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Retrieval of International Legal Materials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2017

John H. Jackson
John H. Jackson*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Type
Notes and Comments
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , October 1964 , pp. 980 - 984
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1964

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References

1 See, for instance, Caldwell, The Use of Electronic Computers for Information Eetrieval in Medical-Legal Research, 60D MULL (Modern Uses of Logic in Law) 146; and the articles in the January, 1960, issue of MULL.

2 These resources for legal research are carefully set forth in several books, such as Price and Bitner, Effective Legal Research. The comparative lack of search aids for international law can be seen from these books.

3 See Brimmer et ah, A Guide to the Use of United Nations Documents viii (New York, Oceana, 1962), where the authors note that few libraries can afford the personnel it takes to merely process and service a collection of United Nations documents.

4 See, for instance, 58 A.J.I.L. at 165 (1964).

5 One can see the diversity of relevant materials by perusing the section of the Journal on " U . S. Contemporary Practice Relating to International Law."

6 The author naturally hesitates to point out other persons' mistakes since his own work is so vulnerable; however, perhaps one illustration of an omission that may have been caused by the lack of systematic search aids or documents is that suggested by Leo Gross in his article, "Expenses of the United Nations for Peace-Keeping Operations: The Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice," 17 International Organization 1 (1963) at p. 19, where he mentions a document relevant to the I.C.J. Finances case which escaped attention.

7 I am concentrating my attention in this comment upon primary documentation, since several extensive indices now exist for secondary works, namely, Index to Legal Periodicals, and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals. These indices are not, however, very analytical, and there is certainly room for improvement in them. I doubt that the simple listing of contents of current periodicals, such as is done in the American Journal of International Law, has any use whatsoever. It should be noted that by digest I do not refer to the large works published by the Department of State (Hackworth, Moore, Whiteman) which are in reality texts and collections of documents. As useful as these are, they require an immense amount of work to prepare and consequently are not up-to-date for a very long period of time. Furthermore, they concentrate primarily on United States practice—a too limited view for a general research aid that is needed. The State Department "Digest" is useful and necessary, but more is needed.

8 Cf. the classificatory systems contained in Hackworth, Digest of International Law (1942); Schwerin, Classification for International Law and Relations (1958); classifications contained in the American Journal of International Law and other similar journals. The author has been informed that both the Library of Congress and the Los Angeles County Bar Library have been working on classification systems on international law materials for library use.

9 See this Journal, section on United States Contemporary Practice Relating to International Law; section on Judicial Decisions involving Questions of International Law; the British Year Book of International Law, decisions of British courts . . . involving questions of public or private international law; Revue de Droit International Public, Jurisprudence Franchise en matiere de droit international public.

10 See the organizations listed in Peaslee, International Governmental Organization (2nd ed., 1961).

11 The American Society of International Law, International Legal Materials, Current Documents.

12 See also criticism of International Legal Materials in a review by Spaeth, 16 Stanford Law Rev. 229 (December, 1963). His remarks at the end of his review, I suggest, reinforce the thesis of this comment.

13 See note 9 above

14 National Lawyers Guild, Civil Liberties Docket (quarterly).

15 See, for instance, 7 The American Behavioral Scientist 25 (December, 1963).

16 See Loevinger, "Jurimetrics: The Methodology of Legal Inquiry," 28 Law and Contemporary Problems 5 (Winter, 1963). The author there describes the use of the computer for information retrieval in the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice. See also Eldridge and Dennis, ' ' The Computer as a Tool for Legal Eesearch,'' 28 Law and Contemporary Problems 78; American Law Student Association, A Techno-Legal Bibliography for Law Students and Young Lawyers (1963).

17 The author is using a small, rudimentary indexing scheme with the computer for certain international legal documents at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.

18 The quality of existing key number systems in other branches of the law is already being challenged as outdated in many respects. One of the subjects which is difficult, if not impossible, to follow in those systems is international law. In an editorial comment in this JOURNAL 15 years ago, Herbert W. Brigga noted the problem of finding international law materials. In the General Digest for 1941-1942 he states, only 42 decisions are listed under the rubric "International Law," while, by making his own index, Briggs found 124 cases for the same period that turned on some question of international law. "Finding International Law," 42 A.J.I.L. 101 (1948).

More advanced ideas of document retrieval than key number systems are described in articles cited in note 16 above.

19 The U. S. State Department and the U. S. Mission to the United Nations have an extensive and expensive system of indexing all U.N. documents. This indexing, which is obviously essential for any effective governmental representation to the United Nations, is done largely by hand. If this indexing service could be made available on a contract basis to the United States Government, as well as to other governments,, libraries and universities, substantial savings could be possible. Consequently, the? State Department might be an interested party to committee discussions. Likewise, the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, with some of the funds which it has available for research, might realize the substantial impact that effective international legal research systems could have on arms control and disarmament, and lend some support to the project. The Defense Department or some ot its alter egos like Band or Systems Development Corporation (the latter is already extensively involved in information retrieval research with computers) should be interested.

20 The Dag Haramarskjold Library at U.N. Headquarters might be a partner to the project described herein. If the United Nations and the specialized agencies were persuaded to co-operate so that their respective library and publication staffs would arrange for classification of the documents issued by those organizations at the source, and the marking of these classifications directly on the documents at publication time, considerable effort could be saved.

21 The Eockefeller Foundation supported publication of the very useful "Guide to League of Nations Documents" by Hans Aufricht (Columbia University Press, 1951).

22 Co-operation from universities and libraries might be financially worthwhile to those institutions on the basis of time saved on cataloguing and filing, especially if punched cards are furnished them as a by-product of the classification effort.