This paper provides an introduction to the SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) Law Gateway a web based descriptive database of high quality legal information resources on the Internet (www.sosig.ac.uk/law). The Law Gateway is a new research support service being developed by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London) in partnership with the University of Bristol as part of the UK's Resource Discovery Network initiative. The project seeks to provide access to the expanding range of global legal materials now being delivered over the Internet. In effect, the Law Gateway aims to offer the UK and international legal communities appropriate new ways to find, assess and access law in the new century.

Despite its recent development, the Web already contains an astonishing variety of legal materials from dozens of countries. Significant collections of legislation are already available on the Web from over 50 countries. The full text is available on the Web of all legislation from almost all the jurisdictions of the USA, Canada, Australasia, many Latin American countries and some European countries (such as Norway and Germany), and extensive collections from many other European counties (such as the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal). Substantial collections of legislation are available from many developing countries, including India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Vietnam, Zambia, China, Mexico and Israel.

I am now going to transfer you rapidly from the global information service to a locally targeted and focused legal information service designed to meet the particular needs of a small jurisdiction like Northern Ireland.

SLS Legal Publications was established in 1980 as a unique and profoundly innovative experiment in Northern Ireland (N.I.). Its continued existence 20 years later is testament to the fact that it has not only become a success story but is now an integral part of the legal system in Northern Ireland. SLS Legal Publications is a legal publishing and training company based within the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) and sponsored by the NICS, the Law Society of N.I. and the Bar Council of N.I. QUB's sponsorship takes the form of the provision of accommodation and accounting services. The purpose of SLS is to provide a legal information service in various ways to the Northern Ireland legal profession and the wider community and I will expand on those various ways later in this talk.

The Communications Directorate of The Scottish Parliament is responsible for the development and implementation of strategy and policy in respect of information generation, publication and dissemination. Within The Directorate, it is the Information Systems business unit that has particular responsibility for the external information policy, that is to say, the policy regarding the provision of parliamentary information to the world outside The Parliament.

Ireland is a small common law jurisdiction with a devolved legal system. These two factors combine to present a number of significant problems with regard to legal information sources:

• Devolution has promoted incremental and incidental change. There has been little systemic review and the law is a complex mix of amendment, addition and judicial review.

• Much of our legislation is reactive to social or political requirements.

• Until recently, sources of law have not been prioritized as an important national resource requiring investment in terms of review and access.

• Consolidation is infrequent and ineffective. Codification has only recently been considered.

• Current sources of modern Irish law have been substantially shaped by major historical events of the last three centuries. Today's Irish legal system and sources of contemporary law owe a lot to the pragmatic adoption and adaptation of the Westminster model and the English common law as it stood in the early twentieth century.

This article addresses the question of electronic access to legal resources in Ireland, with special reference to the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) project. The first section of the article explains the origins of BAILII and the Irish resources which it makes available without charge on the web (as well discussing as other free websites). The second section considers official sources of access to Irish legal material (i.e. government sites), while a final section outlines the commercial services currently on offer. An Appendix provides some “Notes on Using BAILII.”

Library of Congress' Bicentennial Summer 2000 was set as the deadline for completion of Class K for law, the only class of the Library's classification system (LCC) not yet fully developed. The last section of Class K - KB-KBX: Religious law (see detailed outline in the Appendix) - will at its implementation close the lacunae in the LCC.

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.