In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville managed to be sent on an extensive trip to the United States in order to study new world penal institutions. His main interest was the culture and civilization of the United States rather than its jails. Although he conscientiously investigated the penitentiaries and subsequently wrote a report, he considered democracy to be the real subject of his study.

The Philippines, an archipelago of 7,107 islands, (about 2,000 of which are inhabited) with a land area of 115,600 square miles, has a population of 42 million. Some 87 major dialects are spoken all over the islands. English and Filipino are the official languages with English as the medium of instruction in higher education. According to the latest census, the literacy rate is 83.4 per cent. Agriculture constitutes the largest single sector of the economy. The Philippines has a total labor force of 14.2 million.

Filipino culture is a blend of East and West, although foundationally and originally Malay. Its Eastern heritage – the result of centuries of interaction with neighboring countries of Asia – is a synthesis of three mainstreams: the Malay, Chinese and Hindu. Its Western cultural traits are the result of her colonization by two Western powers: Spain and the United States.

When the topic for this paper was first proposed to this author, the exact suggestion was “to write about the language problem as a barrier to publication of legal works in developing countries and their international distribution.” This author must hasten, then, to add that he makes no claim to being an expert in languages and linguistics; however, he does claim some familiarity with foreign languages and foreign law, does have strong interests in these areas, and therefore agreed to attempt such a paper. If he misuses exact linguistic terminology or commits some unwitting faux pas, he begs the reader's indulgence and hopes thereby to avoid igniting any language warfare or great intellectual brou-ha.

Law librarianship in the U.K., like all other types of librarianship elsewhere, is a service profession which reflects the activities of the body of users served. Lawyers in the common law system depend upon the written law, and must refer to the primary sources –statutes and cases– for authoritative statements in support of their arguments and actions. The absence of a formal legal code has long been one of the main characteristics of the U.K. legal system, and marks it off from many other systems, both of civil and common law, although the increasing predominance of statute law in the U.K. has resulted in more and more effectual codification of more and more specific areas of our law during this century. However, in the absence of a “master” code, or even an agreed set of principles underlying our law, U.K. lawyers, perhaps even more than others, are tied to the primary, written legal data base. Their education is concerned mainly with the handling of this data base - locating materials on specific subjects within it, and making classifications of legal subjects according to current trends. Superimposed upon the primary data base are many secondary sources (indexing, abstracting and summarizing services), with which the lawyer becomes acquainted, sometimes as a student, but more often as a practitioner. These are sweeping generalizations, but I hope that my main point will be adequately illustrated by them: that the role of legal information officer or law librarian (apart from purely custodial activities) closely reflects an important part of the role of a qualified lawyer; indeed one upon which his education lays great emphasis.

The emphasis in this paper is on the need for documentation and cooperative reproduction of legal documents relating to the colonial period in Africa which are mainly available in libraries in European countries. It is argued that these materials are extremely useful for research in legal and general scholarship, and that their non-availability in Africa at present is a drawback to the increase of research carried out in Africa. Documentation will make the existence of these materials more widely known in academic institutions than is the case at present, while reproduction through modern techniques will make them available to libraries. Potential demand for the documents, in view of the changing African political scenes, which are cutting across old colonial lines, emphasize the need for their availability. We have chosen the colonial period in African history because the colonial legal documents are obviously out of print and few libraries contain complete sets. As a set of literature, they are difficult for law libraries to acquire, not only in Africa, but also in other parts of the academic world where they may be needed. The International Association of Law Libraries is well placed to coordinate documentation and reprographic exchanges between libraries which have similar requirements in Europe, Africa and other parts of the world.

When I was first contacted by the program chairman to present a paper at the 1976 Conference of the International Association of Law Libraries he very suavely suggested that my paper should deal “with some important aspect of the legal literature in Latin America.” I then tried to compile bibliographies of articles dealing with law libraries in Latin America. Unfortunately, I was unable to find more than a handful of articles, some in Spanish and others in English and these were not of much help. Those in Spanish dealt generally with straight theory and some also dealt with the devising of a viable methold of classification. Having catalogued and classified three law libraries in the United States, I feel that a speech on this subject might be of interest to a gathering of Latin American Law Librarians although inappropriate at this Conference.

The article by N. A. Ogbeide published in Volume 4 No. 1 of the International Journal of Law Libraries (Pp. 19–26) makes interesting reading, but the last paragraph headed “Unacceptability and Apathy” leads to one sad conclusion: namely, it shows that for some decades the Nigerian legal practitioner and the law librarian have been coming into contact, but it does not appear that any meaningful dialogue has taken place between them.

Law librarianship in Nigeria is not as old as the legal profession but certainly older than public librarianship or any other brand of librarianship. The oldest libraries -those of the Lagos High Court and Federal Ministry of Justice– are law libraries and they date as far back as 1900.

Until recently, micropublications have had only limited application in law libraries. This state of affairs is changing, however, as law libraries are faced with rapidly increasing costs of books, limitations on space available to expand collections, and finally, because of the new technological advances in microform equipment itself. My personal interest in microforms has been spurred by a number of factors, chief among them being the recent traumatic experience of seeing a large library collection destroyed by fire. When faced with sorting several hundred pamphlets which were salvaged from the flames and arranging them in their original order, knowing that a good many were missing, the blessed alternative of microforms became readily apparent. The advantages of microforms have been debated endlessly, often with more emotion than wisdom. The purpose of this paper is to explore their application and the problems which micropublications engender in a Law Library.

The present Copyright Act of the United Kingdom was passed in 1956, when modern photocopying was in its comparative infancy. The lusty cries of the novel technology were echoed in the Act. For instance, publishers secured a new form of copyright -in the typographical arrangement of an edition– which was protected against unauthorised reproduction by any photographic or similar process for 25 years from first publication of the edition. The Act also attempted to strike a balance over photocopying and similar practices. But the result was a cautious compromise which simply has not worked.

I would like to start by having a brief look at the basic aims of a librarian before relating them to the specific title under discussion, namely, the old adage: “the right book (or information) to the right person at the right time”. It is to this end that we practice our technical skills of book selection, cataloguing and classification, information retrieval, etc. In titling this paper “law libraries: a community service” I am aware that I am introducing an unusual juxtaposition of ideas. A law library is generally considered to be an esoteric service for a professional elite rather than one intended for the benefit of the community as a whole, but if a community is in need of this type of service then surely it is up to us to provide it. In this paper I want to introduce a completely new concept into law librarianship and suggest, that this is what is needed in Africa today.

As the social and economic position of women changes, their legal status changes commensurately. Among the rights feminist women seek are the franchise; equal access to education; equal access to jobs yielding equal pay; subsidized nurseries; personal control of the body and its corollary, the availability of birth control and abortion; taxation without regard to marital status; and control of their property. Not all these desiderata are yet available in even the most advanced or enlightened state, although considerable progress is being made in some. In the United States of America, to illustrate, the most significant change in recent years has been in the job market, where many employers are now required by Federal law to set numerical goals for hiring women to fill traditionally male jobs as they become vacant. In many States, women are now permitted to work more than eight hours a day, they can no longer be restricted by weight-lifting laws, and where such laws exist they must be equally applicable to women. American women have a limited right to abortion, birth control is legally available, credit is opening to women as a result of the (nation-wide) Equal Credit Opportunity Act, airline stewardesses are permitted to work after they are married, pregnant women are not arbitrarily required to leave their place of employment, newspaper “classified” (job market) advertizing is no longer segregated by sex, and some progress has been made in the admission of women to traditionally male schools, Court award of child custody to fathers is becoming more common, as is a joint custody.

As regards legal literature and its bibliographical description many developing countries are not as underdeveloped as some people in this continent may believe. In various countries of the Third World legal bibliographies have been published (partly with, partly without development aid) which need not shy from being compared with works of the same kind published in Europe. Nevertheless, these bibliographies tend to remain obscure – a fact for which one cannot blame the developing countries. In the course of his education the average jurist in the West becomes acquainted only with the law of his own country. Occasional comparative studies are generally confined to the other European legal systems and to Anglo-Saxon law. In exceptional cases he may also deal with some East European law. Librarians and documentalists get acquainted with a great many bibliographies during their studies, but in general with none dealing with developing countries. For these reasons information experts, lawers and persons assisting in developing countries – having to deal with the legal literature of a developing country for some reason – often do not know whether they must discover all the relevant literature themselves or whether there are – and if so, in what cases – bibliographies already in existence and how to use these bibliographies.

Problems of copyright infringement involved in the extensive and largely uncontrolled use of coin operated photocopying machines in libraries, particularly University libraries, have become the most acute in Australian copyright law at the present time. These problems are not of course unique to Australia, but the recent decision of the High Court in University of New South Wales v Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty Ltd has created a serious and difficult situation for libraries for which a workable solution has not yet been found. In 1974 the Australian government appointed a Committee, known as the Franki Committee, to examine the question of the reprographic reproduction of copyright works in Australia and to recommend any alterations to the copyright law and any other measures considered necessary to effect a proper balance of interest between owners and users of copyright materials in respect of reprographic reproduction. The Committee has not yet made its report and it is not known whether any recommendations will be made which will assist libraries in arriving at a solution to the legal problems now facing them where selfservice coin operated photocopying machines are made available for use by readers.

Application of automated processing (ADP) became self evident in recent times in nearly all technical and scientific disciplines. In this field, too, jurisprudence is the “tail light” in development – perhaps apart from some pure theoretical subjects. It has always been difficult for the legal procedure to employ technical innovations and regulate their legal consequences in a convenient and suitable way. No wonder that too often development passed the lawyers by and those normally came too late to have directing influence. Opposite to this in a surprisingly short time-lag (for lawyers) the (social-)legal problematic connected with the installation of ADP was recognized at least at the start. Early – in the middle of the sixties – out of the scattered single efforts a new field of science was built up in outlines: legal informatics. It can be defined as the discipline that contains the mutual context of ADP and law, i. e., all questions of application of ADP in jurisdiction and administration (automation of law): on the other hand new legal problems, however, arose with the application of ADP (law of automation).