One distinctive feature of comparative law is the ongoing inquiry into the social usefulness of the discipline and the almost constant redefinition of the very object of its (scientific) research. Since the Paris Congress of 1900, comparative law seems to have inspired a vague sense of guilt in those who study it. No other legal discipline exhibits such a strong desire to justify its existence, with the possible exception of Roman Law.

I admit that I am an addict, a compulsive user of libraries and especially law libraries. As a comparative lawyer I need to investigate foreign law, which for me is the law of jurisdictions outside the United States. Since I believe the social and cultural context in which law operates is important to its understanding, I must leave the relative comfort of United States libraries and venture abroad to learn about the features of legal systems not adequately described in books. Beyond common law countries, as the IALL 20th Annual Course illustrates, the language of law is something other than English: yet another hill to climb to understand foreign law. For most of you, United States law is foreign law, which is the other side of the same issue. In addition, public international law lawyers could benefit from the comparative approach. This is particularly true for those from the Anglo-American world who rely almost exclusively on English language materials in their research. This narrow perspective undercuts the fundamental premise of universality behind a truly international legal system.

The subject of this contribution is the influence of Swiss Private International Law (PIL) on the Italian codification. This topic could be regarded as rather old-fashioned. One of the terms of the comparison, the Italian statute of private international law, goes back to May 1995 and the other, the Swiss PIL Act, is even older, almost “prehistoric” since it was adopted in 1987 and entered into force on the 1st January 1989, that means in an era which preceded the advent of the Internet and the “Information Society.” Not even the idea of comparing these two pieces of legislation is an entirely new one, since a very accurate comparative analysis of the two codifications has already been done by Mr. Dutoit, professor of PIL and comparative law at the University of Lausanne, in an article of 1997.

The comparative analysis of diverse constitutional orders enables a more sophisticated evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of different models and solutions. Quite often it also serves practical objectives, providing the impulse for improving our own legal system by carefully adopting institutions and procedures that have proven themselves elsewhere. In the case of the Swiss Constitution, the influence of thoughts and concepts developed during the French Revolution and by the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Constitution is quite obvious. More recently, international influences are most apparent in the field of fundamental rights and freedoms.

Comparative and international law has traditionally played a relatively minor role in legal education and research. J Recent years, however, have seen an increasing interest in comparative law, in particular in Europe, where its protagonists are involved in a vivid debate over the harmonisation of national private law systems. In the following remarks, I will, on the basis of one particular example, try to illustrate the type of comparative legal research that supports this debate. Before doing so, I will briefly present the different drivingforces that contribute to the harmonisation ofEuropean private law systems.

Discussing the European Union (EU) is an excellent way of dealing with the question of the translation of legal texts. Why is this the case? The European Union, with approximately 370 million inhabitants, is unique among the world's international organizations. It is unique because it uses all the official languages of its Member States in its official publications.

The client with a United Nations-related question, once the bogeyman of law librarians, can now be approached with confidence, in the knowledge that many questions can be readily answered by recourse to the Internet – through websites that are either free, or relatively inexpensive to access, or through commercial hosts such as Lexis and Westlaw. This contention is supported with particular reference to treaty research.

It must be emphasized that the functions and structure change continuously and, of course, the documentation changes as well.

United Nations Documentation: a Brief Guide

The UN is a major publisher. Over the more than five decades of its existence, it has published hundreds of thousands of documents (reports, studies, resolutions, meeting records, letters from Governments, etc.) on topics of key interest (disarmament, the environment, human rights, international law, peace-keeping, etc.).

Under the circumstances, it might initially seem impossible to track down precise information in view of the overwhelming amount of data available, but a systematic approach to your research will always yield results.

United Nations Documentation Research Guide

One of the spectacular and liberating features of the Internet in general and the United Nations web site in particular is that if a treaty you are researching was drafted in connection with a conference relating to human rights, the environment, development, or a major topic in criminal or commercial law, entire web pages based on the treaty and its history are now in place. The process of drafting and finalizing the texts of major conventions and treaties sponsored by bodies within the United Nations system is unusually well-documented. The conference process and other drafting procedures have always made researching UN treaties rather more systematic than is the case with many inter-governmental organizations.

CERN, the originator of the WWW, employs the Web internally for corporate information and exchange. Hear from CERN librarians how their Web-based Intranet is deployed and used throughout CERN. They discuss their role, technical issues, challenges and solutions, as well as the lessons they have learned.

This contribution to the IALL Annual Course 2001 focuses on electronic law journals, an issue that doesn't seem to arouse much interest in either the Serials Community or the Legal Community. Electronic law journals are hardly ever mentioned by the Serials Community, which seems more occupied with scientific, technical and medical (STM) electronic journals than with journals from other disciplines. Electronic law journals don't attract many comments from the Legal Community either. There has been in the past few years an occasional focus on the topic, but it aimed essentially at proving that electronic journals in law had no particular reasons to survive the era of electronic self-publication. As such however, the phenomenon of electronic journals is rarely addressed by the professionals of legal information.