The doctrine of judicial precedent is the cornerstone of the English legal system. Therefore, the publication of law reports, through which the development of case law can be followed, is of vital importance. Today, over 350 years since the reception of the English legal system in some Caribbean territories, the law reports published in the region do not exceed 150 volumes, most of which have been issued during the twentieth century in the larger territories of Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. This dearth of primary legal materials has serious implications for legal education in the West Indies, and for the practice and development of a West Indian jurisprudence.

For some time I have been aware of the need for law librarians, not merely in Louisiana (with its system of Civil Law and its special relationship to French Civil Law) but elsewhere as well to have access to the bibliographical works which guide us through the corpus of French law. At the American Association of Law Libraries Institute on the Civil Law in Montreal in 1977, I was extremely gratified to note the high level of interest in French law—even by librarians trained in Common Law! My experiences with the Institute, coupled with the reprinting in recent years of several of the most significant French legal bibliographies convinced me that greater exposure of these works is in order. Because of the introductory nature of this article, my tendency is to omit bibliographies which are virtually unobtainable. Also omitted are general bibliographies, even though law is included, and bibliographies which simply list materials. My obvious preferences are for those works which organize, systematize and classify legal works; those which describe or evaluate the works in question; and those which provide several points of entry by means of tables and indices.

Few libraries outside the United States have either the means or the need to acquire complete holdings of American legal materials. The many capacious series of law reports, legal periodicals and legislative materials which comprise the bulk of American legal literature may in any event be beyond their reach for reasons of cost and space. If foreign libraries are interested in American legal materials at all they have limited objectives. All they need are small collections of monographs with a broad reference capability. In terms of their ideal criteria such collections are envisaged to consist of no more than several hundred basic books which might have the collective effect of presenting a comprehensive overview of the major areas of American law at a sufficient level of analytical depth to satisfy the immediate research needs of a lawyer or a legal scholar in a foreign country.