The 19th Course on International Law Librarianship was held in Dublin, Ireland, August 20–24, 2000. The conference theme, “A common Law for Europe: Legal Systems and Legal Information,” and the attractiveness of Dublin as a conference venue helped draw the largest group of participants to attend our conferences. As important, the 150 participants represented 24 countries, a number that is a record for our Association.

This article examines the potential effects of the developing user-centered, networked information environment on scholarly communication in law. By “user-centered, networked information environment,” I mean the emerging environment for legal research and scholarship, in which most seekers and users of legal information will have ready desktop access to a networked computer and to applications that will allow them to communicate with colleagues around the world and enable them to retrieve increasing amounts of the information they need to be productive directly via the Internet, without needing to rely on locally held print sources.

As a result of my work on the Australasian Legal Literature Index (ALLI) at Monash University, Melbourne, I was invited to the Harvard Law Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assess their foreign and international law journal collection and to set up a system to index the journals in the collection that were not indexed elsewhere. The primary purpose of my study was to identify the problems and to attempt to provide solutions. The project metamorphosed into evaluating the basic current awareness needs of the Harvard Law School Faculty and finding a solution for providing access to the journal collection. An indication of the enormity of the task is to compare the holdings of the Harvard foreign and international law collection, (some 4,000 journals), to the some 500 publications indexed by the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, the major U.S. index to foreign materials.

The use of cloning techniques to reproduce human beings would have a dramatic impact on the individual, the society and the human species itself. Many have expressed their concern and appealed for an international ban. This article examines the French Ethics Committee's arguments for a ban on cloning, evaluates existing French legislation in the area, and enumerates European efforts against human cloning.

The necessity to counteract corruption effectively has lead to an increased integration in judicial cooperation. This paper analyses the legal instruments adopted by the EU for fighting bribery in order to explore in detail existing interrelationships (i.e. differences and peculiarities) between European and Italian rules. The latter is of singular relevance particularly since 1992, when a widespread system of corruption had been discovered and a broad campaign to prevent corruption (“mani pulite“) had been undertaken which resulted in an important work of reform and brought existing rules up to date. Finally, Italy also played an active role at the European level: the 1997 Anti-Corruption Convention was adopted on the basis of an Italian proposal.