By Sarah Holterhoff, Government Information/Reference Librarian
It’s a Small World After All…
Online Legal Research With a Global Perspective
We’ve all heard it—the world is shrinking, globalization is the new buzz word, and interest in foreign and international information of all sorts is growing rapidly. Legal information on the global front is needed by lawyers, legal scholars, and law students and it’s quick and convenient to look for it on the Internet. That brings us to some good news and some bad news… The good news is that today a wide array of websites offer reliable and free source material (primary and secondary) for foreign and international legal research. The bad news is that such abundant access has led to information overload, with resources scattered around the Internet in a disorganized fashion. This makes it difficult to locate the desired information and to determine if what you do find is reliable and authoritative.
But there is more good news…if you need to research foreign and international law online, there is an efficient way to get a head start: find a good, up-to-date online research guide. You will want one written by an expert, which lists and describes available resources and provides links to websites where they can be found. To locate such a guide, you can turn to two well-respected web sites which provide excellent, authoritative research guides: LLRX.com and GlobaLex.
LLRX.com is a website devoted to all areas of law, including foreign and international, as well as legal technology. It has been in existence for over ten years and its original name of Law Library Resource Xchange has now been shortened to the LLRX acronym. The site contains thousands of articles written by respected lawyers, technologists, and librarians, which has led it to be consistently named as one of the top legal websites on the Internet.
Let’s say you need a research guide on Croatian law. If you go to LLRX.com, you would start with the heading “Legal Research” and select “Foreign & Comparative Law.” That link would take you to a page offering various subcategories. Under “Comparative and Foreign Law” you could scroll down to find a guide to “The Croatian Legal System” from 2002. This guide could also be located by typing the word “Croatia” into the search box (located on the top of each page). Guides on the site are listed in reverse chronological order, so the Google search function is helpful for quickly locating a guide on a particular topic, such as Islamic law or the federal civil code of Mexico.
Among the recent additions to the foreign and international resources on LLRX.com are Israeli, Australian, and European Union law research guides. Common features of the guides are numerous links and frequent updating. Some of the guides cover a narrowly-defined research topic, such as intellectual property law in the Russian Federation or the validity of Turkish private law contracts. LLRX is an easily-navigated and well-managed site that contains a wealth of reliable information—on foreign and international law and much more.
GlobaLex is an electronic library of foreign, comparative, and international research guides, created and maintained by the Hauser Global Law School Program at New York University School of Law. It can be found at: http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/. Begun only three years ago, GlobaLex now links to more than 100 guides on a variety of topics and jurisdictions, written by respected authors who are experts on their topics. The site is organized into four sections and is easy to navigate. The foreign law research section includes links to guides from more than 80 foreign jurisdictions, listed alphabetically by country name. If you are interested in knowing more about Pakistan’s constitution and Supreme Court which have been in the news recently, check out “A Legal Research Guide to Pakistan.”
Turning to the international law research section, you’ll find that it’s organized alphabetically by topic, such as “international environmental.” The author of “A Basic Guide to International Environmental Legal Research” is Valpo Law grad Heidi Frostestad Kuehl (J.D. 2000 and now a law librarian at Northwestern University School of Law). There is also a section on comparative law research and a new section about building collections of foreign and international legal materials.
A search box which is powered by Google is also available on the site. A key feature of GlobaLex is the provision for emailing questions or comments directly to the author of each guide, making the research process more collaborative. At this point, GlobaLex is particularly useful for researchers interested in the legal systems of Eastern and Central European countries, for which research guides have previously been unavailable. Site creator and editor Mirela Roznovschi plans to continue adding new research guides as they become available, particularly ones about law in various African and Latin American countries.
When you need to research foreign and international law online, don’t start from scratch. If you take the time to locate a current and authoritative online research guide to the jurisdiction or topic of interest, you’ll have a much better chance of success.
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