Early last summer, I received a phone call from a law student in the litigation department of a large firm. He was working with a team on a case involving Czech law and, as part of a due diligence review, he was seeking an English translation of a piece of Czech legislation before the firm outsourced the bulk of the foreign legal research to Czech attorney-experts. Although it was easy to find the Czech legislation in Czech from a Czech government website, we could not find an English translation – official or otherwise – from any of our free or subscription-based databases. In the end, we relied on the flawed magic of Google Chrome's translate feature to “translate” the Czech legislation from the Czech government website into English. Despite my protestations and disclaimers, the student was thrilled with our results and insisted he had satisfied his due diligence duties. I hung up the phone and thought to myself: certainly, other American litigants have taken cases involving Czech law. What happens to the foreign law and legal analysis they obtain from their Czech attorney-experts? Assuming they submit some of it to our U.S. courts in the course of litigation, why can't we easily retrieve it?

This Bibliography draws together materials authored or edited by librarians and members of the legal community in the Commonwealth Caribbean and further afield. It was compiled as part of a research study on The Provision of Legal Information in the Commonwealth Caribbean, in an effort to bring together and disseminate a listing of materials, particularly those on the legal information and the various laws and legal systems of the Caribbean.

Where in the UK can I locate the most extensive collection of the current legislation for the Cayman Islands?

Which library has a comprehensive set of the World Trade Organisation International Trade Law Reports?

Where can I find verbatim debates on bills as they pass through the New Zealand House of Representatives?

Where are good collections of international environmental or commercial law?

What are the opening hours and access conditions for a visiting researcher wishing to use the official publications collection of a particular major UK university?

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.

During the Second World War, the government of the Netherlands realized that it had no adequate penalization system in place for wartime offences. Thus, the Criminal Law Wartime Occupation Decree of 22 December 1943 (BBS, Stb. D 61) was enacted to penalize offences committed during wartime. This emergency legislation was recognized as legally valid after the war. It then took until the Wartime Offences Act of 10 July 1952 (effective date 5 August 1952, the “WOS”) for wartime offences to be subjected to specific penalties. This was followed by separate statutes penalizing genocide (Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 2 July 1964, effective date 24 October 1970) and torture (Torture Convention Implementation Act of 29 September 1988, effective date 20 January 1989).

Animal rights and animal welfare issues have reached beyond national boundaries and are now the focus of a variety of international concerns. For example, the current controversy surrounding the sale of bear parts from animals in North America to Asian nations for use in traditional medicines involves the laws of the United States and Canada, the market for bear parts in Asia, and the regulations of trade in endangered species on an international level. Other international animal rights issues include the environmental threat to wildlife in the Antarctica, the importation to the U.S. of coats made from dog and cat pelts, and the impact of animal husbandry on the problem of world hunger.

It is known world-wide that there are human rights abuses in Tibet. In this paper I wish to discuss why these abuses arise, and how they can be put to an end. This will be analyzed with the help of theories laid down by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, a Sudanese expert on human rights and international law, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Portuguese expert in the sociology of law.

One of the major weaknesses of libraries in developing countries is their scarcity of foreign and international legal collections. In desperate need for reliable and up-to-date foreign jurisdiction resources, these libraries try to fill the gap with ad-hoc solutions. New York University's experiences in offering assistance to some of them clearly show that obtaining out-of-date books from “generous donations”, importing short-term visiting “brains” or buying computers (which are used as furniture covered with elegant red velvet) doesn't solve the problem. On the contrary, these stop-gaps feed frustration.

Airborne pollution of the marine environment has not received great attention in the literature. This is certainly a reflection of the fact that, for the longest time, this type of pollution was neglected in international efforts to cooperate for the protection of the marine environment. However, the last few years have witnessed considerable activity in this area and some stock-taking is in order.

From time to time during the past several years many law librarians in the United States with institutional commitments for the development of foreign and international law collections have voiced their deep concern about the intrinsic research value of their existing holdings of foreign and international law materials and, even more so, about the ability of their libraries to maintain the future growth of such collections at a sufficiently high scholarly level. Their disquietude was not without a reason. The United States could always pride itself in having several distinguished law libraries with some of the best research collections of legal materials in the world. The reputation of these collections was so great that generation after generation of legal scholars did much of their research work in them. There were also many other law libraries in the United States but they were generally small and did not specialize in foreign and international law. An unexpected development occured, however, in the two decades after World War II. Many of the smaller law libraries as well as a number of new libraries began to expand their holdings at a phenomenal rate of growth. They began also to branch out into areas they had not been previously familiar with, and some of them succeeded in establishing sizable collections of foreign and international law materials within the relatively short period of less than twenty years. After several decades of this unprecedented and frequently indiscriminate expansion, culminating in the emergence of a wide variety of foreign and international law collections, many of these libraries were suddenly faced in the early 1970's with a series of critical problems.

Among the many old and new actors on the international stage of nations the United States is one of the most active and most important. The U.S. is a member of most existing intergovernmental organizations, participates in hundreds upon hundreds of international conferences and meetings every year and, in conducting her bilateral and multilateral relations with the other members of the community of nations, contributes very substantially to the development of contemporary international law. The Government of the United States has a policy of promptly informing the public about developments in its relations with other countries through a number of documentary publication, issued by the Department of State