The 19th Course on International Law Librarianship was held in Dublin, Ireland, August 20–24, 2000. The conference theme, “A common Law for Europe: Legal Systems and Legal Information,” and the attractiveness of Dublin as a conference venue helped draw the largest group of participants to attend our conferences. As important, the 150 participants represented 24 countries, a number that is a record for our Association.

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.

Currently available data on legislative research and analytical services are skimpy and contradictory, largely because of incomplete definitions about what constitutes “research” in a parliamentary setting and also because of the many actors that may be engaged in the enterprise.

This paper represents a preliminary step in ascertaining more accurately the extent and location of research services operating in legislatures. It is drawn from a survey designed to obtain broader coverage of research units that may be based outside the parliamentary library, and offers brief vignettes describing several research services to illustrate the variety of such activities and settings.

As a result of my work on the Australasian Legal Literature Index (ALLI) at Monash University, Melbourne, I was invited to the Harvard Law Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assess their foreign and international law journal collection and to set up a system to index the journals in the collection that were not indexed elsewhere. The primary purpose of my study was to identify the problems and to attempt to provide solutions. The project metamorphosed into evaluating the basic current awareness needs of the Harvard Law School Faculty and finding a solution for providing access to the journal collection. An indication of the enormity of the task is to compare the holdings of the Harvard foreign and international law collection, (some 4,000 journals), to the some 500 publications indexed by the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, the major U.S. index to foreign materials.

In his introduction to IJLI v. 27 no.2 (Summer 1999), “Looking Back to “Rome 1998,” Holger Knudsen encapsulated the special nature of the IALL annual courses: the opportunity to extend our learning in international law and librarianship, to travel to new places, the meeting of friends, and finally: the “Courses beautifully designed by selfless and magnanimous local colleagues, who manage to add that specific local flavour, or, ‘ambiente.'”

It is often said that the effective working of a representative democracy depends on the availability of adequate information and the capacity for its independent evaluation. Such access, it is argued is a major contributor to restoring the significance of the Parliament. Similarly there is a commonly held view that access to justice depends on the laws of the Parliament and the courts being freely available to everyone.

The law in Australia is derived from legislation passed in Australian parliaments, at Federal and State level, together with the English Common law tradition and the Australian Common Law which developed from the English Common Law.

Australia has always been a place of legal pluralism. Before the British colonists brought with them the common law and the statute law of England, there were indigenous systems of law. Indeed, there were very many of them. They did not cease to exist just because English law was imported. Sadly, for over 200 years, their existence was not officially recognised by the Anglo-Australian legal system. In 1992, in Mabo v State of Queensland [No.2], the High Court of Australia did more than “invent” native title. It made this nation officially a legally pluralist one. The common law now recognises, and gives effect to, indigenous law with respect to land tenure and, possibly, with respect to other aspects of life and death as well. Native title is what indigenous law says it is, no more and no less, except to the extent that non-indigenous law operates to “extinguish” or “impair” native title. The first inquiry in any application for a determination of native title must be as to the continuing existence of an indigenous legal system and the manner in which that legal system deals with entitlements in relation to the relevant land. If such a system survives and gives entitlement to people, it must then be asked whether non-Aboriginal law has “extinguished” or “impaired” those entitlements. In truth, this inquiry is as to whether the non-indigenous legal system has withdrawn its recognition of those entitlements, because of its creation of interests, or recognition of activities, incompatible with the continuing existence of indigenous entitlements. The entitlements continue to exist in indigenous law, despite any “extinguishment” or “impairment.”

The use of cloning techniques to reproduce human beings would have a dramatic impact on the individual, the society and the human species itself. Many have expressed their concern and appealed for an international ban. This article examines the French Ethics Committee's arguments for a ban on cloning, evaluates existing French legislation in the area, and enumerates European efforts against human cloning.

Since the beginning of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project in 1996, AustLII has sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation through the provision of relevant legal and cultural information relating to indigenous people. Two important components of the project have been collecting material as well as making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Another significant part of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project has been connecting remote Aboriginal communities to the Internet and providing training to them in its use. The history and achievements of the project are set out here and some consideration is given to future directions for the various aspects of the project.

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 paper outlines a methodology for handling a research issue in French law and identifies the various sources of that law. Our point of departure is that we are entering a civil law system. Therefore, this paper first briefly addresses the general features of the French law system. It then reviews the printed research tools and finally lists the main legal databases and Internet sites.

Canada, like Australia, is belatedly confronting a problem that has long been denied and ignored. Each country is now reckoning the social costs of past policies which sought to achieve the forced assimilation of indigenous children. In Canada this policy was mainly implemented through laws requiring the compulsory attendance of Indian children at school. Some 100,000 children were directed to church-operated residential schools where their cultural transformation could be effected in isolation from their families and the outside world. That isolation left them highly vulnerable to abuse and neglect.