The present reporter has been associated with the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) from its inception in 1959, first as Assistant Editor and, for the last five years, als General Editor; his remarks will be confined to matters of which he has had direct experience in his work for the IFLP.

Law librarianship in Nigeria is not as old as the legal profession but certainly older than public librarianship or any other brand of librarianship. The oldest libraries -those of the Lagos High Court and Federal Ministry of Justice– are law libraries and they date as far back as 1900.

It is proposed in this paper to examine the possibility of cooperative acquisition of legal materials among some libraries in the City of Lagos.

Foreign law, whether a subject of study in itself within the domain of comparative law, or invoked under a rule of conflict of laws to resolve a crossborder issue, is an essential library resource. In jurisdictions where foreign law must be pleaded and proved as a fact, it is up to the parties to demonstrate what that law is, in default of which the Anglo-American court will generally presume it to be the same as municipal law. In other, generally civil-law, jurisdictions it may be up the court to appoint an expert; foreign law may be treated either as law or as fact, depending upon the jurisdiction. Because family law, succession and donations are, in civil-law countries, largely ruled by personal law and because personal law may be determined by reference to facts of nationality, domicile, religion and ethnic identity, considerable academic sophistication is demanded of foreign and comparative law librarians. The escalating costs of legal materials and the difficulty of cataloguing and maintaining collections of rarely-used materials in hard languages pose additional obstacles. In the United States particularly, acquisition of foreign materials has perceptibly declined since the early 1980s. Only a handful of law libraries in the world possesses the financial, logistical, linguistic and technical wherewithal to aspire to collecting materials from all or most countries; for those, managing acquisition and selection is the main challenge. Collecting official gazettes, session laws and case reporters from many jurisdictions makes enormous demands upon space and record-keeping; microform collection is not in many cases an alternative. Where it is, it creates its own special demands.

Modern legal education began in China late in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), and then expanded during the period of the Republic of China from 1912. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, legal education entered a new and difficult period. The compilation of English language materials offered here includes a few materials relating to the Qing and Republican periods, but after 1949 only materials relating to the People's Republic of China (mainland China). Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan all have separate legal education systems and structures, and are excluded from this compilation.

This research guide aims to provide individuals with an understanding for how to approach topics related to the past, current, and future work of the international criminal tribunals established under the domain and supervision of the United Nations. With attention given to the broad nature and responsibilities of these ad hoc tribunals, this guide intends to give a general introduction to researching the tribunals and looking into various types of information that stem from the existence of these institutions. This includes researching information from judicial decisions to the administrative functions of these courts.

In the actual multilingual and multicultural environment there is a significant need, in the academic world, in the legal profession, in business settings as well as in the context of public administration services to citizens, of common understanding and exchange of legal concepts of the various legal systems. At the same time, there is a strong pressure for the preservation of their basic sense and value. Both requirements are quite difficult to meet, and they are complicated by the complexity of legal language and by the variety of modalities used to express law within the various legal systems. Unlike a number of technical and scientific disciplines where a fair correspondence exists between concepts across languages, serious difficulties arise in interpreting law across countries and languages. This is largely due to the system-bound nature of legal terminology. This paper focuses on cross-language retrieval systems’ ability to facilitate access to legal information across different languages and legal orders. As such, issues are addressed relating to linguistics and translation theory, comparative law, theory of law, as well as natural language processing techniques, while some recommendations are provided with the aim to contribute to cross-language retrieval of law.

While those of us in the United States have become accustomed to talking about our war on terrorism and its consequences, including its effects on civil rights, we should not ignore the fact that the international community, and specifically the United Nations, is conducting its own ‘war’ on terrorism. I will be addressing the General Assembly's and especially the Security Council's war on terrorism and the challenges these efforts present, including to international human rights.

Estonia employs a civil law system and follows the legal traditions of continental Europe – there is a distinction between public and private law. The main source of law is written (statutory) law. Case law has no precedent value. However, the decisions of the Estonian Supreme Court are used as a subsidiary source of law in interpreting and founding the general principles of law. This follows expressis verbis from the Estonian Code of Criminal Procedure, which states in article 2 subsection 4 that the decisions of the Supreme Court in issues which are not regulated by other sources of criminal procedural law but which arise in the application of law are also sources of criminal procedure law. And they are de facto in other areas of law: private law, in particular administrative law, as well. Thus one could say that step-by-step the judgments of the Supreme Court gain more and more importance in shaping the legal system and legal order of Estonia.

Once on a plane to New Orleans I chanced to half overhear a conversation between two passengers who shared the same row of seats with me. Somewhere between wakefulness and drowsiness, my ear caught a telltale accent that betrayed one of my seatmates as an Orleanian as they chatted animatedly about the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the ways that both diverged from the rest of the country. The native noted reverently the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, he remarked grandly on the extraordinary cuisine, he waxed pridefully about the city as the birthplace of jazz, and he spoke warmly about the manifold ethnic origins of his fellow Louisianians. Then, as if to fortify his contention that he hailed from a truly unusual place, he pointedly observed that Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose legal system rested upon the Napoleonic Code, even as he confessed to an uncertainty about why that difference existed or what it meant precisely.

Recent developments in U.S-Cuba relations have resulted in a proliferating global interest in Cuba, including its legal regime. This comprehensive Guide aims to fill a noticeable void in the availability of information in English on this enigmatic jurisdiction's legal order, and on how to conduct research related to it. Covered topics include “The Constitution,” “Legislation and Codes,” “The Judiciary,” “Cuba in the International Arena,” and “The Legal Profession.” A detailed section on “Cuban Legal Materials in U.S. and Canadian Libraries” is also featured. Although the Guide emphasizes sources in English and English-language translation, materials in Spanish are likewise included as English-language equivalents are often unavailable. The Guide's 12 authors are members of the Latin American Law Interest Group of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section (FCIL-SIS).

The professional achievements of Adolf Sprudzs have centered on international and comparative law and it is fitting, therefore, to offer some reflections on problems of classification with particular reference to those branches or aspects of the law. They will be concerned with recent solutions to some problems with special emphasis on the classification schemes of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Squire Law Library in Cambridge, the European University Institute in Florence and the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne.

There is an independent Scottish legal system today because, until the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns in 1603 and the Union of the Parliaments of the two countries in 1707, Scotland was an independent sovereign state. When King James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Great Britain in 1603, there was considerable interest in the possibility of establishing a single legal system for the newly united kingdoms, while during the Cromwellian interlude of the 1650s the possibility moved some way towards actuality. But the 1707 Act of Union showed a recognition that the establishment of a single legal system and body of law for the whole of the United Kingdom was not really a practical proposition, in articles which remain the formal basis for the continuing existence and independence of the Scottish law and legal system. Article XVIII provided for the continuation of Scots law after the Union, excepting only the ‘Laws concerning Regulation of Trade, Customs and … Excises', which were to ‘be the same in Scotland, from and after the Union, as in England.’ Change to Scots law was allowed under the Article, but in matters of ‘private right’ such change had to be for the ‘evident utility’ of the Scottish people. Only in matters of ‘public right’ might the aim be simply to make the law the same throughout the United Kingdom. Article XIX laid down that the principal Scottish courts, the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, should ‘remain in all time coming’ as they were then constituted, and further provided that Scottish cases were not to be dealt with by the English courts ‘in Westminster-hall’ (which likewise continued to exist post-Union).

English law reports between 1550 and 1650 seem far more accessible today than the “year books” that preceded them. This is not because they were produced differently, for a different readership or by a different kind of reporter, but because the legal system itself had changed. We also encounter in the Tudor period the first reports written by eminent lawyers, two of whom (Plowden and Coke) saw a selection of them through the press in their lifetimes. Recent editorial work on the better reports has revealed something of the way they were compiled, and also of what was omitted when contemporary notes were turned into printed volumes.

Coke's reports are the most famous, traditionally cited simply as The Reports. Work has just begun on an edition of the underlying notebooks (first discovered just forty years ago), which will probably require at least six volumes. Coke's reporting style was controversial, and his alleged subjectivity was seized upon by Francis Bacon as one of the grounds for bringing him down in 1616. However, Bacon's scheme of 1617 to engage professional reporters, paid by the crown, seems to have collapsed after a few years. Law reporting was thus to remain a matter of private initiative until the end of the eighteenth century, and many of the best reports – even those written by judges – have still not been published. Anyone seeking to trace the evolution of a legal doctrine or practice before about 1700 must regard manuscript reports as an essential recourse.

The comparative analysis of diverse constitutional orders enables a more sophisticated evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of different models and solutions. Quite often it also serves practical objectives, providing the impulse for improving our own legal system by carefully adopting institutions and procedures that have proven themselves elsewhere. In the case of the Swiss Constitution, the influence of thoughts and concepts developed during the French Revolution and by the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Constitution is quite obvious. More recently, international influences are most apparent in the field of fundamental rights and freedoms.

Why do we still have books? To answer this question with views based not on the market trend, nor on the popular feeling that print is outdated and irrelevant, but on the American Bar Association's stated mission of Law Libraries to provide resources that enable legal education,1 this article reviews the potential benefits and determents of different types of legal sources using both print and online formats and discusses whether external pressures should outweigh these factors dependent on the audience.

The significance of cultural property as “a basic element of civilization and national culture” and its interchange among countries for scientific, cultural and educational purposes has been acknowledged in a number of legal instruments prepared under the aegis of UNESCO, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation of the world's cultural heritage. As the Preamble of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property asserts: “… [the interchange] increases the knowledge of the civilization of man, enriches the cultural life of all peoples and inspires mutual respect and appreciation among nations.” Moreover, the 1995 adopted UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects further attests to the: “…fundamental importance of the protection of cultural heritage and of cultural exchanges for promoting understanding between peoples, and the dissemination of culture for the well-being of humanity and the progress of civilization.”