On January 1, 1988, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (the Convention) became effective in the United States. In general, the Convention (also referred to as the “Vienna Sales Convention,” the “Sales Convention,” the “CISG,” or the “UN Convention”) applies to contracts for the sale of goods between enterprises having their places of business in different countries, provided these countries have adopted the Convention. Freedom of contract, however, is a fundamental principle of the Convention, and the parties may opt out or modify the effects of its provisions.

Law is changing, and with it, so too the systems of higher education and research. Over the past two decades, both have been undergoing a progressive process of transnationalisation. In the field of law, we are currently experiencing a proliferation of transnational law. In the systems of higher education and research, national structures of knowledge production are giving way to transnational institutional frameworks. Disciplinary boundaries are becoming more permeable. Today, legal scholars have to engage in an increasingly interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue on law. The aim of this piece is to provide an overview of that process and highlight several significant consequences this development might potentially hold for legal scholarship (and its media).

Outside of the common law and civil law legal traditions, what is termed “Islamic law” forms one of the world's largest legal systems. There are more than one billion Muslims world-wide, and millions of those Muslims populate some of the world's richest trading zones. As of 2005, the Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.), comprised of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, was the United States' fifth largest trading partner.

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as “authoritative,” or “the official” word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital legal materials.

This article examines the contents of legal data and information on the Internet, with a special focus on the United States. It then evaluates the quality of the data, its impact on legal research and access to legal information, and addresses some issues raised by the digital medium, such as its reliability and permanent access concerns.

The necessity to counteract corruption effectively has lead to an increased integration in judicial cooperation. This paper analyses the legal instruments adopted by the EU for fighting bribery in order to explore in detail existing interrelationships (i.e. differences and peculiarities) between European and Italian rules. The latter is of singular relevance particularly since 1992, when a widespread system of corruption had been discovered and a broad campaign to prevent corruption (“mani pulite“) had been undertaken which resulted in an important work of reform and brought existing rules up to date. Finally, Italy also played an active role at the European level: the 1997 Anti-Corruption Convention was adopted on the basis of an Italian proposal.

This article explores HIV-specific laws in Central America: why they exist, where their terms come from, what choices have been made, and what the laws do. Part I outlines the influential work and standards of the U.N. and USAID. Part II presents contours of debate over AIDS law and policy in the United States. Part III reports on the HIV epidemics in Central America. Part IV compares the Central American laws, applying some of the lessons and theories presented in earlier Parts. The article concludes that HIV laws in the region do not function to provide the basis for claims of individual rights or impositions of responsibilities, the way U.S. laws often have. Rather, the Central American laws represent national aspirations toward a reasonable response to the epidemics. Central American aspirations toward safeguarding individual rights, while tracking heightening international standards, nonetheless are profoundly challenged as the epidemic is measured and expands: the law in Nicaragua, with its very low measured incidence of HIV infection, is very “rights” oriented, while the law in Honduras, where HIV incidence is relatively high, is very “duties” oriented.

Article 292 of the United Nations 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea (Convention) reads:

1. Where the authorities of a state party have detained a vessel flying the flag of another state party and it is alleged that the detaining state has not complied with the provisions of this Convention for the prompt release of the vessel or its crew upon posting of a reasonable bond or other financial security, the question of release from detention may be submitted to any court or tribunal agreed upon by the parties or, failing such agreement within 10 days from the time of detention, to a court or tribunal accepted by the detaining state under article 287 or to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, unless the parties otherwise agree.

2. The application for release may be made only by or on behalf of the flag state of the vessel.

3. The court or tribunal shall deal without delay with the application for release and shall deal only with the question of release, without prejudice to the merits of any case before the appropriate domestic forum against the vessel, its owner or its crew. The authorities of the detaining state remain competent to release the vessel or its crew at any time.

4. Upon the posting of the bond or other financial security determined by the court or tribunal, the authorities of the detaining state shall comply promptly with the decision of the court or tribunal concerning the release of the vessel or its crew.

Mr. Zhai presents a bibliographic guide listing the major sources of criminal law literature of the People's Republic of China published during 1949–2000. The fifty year span is divided into three phases, each containing a selective bibliography on criminal law representative of academic scholarship of the corresponding period.

Early last summer, I received a phone call from a law student in the litigation department of a large firm. He was working with a team on a case involving Czech law and, as part of a due diligence review, he was seeking an English translation of a piece of Czech legislation before the firm outsourced the bulk of the foreign legal research to Czech attorney-experts. Although it was easy to find the Czech legislation in Czech from a Czech government website, we could not find an English translation – official or otherwise – from any of our free or subscription-based databases. In the end, we relied on the flawed magic of Google Chrome's translate feature to “translate” the Czech legislation from the Czech government website into English. Despite my protestations and disclaimers, the student was thrilled with our results and insisted he had satisfied his due diligence duties. I hung up the phone and thought to myself: certainly, other American litigants have taken cases involving Czech law. What happens to the foreign law and legal analysis they obtain from their Czech attorney-experts? Assuming they submit some of it to our U.S. courts in the course of litigation, why can't we easily retrieve it?

A decade after the inauguration of the national working group on the reform of criminal justice administration in Nigeria by the then Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Akin Olujinmi, SAN, Nigeria was presented with a newly signed law—Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), which was a direct response to the growing call for reforms that would address the plethora of problems confronting the administration of the criminal justice system in Nigeria. The 495-section law harmonized the existing two principal laws: the Criminal Procedure Act (CPA) and the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC), which hitherto governed the administration of criminal justice system across all Federal-owned Courts in Nigeria and the Courts within the Federal Capital Territory. Both CPA and CPC operated for many decades in Nigeria, but had many challenges, hence the urgency for the newcomer— ACJA.

Rogelio Pérez Perdomo is a Professor of Law at the Central University of Venezuela and an active member of the Latin American Council of Law and Development. A longstanding student of the purposes and methods of legal education, he has also made a special point to acquire knowledge about legal education in Europe and the United States.

In this article Professor Pérez Perdomo discusses the inadequacies and shortcomings of the existing legal education programs in Latin America. He recognizes the growing awareness of such inadequacies on the part of many Latin American law teachers, and their dissatisfaction with the traditional systems and methods of law teaching. This dissatisfaction has generated many studies and discussions in the different Latin American countries, and it has also produced some changes and improvements. Professor Pérez Perdomo believes, however, that such changes fall significantly short of modern needs of adequate legal education. Concentrating on the situation in Venezuela, he compares it with current legal education innovations and developments in other Latin American countries, as well as in the major European countries and the United States.

Professor Pérez Perdomo clearly admits his preference for further reforms of the legal education methods and programs in Venezuela (and, presumably, in other countries of Latin America). He views, however, student unrests as an invalid reason for such reforms because improvements must emerge from substantive needs rather than the temporary considerations of political expediency. Reforms must proceed from an appreciation of the true role of law and the legal profession.

In a brief survey of the traditional and modern role of the law, especially its use as a vehicle for social and economic development, Professor Pérez Perdomo demonstrates the significance of their impact on legal education. Equally important, in his opinion, is the influence of foreign financial aid, e.g., the Ford Foundation, the International Legal Center, etc., which must have had a considerable impact on the emergence of new legal education trends. The effect of such influences has not yet been evaluated, but it is an important topic in any study of the effectiveness and desirability of international transfers of educational methods from one country to another. Thus, the United States legal education model encountered many difficulties in Latin America when the attempt was made to apply it there, and it can be used there only in a limited sense and in a significantly modified form.

Professor Pérez Perdomo notes the following trends of legal education reform in Latin America:

1. 1) The reorganization and “semestization” of law courses.

2. 2) The use of new teaching methods–tutorials, class discussions, working groups, and legal clinics–by various law schools in their efforts to enrich the content of their educational programs.

3. 3) The identification of the purposes and responsibilities of legal education in coordination with the general aims of law and the legal system.

Professor Pérez Perdomo recognizes that many of these aspirations for reform are seriously affected by such factual limitations as, for example, the unfavorable numerical ratio of students to law faculty, inadequate teaching abilities of the professors, poverty and the small size of libraries, and the encumbersome administrative organization and fiscal procedure of universities. Despite these difficulties, Professor Pérez Perdomo is confident that the reform efforts will prevail and that many salutory improvements will eventually become evident in Latin American legal education.

Among the many old and new actors on the international stage of nations the United States is one of the most active and most important. The U.S. is a member of most existing intergovernmental organizations, participates in hundreds upon hundreds of international conferences and meetings every year and, in conducting her bilateral and multilateral relations with the other members of the community of nations, contributes very substantially to the development of contemporary international law. The Government of the United States has a policy of promptly informing the public about developments in its relations with other countries through a number of documentary publication, issued by the Department of State