IALL Guidelines for Public International Law Research Instruction
…Announcing a Second Edition, 2024
By David Wills,
Chair, IALL’s Education Committee
Librarian, Squire Law Library, Cambridge
The International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) originally established its Education Committee to address how best to teach law students about researching public international law (PIL). The challenges faced when researching PIL are common across jurisdictions, and by bringing together colleagues from many parts of the world, a global perspective became possible.
Two workshops, convened at the IALL Annual Courses held in Barcelona in 2013 and Buenos Aires in 2014, led to the first edition of the ‘IALL Guidelines for Public International Law Research Instruction‘, which was duly published on the IALL Education Committee’s web page.
In 2024, the Education Committee revisited the guidelines with a view to updating the content. A new, revised second edition has been drafted by Sarah Hammond, Legal Research Librarian (Foreign, Comparative and International Law) at the Squire Law Library, University of Cambridge.
The Guidelines serve to aid law librarians and others who teach public international law research. The Guidelines follow the structure of Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ Statute). Although this article formally only concerns the ICJ’s methodology, it is widely accepted as a general delineation of the relevant PIL sources.
Some key changes from the first edition include: the removal of outdated and expired references and URL links; some changes to language and terminology; and, finally, there is a closer alignment with other existing information literacy frameworks and research competency standards.
The IALL Education Committee is delighted to announce that the newly updated version is available here.
Special thanks go to Sarah Hammond for her work to revise this document and to Julienne Grant (Editor of IALL’s International Journal of Legal Information) for her assistance with editing the text in readiness for publication.
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