State Bar of Georgia Opens Virtual Law Museum

June 9,2016

The State Bar of Georgia has launched The Virtual Museum of Law to give students and educators an online tour of legal history.

The online website at www.thelawmuseum.org presents much of the same material that can be found in the Museum of Law— housed at the bar's headquarters in downtown Atlanta—to make legal history accessible to those who can't travel downtown.

Designed by the bar's Law-Related Education Program, the virtual museum covers four areas of legal history through the lens of individual cases: civil rights, an independent judiciary, cruel and unusual punishment and famous trials in Georgia and the United States.

There are 30 historically significant cases so far that are covered in the four subject areas, such as the Salem witch trials, Brown v. Board of Education, Marbury v. Madison and Furman v. Georgia. Users can click on icons for each case to learn more.

The Law-Related Education Program has created short, animated educational videos for six of the cases, Brown (civil rights), Marbury (independent judiciary), Furman and Gregg v. Georgia (cruel and unusual punishment), and the Leo Frank trial and the Lincoln assassination (famous trials).

The bar's Law-Related Education Program created the virtual law museum to provide access to legal history to students far from Atlanta and has designed the website to be used as a teaching aid. The LRE program hosts about 10,000 fourth- through 12th-grade students at the downtown museum for its free "Journey Through Justice" field trip.

"While designed to offer the same experience for those who cannot travel to Atlanta, the Virtual Museum of Law is not just a recreation of the physical museum," said Deborah Craytor, the bar's director of law-related education, in a statement. Craytor said the bar will be adding more videos about cases to the virtual law museum in an ongoing effort over the next five years.