China is entering a new era; after the 12th National People's Congress, which is to be held in March 2013, China's fifth generation of power transition will be complete. Czarina Poon offers the LIM readership an overview of the political and economic developments within China and outlines the governmental and legal structures for a nation that is one of the last five remaining Communist countries.

After more than 60 years of development, the People's Republic of China has established the world's largest size of legal education, with 624 law schools and 450,000 thousands of undergraduate students currently enrolled. As Wenhua Shan explains, whilst the quality of education has also been improved, it generally falls short of meeting the domestic and international challenges that China is facing in legal education and practice. The most important measure recently adopted by the Chinese Government to enhance the quality of legal education, the “Outstanding Legal Personnel Education Scheme”, is poised to bring significant changes to the structure, contents and methods of Chinese legal education; and it will boost deeper cooperation between law schools and the practice sectors. Further measures are nevertheless required to achieve the desired results of the scheme and to place Chinese legal education in an internationally competitive position.

This article, written by John Bahrij and Lily Ko, focuses on resources in print and electronic form that are available in English for Chinese legal research in the Greater China region. The article covers resources for the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR) and Taiwan. An overview of each jurisdictions legal system is also provided so that the resources can be discussed in the context of the prevailing system of law.

Legal information management is crucial for Chinese Lawyers who practice law in non-litigation and litigation legal areas. Li Zheng, Attorney at Law from PRC, provides a brief overview of the legal procedure, at a practical level, from the point of view of a Chinese lawyer.

Joseph A. Semugabi, Chief Librarian at the Law Development Centre, discusses political-legal developments since 1986 which resulted in the restoration of rule of law and the liberalization of university education in Uganda. He then explains how these have had a significant impact on the country's only institution of practical legal training and its law library.

In a previous article for LIM, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj wrote about online legal information services and their uses at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.1 This new article looks at Institutional Repositories (IRs) which in the academic world, help to re-define the production, dissemination and the use of the intellectual output from an institution. A project to develop an IR offers numerous opportunities to become engaged with information and scholarly material beyond the nature of traditional library services. In this paper, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj and Shikha Kaushik jointly discuss some of the issues, experiences and theories around the institutional repository that has been developed at St Stephen's College.

This article written by Jasmin Hollingum was adapted from her coursework that she submitted as part of an MSc in Library and Information Studies. It posits that whilst collection development policies (CDPs) are in widespread use in academic institutions, they are currently under-used in law firms. It considers what benefits a written CDP could deliver to a law firm library and identifies the problems that firm librarians face when developing such policies. Finally it seeks to establish ways in which they might be overcome.

In this article, Jackie Fishleigh looks at ways in which legal information managers can demonstrate their personal value and effectively market their services. In so doing she draws on her own recent experience promoting the intranet to every department in her law firm.

Kathryn Hayes reflects on the PLL (Private Law Libraries) Summit at the 2012 AALL Annual Meeting and Conference in Boston, which focussed on what law libraries and information services will look like in 2020 and what we should be doing now to advance that vision.