Before recollecting the contributions of Sir B.N. Rau in articulating of the Constitution of India, it is necessary to know about the evolution of concept of Constituent Assembly, formation of Indian Constituent Assembly and initiatives taken by its members to include the best features of some Constitutions of the World for the benefit of Indian people.

This article provides an overview of the importance of cultural competency skills for multijurisdictional practice and a comprehensive list of resources for international business law for G20 nations. Law students today are certain to confront issues of cultural competency in both clinical settings during law school and also during their legal careers as a result of the increasingly global practice of law. This article focuses on cultural competency as an essential lawyering skill in the context of private international law. First, the article will provide a brief history of cultural competency and its inclusion as a type of skills training in a clinical legal education setting at some law schools. Then, the article includes a brief survey of current globalization offerings and initiatives at U.S. law schools. Finally, the article provides a comprehensive list of resources to aid cultural competency and understanding of the legal systems and, further, an authoritative survey of international business resources for G20 countries.

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.

Chile privatized its social security system in 1981. Almost immediately, scholars began analyzing the impact of the new system to gauge its effectiveness and they continue to do so to this day. This bibliography collects and describes the most significant scholarly articles, books, and book chapters written in English discussing and analyzing Chile's privatized social security system.

This article will introduce an approach to teaching legal research called Expansive Legal Research. The Expansive Legal Research perspective is based upon dissertation research on legal information behavior at a law school legal aid clinic. This approach is inspired by an educational perspective called Expansive Learning, which in turn has roots in the psychological theory called Activity Theory. The Expansive Legal Research perspective includes elements inspired by Expansive Learning and Activity Theory such as a focus on an activity-centered context of both the individual and social aspects of human behavior; the design-oriented nature of human problem-solving; the role of tacit knowledge and unwritten rules in daily activity and practice; and a cultural historical approach to learning and development, where both the user and their tools are undergoing a constant process of growth and change and transformation. An Expansive Legal Research approach, and the theory it is based upon, may provide new insights into legal research instruction, and may be a useful tool for legal research instructors.

Law is changing, and with it, so too the systems of higher education and research. Over the past two decades, both have been undergoing a progressive process of transnationalisation. In the field of law, we are currently experiencing a proliferation of transnational law. In the systems of higher education and research, national structures of knowledge production are giving way to transnational institutional frameworks. Disciplinary boundaries are becoming more permeable. Today, legal scholars have to engage in an increasingly interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue on law. The aim of this piece is to provide an overview of that process and highlight several significant consequences this development might potentially hold for legal scholarship (and its media).

Around the world, people with mental disabilities are subject to many types of behavioral therapies against their will, including medications and restraints. This is especially true of people who are institutionalized. These intrusions are in violation of fundamental international human rights principles. People with mental disabilities are often stripped of many of their basic rights, including the right to determine what is done to their bodies. This article compares the prevailing law on the right to refuse treatment for people with mental disabilities in an institutional setting in three different nations on three continents, specifically in the United States, Kenya, and Brazil.

In the Spring of 2015, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library was contacted by Mark Engsberg, Director of Library Services at Emory Law, enquiring about old English legal documents. Mark knows several of us at the Institute through the IALL conferences. He was emailing on behalf of Professor Tina Stark, an Emory faculty member, who was planning a visit to London and hoped to see collections of indentures while she was there.

This article introduces readers to a new perspective on meeting library user needs. The author employs Kano theory to examine library user demands in Chinese law libraries and how law libraries in China have tried to meet user needs on three different levels. The Kano model was first introduced by Professor Noriaki Kano of Tokyo Rika University. The model was based on the assumption that customer needs are constantly changing and the question becomes how to meet library users’ evolving demands. The article summarizes demands of Chinese law library patrons on three levels: basic needs, performance, and excitement demands. Currently, most Chinese academic law libraries meet the basic needs of library users, but they need to further enhance user satisfaction and promote the law libraries’ status as a legal information center instead of merely a place to collect and house books.

The Mediation Committee of the Bundestag and Bundesrat – is it “one of the most felicitous innovations in our constitutional activities”, “the most positive institution in the entire Basic Law” or, as some critics assert “a substitute and superordinate parliament” or indeed the “mysterious darkroom of the legislative process”? This article seeks to provide answers to these questions. It is however clear that the Mediation Committee has become an important instrument for attaining political compromises in Germany's legislative procedure. The Committee's purpose is to find a balance between the differing opinions of the Bundestag and Bundesrat concerning the content of legislation, and, through political mediation and mutual concessions, to find solutions that are acceptable to both sides. Thanks to this approach, the Mediation Committee has helped save countless important pieces of legislation from failure since it was established over 65 years ago, thus making a vital contribution to ensure the legislative process works efficiently. The lecture will address the Mediation Committee's status and role within the German legislative process. It will explain the composition of this body as well as its most important procedural principles also against the backdrop of current case law from the Federal Constitutional Court. Finally, the lecture will consider how particular constellations of political power impact on the Mediation Committee's work.

The easy accessibility of sources via web links and the fluidity of online formats offer an opportunity to revisit the purpose of legal citation and to consider competing citation models from a fresh perspective. This bibliographic article identifies the leading citation guides in use in the United States along a historical continuum and documents selected works that extol, critique, or excoriate—but for the most part continue to recommend adherence to—these guides. Secondary sources are included for the purpose of outlining the scope of the debate concerning which of the many citation guides now in use is preferable, and to help predict the path that legal citation is likely to take in coming years, particularly given the realities of a hyperlinked world and easily accessible source documents. Using these materials as a framework, the article invites the reader to think creatively about the purpose and future of legal citation.

Over the years, the legal problems posed by absentees and returnees have attracted the attention of scores of law review authors. Their work is difficult to access, however, because it is scattered across time and place. This is particularly problematic for a field that has no current organizing text. Accordingly, this bibliography collects and annotates the more notable pieces, dividing them into three principal categories: General Works, State-Specific Works, and Subject-Specific Works.

This essay outlines how the German Unification Treaty comprehends real property merely as a problem of transition provisions and of restitution. The Treaty therefore does provide for a small set of transition provisions similar to those provided for in 1900 for the introduction of the German Civil Code and for a restitution Act. More by instinct than by reflection or knowledge the Treaty also comprises a clause reserving later legislation on reorganizing property law. Soon after Unification having come into force this clause proved to be essential. Literally day by day, the gap between the written German Democratic Republic (GDR)-law and the real practice became more and more apparent. The difference between rights in rem and contractual rights had vanished in the GDR-law to an extent that, in the end, in hundreds of thousands of cases people did not provide at all for the necessary legal fundament for building small houses, big housing blocs, factories or public highways. Nearly every day people wrote letters to the Federal Ministry of Justice describing cases that could not or at least not satisfactorily be resolved with the instruments of the existing law. Therefore, the German parliament had to close these gaps and reorganize the rights and obligations of the people and enterprises using other persons' real property.

It accomplished this by enacting in a quick sequence a series of statutes reorganizing property law. Then it was up to the public notaries and the courts, especially the civil senate of the German Federal Court of Justice and the 7th and 3rd revision senate of the Federal Administrative Court to make these laws in practicable. Although the more difficult cases on reorganizing real property relations come up for decision recently, the vast majority of cases have been finalized. This has also been a challenge for law libraries. First, they had to withstand the general trend to throw away their old stocks, which at a second glance could be very useful, both for creating the necessary reorganizing provisions and for assisting the decisions of the courts on these new rules. Then they had to decide how to provide to their Courts, lawyers or professors the necessary periodicals, commentaries and monographs. Now these transient stocks continue to be necessary for the decisions of the courts in the actual cases – and the preparatory work on writing the legal history.

This paper discusses the protection of human rights in Germany through the interplay of constitutional law and international human rights law. It also explores the relationship between specialized human rights treaties on the rights of women, children, and persons with disabilities with “general” human rights treaties and their added value. It will highlight current human rights issues, such as the treatment of refugees, the protection against racist discrimination, and the right to privacy in the digital age.