The title of the legislation commonly referred to as the USA PATRIOT Act is in fact an acronym: the full name of this 342-page act is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, passed on 26 October 2001. It amends more than 15 federal statutes covering criminal procedure, computer fraud and abuse, foreign intelligence, wiretapping and the privacy of student records. The USA PATRIOT legislation was introduced by Attorney-General John Ashcroft who sought to increase the powers to fight terrorism following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC. Some concern was expressed at the lack of public debate when the legislation was introduced: the Act was passed in around six weeks.

When we examine the implications of US and UK governmental responses to the events of 9/11 for the privacy rights of their citizens, we have to begin from the understanding that even prior to 9/11 there were relatively few congruencies between the two legal systems. While neither country has an explicit constitutional right to privacy, in the US the Supreme Court decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that for many of the other constitutional rights to be meaningful, there had to be at least an implicit right to privacy derivable from the Constitution. In contrast, the concept of a right of personal privacy, to protect the individual from third parties generally, or from government in particular, is one which, until recently, has been largely alien to the law of the United Kingdom. Unlike the situation in the United States, the judiciary in the UK has consistently declined to provide specific sectoral privacy rights, via the common law, that might eventually be developed into a general right of privacy. Legislative attempts to create such a general right have met with an equal lack of enthusiasm. Where specific sectoral statutory protections of privacy have been adopted by the UK Parliament they have, almost without exception, come about as a result of pressures at an international level, not the least as a result of actions, or threats of actions, under the European Convention on Human Rights, or as a result of economic requirements consequent upon the UK's membership of the EU.

Disability discrimination law is a fast evolving area of the law in England and Wales. This article sets out the basic concepts of what constitutes a “disability”, what constitutes “discrimination” and some of the factors that tribunals, employees and employers should consider in a disability discrimination dispute.

E-government first came on the scene for local authorities in 1999 with the publication of the White Paper Modernising Government by the Cabinet Office. The Government of the time was persuaded that, due to the substantial and high publicity advances in online and dot.com businesses, public services in general and local government functions in particular would have to be capable of being delivered technologically. If this was not to be the case, then the Government expected a backlash from those who could buy goods online, download music from Internet sites and post messages on bulletin boards but who could not report a fault, make a complaint or pay their council tax in a similar way. Ironically, during the intervening years, the business world has seen the dot.com crash and many of the young upstart businesses which appeared on the scene around that time have either gone bust or been swallowed up by more traditional businesses that approached the electronic agenda much more slowly and cautiously. This means that one of the main drivers to have e-government at all, has substantially reduced in its ferocity.

The Lawpaths project >http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/lawpaths/< is a project to provide a resource bank of customisable legal information skills materials, based on best practice. It is funded by the JISC over three years, starting in August 2002 under the X4L (Exchange for Learning) programme. The project partners are the University of Kent, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and the UK Centre for Legal Education, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, Cardiff University and the Institute for Learning & Research Technology

Lawbore is a subject-orientated gateway to legal resources developed at City University, which has been created as a community site for the law department. Lawbore's features include regular polls, articles written by City staff and students, legal news and useful legal quotes. It aims to attract students with its time based structure, snappy resource descriptions, direct links into articles within databases, interactive qualities, relevance to module content and easy navigation. Although launched at the end of April, it is expected that usage will be low-key at a time when most students are frantically revising. The real test will not come until the new academic year.

This is a revised version of a paper given by John Sibbald at Glasgow University Library on 19 august 2002 at the inaugural meeting of the International Federation of Library Associations' (IFLA) Law Libraries Discussion Group held in conjuction with the 68th IFLA General Conference 18–24 August. The Paper argues the case for Scotland, as a distinct jurisdiction within the UK, having its own seperate, identifiable, and official gateway to legal information.

Over the past decade, there has been a remarkable growth in the availability and use of Irish legal materials in electronic form (principally through the internet). There has been a transformation in the ease of access to legal materials – from a jurisdiction in which legal practitioners obtained up-to-date paper materials with difficulty to one where up-to-the-minute information is freely available online. It is now possible to access online the full text of Irish legislation, judgments, explanatory codes and memoranda, details of administrative procedures, parliamentary debates, certain secondary legislation, guidance notes and statements of practice. What has led to this remarkable transformation? What are the principal factors which have encouraged the continuing free flow of official legal materials onto the internet?

Every night for ten nights last May, I returned to room 128 in the Westside YMCA (West 63rd Street, New York City – just off Central Park) armed with more behind the scenes insights, professional secrets and first hand accounts of US law library operation and management than one slim A5 notebook could hope to hold. I was fortunate to be in the United States on a two-week placement at Columbia University, visiting some of America's great law libraries – the law school libraries of Columbia itself, New York University and Yale University. Each morning, after orange juice, coffee and a toasted cream cheese bagel, I would head out with the commuters to join the subway at Columbus Circle – uptown for Columbia or downtown for NYU. Every evening I would admire the energy of the mostly silver-haired athletes in brightly coloured lycra returning to the Westside “Y” after numerous circuits of the Jackie “O” reservoir on the upper east side of Central Park. The park is 843 acres of creative space bounded by impressive hotels, apartment blocks and the streets of Harlem. In May it is in perpetual motion from dawn to dusk with joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists weaving their way around the trees, fountains and numerous statues. Indeed it appears to be a huge magic garden, complete with beautiful street lamps that seem to come from C.S. Lewis's Narnia – another world, like the City itself, at once familiar and fascinatingly different.

The following report outlines the activities and funding of academic law libraries in the UK and Ireland in the academic year 2001/2002. The figures have been taken from the results of a postal questionnaire undertaken by Information Services staff at Cardiff University on behalf of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS).

From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library produced an annual List of Current Legal Research Topics. The most recent annual issue was published in 1988 and listed the subjects of research currently being pursued (i.e. provisional dissertation titles) by students registered for research degrees in law (e.g. PhD, MPhil) at higher education institutions in the UK.

Editor's note: this review unfortunately had to be held over from the previous issue of LIM due to lack of space and because of the pace of change in electronic publishing it may not be completely up to date in tis description of the various features of the website.