We live in a complex and interdependent world. Our planet seems to have become much smaller than it used to be only a few decades ago. We know almost instantaneously what is happening in places thousands of miles away, and we also know that most world events are interrelated and affect us all, wherever we might live or whatever nationality we might belong to. Movements of goods, people and ideas across national borders and the constant interplay of national interests of states continuously create situations which demand and command international attention and cooperation. States and intergovernmental organizations are thus required to assume the roles of principal actors on the world stage where the contemporary human drama is being played with much greater number of participants and intensity than ever before. The number of independent nations has increased dramatically during the last decades. Their mutual relations accordingly require a multitude of various formal and informal arrangements unprecedented in quantity as well as complexity. It is a fact of life that no nation today can afford to live in complete isolation from all its neighbors. The economic and political realities simply do not permit it. As a result, therefore, networks of international agreements under a variety of names (for the purposes of this paper we shall call them all treaties) have been growing like mushrooms after a good autumn rain, attempting to define, reconcile, harmonize, adjust and regulate the whole spectrum of competing national interests, aspirations and needs of the multimember family of nations. The sheer number, diversity and complexity of the world treaty picture has reached such a degree of difficulty in recent years that some scholars have described the situation as a “state of confusion” or even a “treaty jungle”. Librarians are very much in the middle of this situation, being called upon to provide bibliographic guidance to and through this “jungle”. It may therefore be useful to present here, within the prescribed limited confines of this paper, a quick look on the degree of accessibility to treaty information in the world today, to discuss briefly some of the types of treaty research tools that are and are not available, and to conclude with a number of suggestions for possible improvement.

In 1995 the Constitutional Assembly Database Project (the Project) began to publish the proceedings of South Africa's Constitutional Assembly on the Internet. The Project finished this work, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, in 1996, but the Database has not been available since a computer crash in 2000. This paper is the first account of the history of the Project. The paper argues that it is important to restore access to the Database, but in a way that will not repeat the mistakes made when setting up the database.

This contribution to the IALL Annual Course 2001 focuses on electronic law journals, an issue that doesn't seem to arouse much interest in either the Serials Community or the Legal Community. Electronic law journals are hardly ever mentioned by the Serials Community, which seems more occupied with scientific, technical and medical (STM) electronic journals than with journals from other disciplines. Electronic law journals don't attract many comments from the Legal Community either. There has been in the past few years an occasional focus on the topic, but it aimed essentially at proving that electronic journals in law had no particular reasons to survive the era of electronic self-publication. As such however, the phenomenon of electronic journals is rarely addressed by the professionals of legal information.

Ever since Joseph Schacht, whose book An Introduction to Islamic Law is on the short list of books on Middle East law, said that Islamic law is the epitome of Islamic thought, in other words, you can't understand Islam without understanding Islamic law, Middle Eastern studies and their journals invariably include classical Islamic law in their coverage of the subject with little attention given to modern legislation. This is particularly obvious in the bibliography of periodical literature which disregards the increasing number of studies on the modern law of the Middle East appearing in law journals. Even entries described as positive law, a category recently added to John and Marianne Makdisi's eminently useful compilation on Islamic law, comes no closer to giving a realistic picture of the applicable law. To illustrate what I mean, titles under positive law dealing with insurance, banking, and interest, concentrate on Islamic law's position on these subject-matters at a time when modern legislation in most Arab states has completely discarded that position.

Twenty years ago, most of the users at the University of Oslo's Faculty of Law Library (UOFLL) were what we would call “Norwegians from Norway”. They came to the library to find Norwegian domestic law to address issues of purely domestic concern. In recent years, bilateral, regional and global agreements have increasingly become an integral part of our domestic legal system.

The Argentine Constitution was adopted in 1853 after years of domestic turmoil which ended with the defeat of Juan Manuel de Rosas, an authoritarian caudillo from the Province of Buenos Aires, by Justo José de Urquiza y García. This Constitution, with the amendments that will be explained below, still remains in force.

This project seeks to develop ways of holding governments accountable for their failure to satisfy the requirements of conflict management, political stability, economic growth, and social welfare. Since offending governments tend to resist external sources of protection and assistance for an oppressed population by pleading national sovereignty, and major international actors are less likely to act unless driven by strategic or ideological reasons, the project aims at “expounding on the normative principles of responsible sovereignty, international mechanisms and strategies for their enforcement, and empirical evidence about the performance of governments as measured by the stipulates of sovereignty.” Asserting “human dignity as an overarching goal to which all peoples and societies aspire and are committed, whatever the variations of their cultural perspectives on the institutional details of the concept” the project perceives this concept as “operationally or functionally translated into a quest for recognition and respect for human beings, both as individuals and as members of identifiable groups. Human dignity demands, in the minimum, equal treatment with full rights and duties of citizenship.”

On July 17, 1998, the world community voted on the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC,) which, if ratified by 60 countries, would establish for the first time in history, a permanent international criminal tribunal. The outcome was an overwhelmingly favorable vote, with 120 countries voting in favor, 21 abstentions, and 7 countries, including the United States, against. The idea of an international criminal court appeared to be in the making.

“Data protection” law refers to the legal scheme governing the collection, holding, processing, disclosure, and transfer of individuals’ personal information online … and off. Data protection is a fast-changing and increasingly important supranational, international (including transnational), and national topic that touches on a numerous core political concerns, including the freedom of expression, public safety, and international trade. One recent study found that “data privacy laws are spreading globally, and their number and geographical diversity accelerating since 2000.”

Thank you, Terry [Harry S. Martin III] for this kind introduction. I'm glad to be here to meet you all. I'm very fond of law librarians, perhaps because of Terry, who has given us such unstinting support for a program and for a body of literature that might otherwise be considered exotic or unnecessary. I don't think we've ever asked for anything from this Library that it has not tried its very best to give us. In our program we are aware that probably the most essential thing we can do—building for the long-term—is to strengthen the Library in our field. I have to admit, in my modest moments, that people most often come here to study with us, to join our program, not for us, but for the Library. Occasionally people let it slip.

This article examines the potential effects of the developing user-centered, networked information environment on scholarly communication in law. By “user-centered, networked information environment,” I mean the emerging environment for legal research and scholarship, in which most seekers and users of legal information will have ready desktop access to a networked computer and to applications that will allow them to communicate with colleagues around the world and enable them to retrieve increasing amounts of the information they need to be productive directly via the Internet, without needing to rely on locally held print sources.

Law librarianship, especially the librarianship in judicial institutions, is different from librarianship in any other discipline. This aspect is more appropriately explained by Prof. Igor I. Kavass, when he says that “the reason for law libraries being different from other types of libraries is that they serve a profession which is literally unable to exercise its work without the use of books.” While Librarians in other organizations may convince their users to give them some time for catering to their information requirements, a court librarian has to furnish the desired information at once because the case is being argued in the Court and desired information is needed in the course of the argument. So a law librarian has to provide the information instantly without any excuse. Because of this reason, a law librarian has to be a very alert professional and must develop his or her own tools and expertise to provide the desired information instantly.

Law publishing — that is, the reproduction and dissemination of statutes, judicial decisions, commentaries, legal forms and texts — is as old as writing and can be found in all literate societies. In the ancient world, written law was essential to political and social relations. That can be seen from the importance given to law codes in the Semitic, Greek and Roman societies. Over the centuries and in every medium from stone and clay, papyrus and parchment, to paper and the electronic media of our day — law has been a major component of literature. The very fact of publication is an essential requirement for the enactment and efficacy of laws in many societies. Publication of law was widespread before the invention of printing and was achieved by reproducing important texts in multiple manuscript copies which could then be disseminated to libraries, officials and others who needed them and could afford them. The printing of law depended not only on the invention of the press itself, but also on the acceptance of what more accessible law might mean to society. In England, for example this was a matter of considerable controversy for over a hundred years.

Discussing the European Union (EU) is an excellent way of dealing with the question of the translation of legal texts. Why is this the case? The European Union, with approximately 370 million inhabitants, is unique among the world's international organizations. It is unique because it uses all the official languages of its Member States in its official publications.