Learning the rules of legal citation is a challenge for new and seasoned legal researchers alike. Good instruction and practice are required to master these rules. Think about the first sport you learned to play. Did you master all the rules the first time you played the game? Do most people even read a rule book when learning to play a new sport? Initially, it is a challenge for any player learning the game to follow all of the rules correctly. Generally, only coaches study the rule book. The rules of the game are very important so coaches and players know what is and is not permitted “on the field.”

Most rules are disseminated orally and learned through practice. Law professors who teach legal research or supervise legal writing are the coaches in the game of legal citation; they must disseminate the rules to their students. The professors have a duty to stimulate a student's mastery of legal citation rules to meet the proficiency required of legal writing in the profession. Law students who do not master the rules of legal citation are more likely to plagiarize.

In the post-colonial era, social movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean have empowered citizens to reclaim, redefine and further develop their identity. These movements, combined with a history of colonialism and transatlantic slavery in the region, have yielded a Caribbean culture “too diverse to be labeled.” Indeed, the Caribbean culture is composed of “a bastion of discrete identities as well as quarries of very invaluable raw material that can be used to build the bridges across cultural boundaries.” These distinct but potentially overlapping identities make the Commonwealth Caribbean a truly pluralistic region, at least at the cultural and social level. As modern legal and political systems, however, the states of the Commonwealth Caribbean have, in many ways, failed to sufficiently protect the non-dominant groups within Caribbean. Indeed, attempts to balance the majoritarian demands of democracy against the pluralist notion of minority rights protection have landed largely on the side of majorities.

As we speak about Family Law, I want to begin my exposition with a concise picture of the Catalan society and the “Catalan family”. Our concept of family, like other neighboring societies, has changed substantially in relation to the preceding generations. Catalonia today is an aging society with rather low fertility, increasing divorce rates and a large increase in the number of single households (the result of an increased life expectancy). Furthermore, the man is no longer the only household member who contributes to household income; in more and more families both men and women engage in paid employment. The female employment rate has risen in a big way, which explains that the average age for a first marriage is over thirty years for both women and men. This fact means in practice that Catalonian couples have few children: one, two, or as a heroic common project, three.

The history of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (C.A.L.L.) has many parallels with the history of the International Association as set out by Dr. Dahlmanns in No. 28 of this Bulletin. The year 1960 seems to have been a turning point in law library development in Canada and the decade following it was a period of rapid and extensive growth both in the number of law libraries and in the size and scope of their collections. Before 1960 the possibility of a law library organization had been discussed, but in 1960 it became a reality. Under the guidance of Eunice Beeson, the newly appointed law librarian at the Dalhousie University Law School in Halifax, C.A.L.L. first came into being as a chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries. Eunice brought with her to Canada valuable experience in the American organization and she lost no time in getting the five or six widely scattered Canadian law librarians into touch with one another in a way in which they could work together on common projects and share similar concerns. She drafted the constitution of the organization, articulated ideas for co-operative ventures, and indicated practical ways of achieving what had to be done. Her death in the spring of 1966 was a great loss, but she had laid a firm foundation for the future development of the Association.

Law libraries are the stepchildren of legal and general library literature. This observation made by Kurt Schwerin a decade ago is still valid in the Federal Republic of Germany. No comprehensive publications exist to describe the history, current status or the prospective tasks of our law libraries. The few articles published on the topic describe only one library or one group of libraries. The reports published by juridical institutes often contain useful information on the respective libraries. Another source of information on law libraries may be found in the guides published by several law libraries to facilitate the use of their holdings.

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 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.

Copyright is a monopoly conferred upon authors or creators of literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works to produce, reproduce, adapt, or perform their works for a limited time. The Copyright Law, by conferring this monopoly upon authors and their assignees, provides an economic incentive “to those with the requisite ability to create intellectual property” and to “publishers, recording firms, and similar enterprises to package and distribute these intellectual creations to the general public.” Prior to the invention of the printing press the possibility of commercial gain from the production of intellectual property was severely limited by the drudgery involved in manual copying of manuscripts, which work was performed by slaves in ancient times and monks under a vow of obedience later. Private patrons and universities provided the only economic incentive to authors to produce intellectual property and the book trade was small. Although both law and literature existed in abundance in ancient and medieval Europe, Copyright Law was unknown.

On numerous online discussion forums in various countries, ordinary people pose specific legal questions and both ordinary people and lawyers answer them. This article considers this new and rapidly growing method of providing legal advice. It emphasizes qualitative over quantitative issues. It seeks to answer questions such as “What kind of questions are being asked?”; “What sort of people are giving legal advice?”, “What sort of people are getting legal advice?”. For those few legal systems that I know something about, I also have considered the question, “How good is the advice?” This is a comparative study, involving discussion forums for Armenian, Australian, Austrian, Brazilian, Canadian, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Moldovan, Portuguese, Russian, Scots, Spanish, Swiss, Ukrainian, United Kingdom, and United States law.

Whales have captivated the human imagination for millennia. Indeed, evidence of the first whale hunting dates back to at least 6,000 B.C. These incredible cetaceans have been a source of human food, fuel and tools, and have inspired art, myth and literature around the globe. Legal issues affecting whales are varied and far reaching. Only since the mid 20th century, with the establishment of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) under the terms of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) have whales benefited from any type of conservation effort.

There is a difference between voluntarily giving somebody an amount of money and having the same amount of money taken away from one, maybe even without one noticing it at first. Even though the economic situation might be the same, it is the loss of control, of sovereignty over one's own affairs, which we find troublesome. Likewise, hardly anyone, when buying something from a complete stranger, would assent to the idea that one is to hand over one's wallet, let the seller take whatever he or she sees fit, and return the wallet, with the buyer only being able to find out much later, how much was taken.