In the Canadian Arctic on the southwestern tip of Baffin Island, there is a sacred meeting place marked by a ring of massive stones, “some weighing up to a ton, standing on end and arranged in a near perfect circle.” This place is called Akitsirqavik [cited as Akitsiraq] and for generations, this is the spot where people gathered for celebrations, games, feasts, and is the place where the Inuit Great Council met to discuss conflicts in their community and to agree upon solutions to these disputes. The last known Inuit traditional trial, a murder trial, occurred here in 1924. Akitsiraq means “to strike out, [to] render justice.”

PREFACE

This Select Bibliography, with Appendices, chronicles the published and unpublished work of Members of the Caribbean Association of Law Libraries (CARALL) over the past 21 years of its existence. In this regard, only materials produced between 1984 and 2005 have been included, with the exception of one item which predates this period. This item is not only a significant and seminal work, but in fact laid the foundation for the establishment of the CARALL, and indeed, the future development of law libraries in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The item, therefore, holds its own place, and could not be omitted.

As a consequence of the still increasing transnational commercial and scholarly cooperation and exchange, more and more often legal information has to be translated. Sometimes the content of legal documents (contracts, statutory provisions, books and articles on legal topics and so on) has to be translated into another language. But even more frequently, information on rules from one legal system has to be provided in the legal language of another legal system. In both cases the translator or the lawyer involved is confronted with difficulties of legal translation. In both cases bilingual legal dictionaries could play an important role in the translating process by providing translation suggestions and information on the linguistic context of terms in the target language, such as specific noun-verb combinations, or typical collocations.

Not every proposition in a law review article requires citation, nor does every footnote require cited authority. Indeed, only a few of the several possible types of footnotes require the author to cite to authority. Unfortunately, many student editors and research assistants do not understand the distinctions among types of footnotes and expect each to look the same – a reference to some other author's research or thoughts on the subject mentioned in the text. I have therefore written this article explaining the different types of footnotes and how to prepare them.

Since the end of the Cold War, a number of regional conflicts worldwide have devastated innocent populations. The conflicts in Rwanda and in the Balkans come to mind as prominent examples. With these developments the literature about women and war has proliferated.

Although the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention was a well-intentioned step toward ending genocide, acts of genocide have continued since its ratification. This paper suggests that because genocide is widely considered to be the most horrific of all crimes, the leaders of the international community owe it to their constituents to put some teeth in the Genocide Convention by increasing the speed with which acts of genocide are identified and eradicated. In order to speed up the international community's response time in stopping existing situations of genocide, this paper asserts that certain specified international human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should be given the designated role of identifying genocide and related acts. Such a designation would then initiate, within the U.N. system itself, appropriate action to stop these genocidal acts.

This paper examines the relevant statutory provisions and precedents for significant NGO involvement within the United Nations (UN) system. I also discuss several practical concerns associated with granting deference to NGOs and evaluate the degree to which such concerns may be refutable or compelling. This paper explores the moral and pragmatic values of creating a new system to identify cases of genocide, in the hope that the “never again” mentality that permeated the original drafting of the Genocide Convention can finally be given some force.