The year 2013 marked the five-year anniversary of the enactment of the People’s Republic of China’s (“PRC”) first national Open Government Information Regulation.[1] China has made significant strides on enhancing free access to legal information since then. Adopted and enacted…
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Developments in Comparative law research
Possibilities for cost (and time) efficient Comparative law research are now much broader thanks to the Hathi Trust. The Hathi Trust is a partnership of over sixty Libraries and research institutions worldwide and currently contains 11 million digitized volumes. Access…
The Rediscovery of Legal Culture: Legal Scholarship in Germany faces the Challenges of Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity
Over the past two years the Wissenschaftsrat (German Council of Science and Humanities) has evaluated in fundamental analysis the structures of legal scholarship in Germany. As a result a bundle of recommendations has been adopted with a special focus on…
The FLAG Rebuild Project
Many libraries throughout the UK are helping to update FLAG – the Foreign Law Guide – this year. The project team to update and rebuild FLAG is based at IALS, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Team members are…
The origins of IALL
Recently I came across a few documents from the University of Oslo archives that illustrate the start of the International Association of Law Libraries. The most interesting was a letter dated February 24th 1959 from William R. Roalfe inviting representatives…
Grants for professional development
As you know, IALL offers a professional development bursary every year to law librarians from around the world in an effort to assist with the cost of attending the annual course. (A list of the 2013 recipients is available here.) …
Thank you Barcelona
Having just returned from the 32. annual course in law and law librarianship in Barcelona I want to take this opportunity to thank those who attended and made it such a memorable and successful conference. We all owe our deepest…
Foreign Law Guide
We all have trusted research tools that we use frequently in our work. For many of us, Foreign Law Guide (“FLG”) is one of these standard resources and it has now entered a new era. A Bit of History Tom…
2012 Membership Statistics
2012 Membership Statistics by Jurisdiction and Membership Level The International Association of Law Libraries is a diverse, non-profit organization of law librarians, academics, practitioners, publishers, and students. In 2012, the Association collected dues from 379 members representing 47 countries from…
The US legal system and same-sex marriage
The topic of same-sex marriage in the US provides a way to explore the complexity of the US legal system, along with some legal research resources. As a federal system, the US has national and state laws covering marriage. Although…