In his Introduction to the study of the Law of the Constitution, which appeared in its first edition in 1885, Professor A. V. Dicey of the University of Oxford emphasized in particular the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty and the concept of the Rule of Law as guiding principles of the constitution. His exposition was clear and trenchant, inspired by the self-confidence of late Victorian Britain, and through nine editions it provided the authoritative text which to this day has influenced judges and lawyers, politicians, observers from abroad, and many others in their interpretation of the constitutional law of the United Kingdom.

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.

Arbitration is frequently the most effective way of resolving international commercial disputes. In a typical dispute the parties will be of different nationality and have different legal and cultural backgrounds. Neither side will be content to allow the dispute to be decided by the national courts of the opposing party. Arbitration offers the parties the opportunity to choose their own arbitrator, the location of the arbitration, the procedures and the law in accordance with which the dispute is to be resolved. It also offers them privacy and in many cases this is likely to be a very important consideration.

There has been a high level of activity in the development of standards concerning access to public sector information in Europe in recent years. At domestic level, freedom of information (FOI) legislation has been introduced to the overwhelming majority of member states of the European Union and to a number of former Eastern bloc countries. Freedom of Information has also increased its impact at supra national level, both in terms of progress towards the development by international bodies such as the European Union and the Council of Europe of FOI norms for their Member States and with respect to the opening up of access to documents of the international institutions themselves. There is, however, considerable variation in the content and scope of the various FOI measures introduced. The aim of this paper is to assess the scope and operation of two contrasting examples of recently introduced or proposed FOI measures, namely the Irish FOI Act and the proposed Regulation on Access to Documents of the European Institutions. The overall theme of the paper is that strong FOI measures are needed to combat the tendency toward secrecy in public administration in Europe but that even where access measures are relatively strong in their formulation, their effectiveness can be limited through under-funding or more direct interference with the operation of the access scheme.

Once on a plane to New Orleans I chanced to half overhear a conversation between two passengers who shared the same row of seats with me. Somewhere between wakefulness and drowsiness, my ear caught a telltale accent that betrayed one of my seatmates as an Orleanian as they chatted animatedly about the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the ways that both diverged from the rest of the country. The native noted reverently the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, he remarked grandly on the extraordinary cuisine, he waxed pridefully about the city as the birthplace of jazz, and he spoke warmly about the manifold ethnic origins of his fellow Louisianians. Then, as if to fortify his contention that he hailed from a truly unusual place, he pointedly observed that Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose legal system rested upon the Napoleonic Code, even as he confessed to an uncertainty about why that difference existed or what it meant precisely.

There is an independent Scottish legal system today because, until the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns in 1603 and the Union of the Parliaments of the two countries in 1707, Scotland was an independent sovereign state. When King James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Great Britain in 1603, there was considerable interest in the possibility of establishing a single legal system for the newly united kingdoms, while during the Cromwellian interlude of the 1650s the possibility moved some way towards actuality. But the 1707 Act of Union showed a recognition that the establishment of a single legal system and body of law for the whole of the United Kingdom was not really a practical proposition, in articles which remain the formal basis for the continuing existence and independence of the Scottish law and legal system. Article XVIII provided for the continuation of Scots law after the Union, excepting only the ‘Laws concerning Regulation of Trade, Customs and … Excises', which were to ‘be the same in Scotland, from and after the Union, as in England.’ Change to Scots law was allowed under the Article, but in matters of ‘private right’ such change had to be for the ‘evident utility’ of the Scottish people. Only in matters of ‘public right’ might the aim be simply to make the law the same throughout the United Kingdom. Article XIX laid down that the principal Scottish courts, the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, should ‘remain in all time coming’ as they were then constituted, and further provided that Scottish cases were not to be dealt with by the English courts ‘in Westminster-hall’ (which likewise continued to exist post-Union).

This article examines the development of a policy by the Government of Ireland on the modernization of its statute law and describes recent developments in statute law revision and related policies in Ireland. In theory, the ideal and ultimate aim of such a policy should be the development of an easily accessible code.

In practice, there is no political requirement for such grandiose idealism and what is taking place is much more pragmatic and modest. The article places these policies in the wider context of the modernization of government and anticipates some of the likely developments to emerge in this field in Ireland in the next 5 years.

The title of this paper comes from the famous ‘Schuman Declaration’ of 1950, which signaled the placing of Franco-German production of coal and steel under a single High Authority. It is quite astonishing that from this humble beginning, evolved the European Union of today. The phrase takes on new relevance as the Treaty of Nice paves the way for the biggest single enlargement of the European Union. The current Treaty, completes the Intergovernmental Conference which began in February, 2000. The founding treaties, signed in Paris and Rome in 1951 and 1957 respectively, and the amending treaties, most notably the Treaty on European Union, (Maastricht), and the Treaty of Amsterdam, form the Constitution of the European Union. It is important to note that while the earlier treaties concentrated on economic integration, the later treaties have shifted towards political questions. Bibliographic references to the various treaties have become quite complicated because the Treaty of Amsterdam brought about a renumbering of the articles to both the Treaty on European Union (EU) and the Treaty establishing the European Community (EC).