Australian Public Law
Constitutional law - classic constitutional (and political philosophy) texts - full text online
- University of Sydney Australian Federation Full Text Database - Includes the Convention Debates of the 1890's and classic works by Sir Robert Garran, Sir John Quick, Andrew Inglis Clark, Alfred Deakin and many others.
- The Federalist Papers (courtesy Project Gutenberg) - The Federalist, commonly referred to as the Federalist Papers, is a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison between October 1787 and May 1788. The essays were published anonymously, under the pen name 'Publius', in various New York state newspapers of the time. The Federalist Papers were written and published to urge New Yorkers to ratify the proposed United States Constitution, which was drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. In lobbying for adoption of the Constitution over the existing Articles of Confederation, the essays explain particular provisions of the Constitution in detail. For this reason, and because Hamilton and Madison were each members of the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers are often used today to help interpret the intentions of those drafting the Constitution.
- The Constitution Society - Website maintained by American, Jon Roland, containing an enormous range of American, British and some European classic constitutional and political philosophy works in full text. Many are not available elsewhere in electronic form. See especially Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics.
- Law of the Constitution, by A.V. Dicey, Eighth Edition (1914) - at The Constitution Society. Jon Roland scanned and uploaded this classic British text at my urging (because Dicey's thinking was so influential on Australia's Founding Fathers). Jon had threatened to upload Dicey's text with a critical preface arguing that it was a woolly-thinking popularising work, which was little more than an uncritical apologia for British version of constitutionalism. Roland (like many Americans) compares Britain's largely unwritten constitutional rules with the detailed Lockean model of the US Constitution. He has a point, I think.
- The English Constitution, by Walter Bagehot, Second Edition
- Second Treatise on Government, by John Locke (1690)
- Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England
