Publications of the EC ought to be published by the Office for Official Publications of the EC (henceforth cited as “Office”) in Luxembourg. However, the five institutions which are jointly responsible for the Office (European Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justice, Economic and Social Committee) also publish documents and papers themselves. Moreover, a clearly defined publication policy does not exist neither in the Office nor in the institutions. These two factors, the variety of publishers and the lack of concept, make it particularly difficult to know what has been published in the EC, all the more for persons from non-member countries. The “Catalogue of the publications of the European Communities Institutions 1972–1973” (476 pages) does not provide complete information on the publications, although this catalogue is, of course, helpful. The enormous bulk of paper issued by the EC is partly for sale, partly for distribution free of charge, only a part of the documents are printed, others are duplicated typescripts; a lot of paper is brought out for the information of the general public, whereas legal and scientific texts are only of interest for a smaller number of persons. For a librarian in charge of getting adequate information on the EC, I should like to propose the acquisition of the following minimum set of EC publications:

Primary legislation (foundation treaties),

Official Journal (L and C),

Official Journal– Annex (Debates of the European Parliament),

Working documents of the European Parliament,

Reports of Cases before the Court,

General Reports on the Activities of the EC,

Bulletin of the EC and Supplement thereto.

Information Literacy (IL) has been defined by the ACRL as the ability to identify, access, evaluate, and apply information in an ethical manner. However, IL skills are not an ossified set of behaviors, and IL skills cannot evolve in an intellectual vacuum, without the content that allows for such skills to emerge from practice. As such, IL should be contextualized within the structures and modes of thought of particular disciplines. In response, a burgeoning IL in law movement has arisen, applying the standards of identification, accessing, evaluation, application, and ethical analyses to legal information and the research methods and tools unique to the practice of law. This article traces the development of this movement in three distinct jurisdictions: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.

Access to justice is one of the significant pre-requisites for sustainable human development and it has been made available in the form of both the formal and informal systems stretching from the very top of the judiciary to the local justice system in Bangladesh. The formal justice system, even though it plays the most pivotal role, has been facing huge pressure from case backlogs, which ultimately hampers the true spirit of justice. On the other hand, most people's perception towards informal justice system is also fairly poor with lack of trust due to partisan political interference, corruption, religious dogmas, and social elitism, which have made this system almost ineffective. Consequently, state-sponsored local justice system has come forward with a view to combining the both streams in a single channel in the form of restorative justice and a quorum of quasi-formal justice system aimed at ensuring and dispensing justice to the people in rural areas in an affordable and convenient manner. In line with this view, village courts have been established to redress petty civil and criminal issues. This article attempts to examine the feasibility of the present legal framework of village courts to deliver justice efficiently at the grassroots level.

In a statement to the 52nd session of the Commission on Human Rights, then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali characterized Geneva as the “city of human rights.” Interestingly, the first organization he used to illustrate his point was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. While others may share this view of UNHCR as a “human rights organization,” UNHCR–at least on the policy level-has been slower to adopt this self-image. At the same time, it is easy to categorize UNHCR's Centre for Documentation and Research (CDR) as a “refugee and human rights” information centre because it sets out specifically to collect materials which fall within the human rights domain. To give you a better sense of the context in which CDR develops its collections, I would like to first review UNHCR's activities as they relate to refugees and human rights, then conduct a brief demonstration of a database which provides access to a significant repository of human rights documentation. Then you can decide for yourselves whether or not UNHCR indeed qualifies as a “human rights organization”!

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a very great honor for me to be able to speak to you on the subject entitled,The Japanese Way of Legal Thinking. As you probably know, many westerners believe in a myth which has developed concerning the psychology of the Japanese people. The myth tells us that many things in Japanese culture are completely opposite to everything in the western society. There is some basis for this belief. For example, when we want to call someone to come toward us, we use a wave of the hand for this purpose. However, in western society this signal is almost universally interpreted to mean waving good-bye to the person. Since the end of World War II with increased contacts between Japanese and westerners there has been a greater understanding about the psychology of the Japanese. Today, there seems to be less and less basis for this myth. At the same time, there does, however, exist a way of legal thinking which is specific to Japanese culture and her people.

In Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has again turned its attention to legal education. Much as it did in the early years of the last century, in the first years of this century in its Preparation for the Professions Program (“PPP”), the Carnegie Foundation is examining professional education generally. In the early twentieth century, the Carnegie Foundation published its first report in law, The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools, prepared in 1914 by Josef Redlich, an Austrian law professor. The two reports are referred to here as the PPP Legal Education Report and as the Redlich Report respectively.

Between 1995 and 1999, the United Nations established transitional administrations over four war-torn territories – East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Eastern Slavonia, and Kosovo. These transitional civil administrations began as part of a peace agreement and have or will end with either independence of the territory, as with East Timor, or the reuniting of a war-torn state, as with Eastern Slavonia's return to Croatia. As of this writing, the United Nations’ mission in Kosovo has not ended.

The dust has not yet settled after the referendum on Britain's relationship with the EU, which took place on 23 June 2016. UK voted to leave the EU by 51.9% to 48.1%, which is a winning margin of almost 1.3 million votes. However, it is not yet clear what ‘Brexit’ means or how it will come about – legally and constitutionally. This article seeks to answer the latter question from the standpoint of UK and EU law. The discussion begins with the domestic process before beginning the initial withdrawal negotiations, which is governed by UK constitutional law. The focus then shifts to the process of withdrawing from the EU, which is set out in Article 50 TEU. This article further examines whether ‘Brexit’ can be stopped once Article 50 has been triggered. The penultimate section of the article looks at the legal nature and substantive content of the agreements that might be concluded between the UK and the EU if ‘Brexit’ were to become a reality. The final section of the article examines the UK rules on ratification of such international agreements.

Estonia restored its independence in 1991 following the unsuccessful coup attempt for in Moscow. Within six months, the Constitutional Assembly created a draft of a new constitution based on Estonia's constitution of 1938. Estonia's subsequent legal reforms have been based on the Constitution adopted in 1992 reinstating a parliamentary democracy founded on legal continuity. Supreme power is vested in the people, and this power is exercised through a single chamber parliament.

This article focuses on the distinctions that the ad hoc Tribunals have drawn between the comparative law method and the review of evidence for clarifying customary international law and general principles of law. It outlines the dangers in the readiness of some international judges to accept narrow inquiries, which at best attach special weight and at worst restrict the scope of inquiry to a single, specific legal system. The readiness of some international judges to simply elevate legal rules and concepts with which they are familiar from their own legal education and practice to the level of universal truths may imply a failure to understand the other legal traditions on offer. The article concludes by showing that, unless the dangers inherent in the readiness to accept narrow inquiries are clearly emphasized, the achievement of an international criminal justice that is truly tolerant of plurality is a long way off.

The inauguration of the Caribbean Court of Justice in April 2005 represented the culmination of aspirations in earlier years to establish a court of last resort for the Caribbean Region to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (The Privy Council) which was and still is for most Commonwealth Caribbean jurisdictions, the final court. These aspirations were endorsed by the legal profession through the Organisation of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Associations (OCCBA) over thirty years ago, although the idea of such a court was not an original one having been contemplated early in the last century. The court was envisaged as a Caribbean Court of Appeal with an appellate jurisdiction hearing appeals from domestic appellate courts and an original jurisdiction to interpret regional treaties.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal (247-182) achieved a most extraordinary feat: he crossed both the Pyrenees Mountains and the Alps with an army of about 38.000 soldiers, 8.000 Cavalry and 37 elephants, aiming to win the Second Punic War by a bold invasion of Italy before the Romans were prepared. Even if his attempts to defeat the Roman legions failed in the end, common lore stills tells the story of the elephants crossing the Col du Mont Genevre in deep snow, setting thus an example of a near impossible achievement for generations to come.

In a broad sense, “China law” ought to be comprised of four components: (1) the laws of the People's Republic of China (PRC); (2) the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), a former British colony handed back to the PRC in 1997, which still employs the common law system; (3) the laws of the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR), a former Portuguese colony which was returned to China in 1999, but has kept the original legal system; and (4) the laws of Taiwan which, as the remaining part of the former Republic of China, has developed a distinct legal system different from that of the mainland after the Nationalists lost the civil war to the Communists in 1949. However, “China law” is commonly referred as the laws of the PRC, which was constituted in 1949 when the new government was founded. This article will mainly review the legal resources of the laws of the PRC in electronic formats, including databases, websites, CD-ROM products, and other non-print materials, but not traditional print resources. The legal resources of the laws of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan will be discussed in future articles.

Collectively, you law librarians gathered here must have been affected by the many legal fallouts from September 11: the Office of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, the Use of Military Force Resolution-, the thousands of casualties of all nationalities; the detainees; the military commissions; the prosecutions; the habeas cases. But even as you have studied and researched these individual issues, you have probably wondered whether something bigger is going on. Are these legal fallouts only symptoms of a much larger phenomenon: a post-World War II legal system placed under stress by September 11?

Liberia has become the quintessential example of an African failed state. Though Liberia's civil war is officially over, war criminals are free and some are even helping run the transitional government under the authority of Liberia's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). This peace agreement calls for the consideration of a general amnesty for those involved in the Liberian civil war alongside the parceling of governmental functions among members of various rebel groups. The drafters of the agreement claim that this was the only viable solution for sustainable peace in Liberia. Meanwhile, Charles Taylor relaxes in Nigeria's resort city of Calabar.

The Library of Congress recently issued new classification schedules for the law of the Roman Catholic Church and for the History of Canon Law. The schedules were developed by Dr. Jolande E. Goldberg of the Library of Congress with input from librarians and scholars from many countries. During the final months of their development, we spoke, individually and together, to several groups of librarians to introduce them to the elegant structure of these forthcoming schedules and to get reaction from librarians who had, and had not been, involved earlier in the development process. My role was to provide some context to the content of the schedules. I discussed the concept of religious law for purposes of these schedules and introduced the historical development of religious law, particularly that of the Roman Catholic Church.

The existing state of human beings, to which the present international movement for human rights addresses itself, is no reason for applause for the success of that movement. It is true that there are several reasons for the lack of success and not all blame is to be borne by the deficiencies in the present approach. True also is the fact that the struggle for protection of the human being from excesses of the state or powerful elements within society is a continuing saga of organized society with only the promise that the struggle and its causes have more of an enduring existence than the various efforts for seeking protection for the human being attempted in the history of mankind, of which human-rights is one instance. However, to the extent it is legitimate to explore if improvements in the present approach are possible, one might well be permitted to raise anew questions about the philosophical foundation for human rights and the pragmatic approach to their achievement.