Airborne pollution of the marine environment has not received great attention in the literature. This is certainly a reflection of the fact that, for the longest time, this type of pollution was neglected in international efforts to cooperate for the protection of the marine environment. However, the last few years have witnessed considerable activity in this area and some stock-taking is in order.

This paper briefly discusses the transformation of the customary law of marriage in South Africa by the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act of 1998 Act (hereafter referred to as the Act), and the likely challenges of implementing the new law. The latter will be demonstrated by reference to section 7 of the Act, which regulates the matrimonial property.

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.

One of the major weaknesses of libraries in developing countries is their scarcity of foreign and international legal collections. In desperate need for reliable and up-to-date foreign jurisdiction resources, these libraries try to fill the gap with ad-hoc solutions. New York University's experiences in offering assistance to some of them clearly show that obtaining out-of-date books from “generous donations”, importing short-term visiting “brains” or buying computers (which are used as furniture covered with elegant red velvet) doesn't solve the problem. On the contrary, these stop-gaps feed frustration.

The global development of legal information needs and services has continued to stimulate much professional discussion in recent years. This detailed report, and the comparative assessments and analysis it aims to provide, follow from one of the first global surveys of major law libraries around the world to take account of the present period of challenges and change. The report analyses the results of a comprehensive survey of 124 major law libraries world wide undertaken from April to June 2012 - extending a methodology involving both quantitative and qualitative approaches which has proved successful in my previous research on the activities of law libraries across the UK. It is hoped that this comparative data and analysis (gathered from the activities, ambitions and concerns of law libraries in the real world) will provide a useful snapshot of current research support services, capture emerging trends and new service initiatives and encourage major law libraries to develop their services by providing helpful benchmarking and best practice information.

This short overview will focus on three points: open access of primary sources, access to journal articles highlighting the experience of the repository of Toulouse 1 Capitole university, and perspectives for the future with a proposed French bill “for a Digital Republic.” These three parts will be illustrated with three websites.

Most legal scholars assume that there are only two “families” of legal systems in the world: common law and civil law. Briefly, common law is applied in all countries that speak the English language and has its origination from the “habits of society.” On the other hand, civil law is applied just about everywhere else, with a few exceptions, such as in tribal law areas, jurisdictions that follow Islamic law, and a few other smaller legal systems. Brazil's New Code of Civil Procedure was promulgated in 2015 and brought innovations to Brazilian law. Elements of common law were incorporated into the Brazilian legal system, particularly that of using precedent. The application of common law elements in Brazilian law is being studied by various legal specialists. This present study explains how common law can be applied in civil law jurisdictions, similar to the way it is being adapted and applied in Brazil.

Open access (OA) in the United States is similar to a crazy quilt. There is a patchwork of OA policy and practice among the many federal, state, and local jurisdictions in the United States, as well as individual policies and practices in individual institutions, whether those are academic, business, or governmental. By way of a reminder, the United States is a federal republic consisting of 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., five major territories, and various possessions. Most readers know that already, but what one should also understand is that each of the states and territories has its own policies with respect to OA, as does the Federal government.

This Bibliographical Calendar focuses on a general armed conflict within Europe that spread to most parts of the world. It started during the second decade of the twentieth century. In this context the present Calendar offers an overview of the chronology leading up to the First World War. It is also a documented survey of official transactions relating to the World War with particular attention to the sources of record. The main focus of the work is on diplomatic acts of the belligerent and neutral parties that accompanied the military dimension of the conflict.

The Calendar assumes the form of a compilation of related kinds of information situated between a bibliography and a repertory, with the aim of elucidating the course of World War One from the perspectives of international law and diplomacy.

From time to time during the past several years many law librarians in the United States with institutional commitments for the development of foreign and international law collections have voiced their deep concern about the intrinsic research value of their existing holdings of foreign and international law materials and, even more so, about the ability of their libraries to maintain the future growth of such collections at a sufficiently high scholarly level. Their disquietude was not without a reason. The United States could always pride itself in having several distinguished law libraries with some of the best research collections of legal materials in the world. The reputation of these collections was so great that generation after generation of legal scholars did much of their research work in them. There were also many other law libraries in the United States but they were generally small and did not specialize in foreign and international law. An unexpected development occured, however, in the two decades after World War II. Many of the smaller law libraries as well as a number of new libraries began to expand their holdings at a phenomenal rate of growth. They began also to branch out into areas they had not been previously familiar with, and some of them succeeded in establishing sizable collections of foreign and international law materials within the relatively short period of less than twenty years. After several decades of this unprecedented and frequently indiscriminate expansion, culminating in the emergence of a wide variety of foreign and international law collections, many of these libraries were suddenly faced in the early 1970's with a series of critical problems.

During the Second World War, the government of the Netherlands realized that it had no adequate penalization system in place for wartime offences. Thus, the Criminal Law Wartime Occupation Decree of 22 December 1943 (BBS, Stb. D 61) was enacted to penalize offences committed during wartime. This emergency legislation was recognized as legally valid after the war. It then took until the Wartime Offences Act of 10 July 1952 (effective date 5 August 1952, the “WOS”) for wartime offences to be subjected to specific penalties. This was followed by separate statutes penalizing genocide (Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 2 July 1964, effective date 24 October 1970) and torture (Torture Convention Implementation Act of 29 September 1988, effective date 20 January 1989).

• Conference sessions take place in the Assembly Hall of the Law Faculty of the St. Petersburg State University, in St. Petersburg.

Where in the UK can I locate the most extensive collection of the current legislation for the Cayman Islands?

Which library has a comprehensive set of the World Trade Organisation International Trade Law Reports?

Where can I find verbatim debates on bills as they pass through the New Zealand House of Representatives?

Where are good collections of international environmental or commercial law?

What are the opening hours and access conditions for a visiting researcher wishing to use the official publications collection of a particular major UK university?

Russian constitutional principles setting out a federal system and a republican form of government are integral attributes of Russian nationality. It makes it necessary to create an adequate blend of federalism and electoral politics. Accordingly, there is a special interest in the problem of electoral federalism. It implies, together with provisions for the unity of the Russian Federation's electoral system, fundamental principles, and real opportunities for the subjects of the Federation to independently solve problems on organizing and holding elections in their territories. At least, such an approach correlates to federalism and elections at the national and regional levels and is declared in the articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation as well as decisions of the Russian Constitutional Court.