Parts:

• Part I, 1620-1926 contains more than 1,300 individual titles comprising over 2,000 volumes sourced chiefly from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University and the Law Library of Congress. The 1.8 million pages in Part I span over 300 years of legal history and comprise a variety of key works, including early U.S. state codes, municipal codes, constitutional convention proceedings, legal compilations, and other key primary source documents, many digitally available for the first time ever.
   
• Part II, 1763-1970 extends the scope and chronological range of this acclaimed archive into the second half of the twentieth century with more than 1.6 million pages drawn from the Harvard Law School Library, the Yale Law Library, and the Law Library of Congress. Comprised of United States codes, constitutional conventions and compilations, and municipal codes, Part II enlarges the range of scholarly access to essential documents in American legal history.