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.”

How do I find Romanian statutes and cases in English? How might I better understand treaty research and use of travaux préparatoires, find available online and print resources for international agreements, and obtain a cogent overview of this topic? What sources might be helpful for researching religious legal systems, such as Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic law? Where can I find a description of the legal system of Belarus? As U.S. law schools are becoming increasingly global in their scope and preparation of students and LLM programs abound, law librarians will more frequently encounter foreign, comparative, and international law reference questions like the above. In addition, if a reference librarian does not have a background or exposure to foreign, comparative, and international research or if there isn't a foreign and international law librarian at the institution, reliance on available online reference sources, such as research guides, and traditional reference works in foreign and international law will be essential. One excellent online resource that provides research guidance in the areas of foreign, comparative, and international law and has an authoritative and fascinating portal of research articles is GlobaLex.

I am one of the three privileged persons awarded a 2005 IALL scholarship to attend the Association's annual conference. The grant of US $1,500 assisted me in many aspects, which are highlighted in this report.

On numerous online discussion forums in various countries, ordinary people pose specific legal questions and both ordinary people and lawyers answer them. This article considers this new and rapidly growing method of providing legal advice. It emphasizes qualitative over quantitative issues. It seeks to answer questions such as “What kind of questions are being asked?”; “What sort of people are giving legal advice?”, “What sort of people are getting legal advice?”. For those few legal systems that I know something about, I also have considered the question, “How good is the advice?” This is a comparative study, involving discussion forums for Armenian, Australian, Austrian, Brazilian, Canadian, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Moldovan, Portuguese, Russian, Scots, Spanish, Swiss, Ukrainian, United Kingdom, and United States law.

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.

First, I would like to thank the members of the Scholarship Committee of IALL for giving me the opportunity to attend the IALL annual meeting celebrated in Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, last September. Our library has a limited budget for travel. We participate in the annual conferences of the American Association of Law Libraries, which uses almost our entire travel budget. In recent years, the opportunities for participating in good conferences are greater but our budget continues to be the same. That is why I think that the grants given by IALL to new attendants are a great way to encourage librarians to participate in professional development opportunities and should be promoted continually.

Five years ago I wrote about some of the key issues and problems that confronted academic law libraries, and speculated about what the future might hold. I discussed trends in legal education and developments in legal research instruction; the changing physical environment of the library, including an idea that was once anathema, the growing move to allow patrons to eat and drink in the library. Time has passed all too quickly and there have been many momentous changes in the world, including the trauma of September 11, 2001, and the protracted war in Iraq.

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.

This article identifies and provides a brief description of Malaysian electronic legal information and resources. It guides non-legal and legal information-seekers to find useful legal information and resources on the web. A brief description of the Malaysian legal system and its history is also highlighted to give an understanding of the context of the development of the country's legal system and its resources.

The process through which the founding Treaties of the European Communities came to function and be regarded as a constitution and the role of the Court of Justice in that process are well known. According to a widespread view, the Court would have been the main or even the only actor in the constitutionalization of the Treaties, transforming them into constitutional entities by virtue of some judgments of the 60s and 70s. For many, in those judgments the Court would have been excessively prointegrationist, too audacious, almost “running wild”. At some point, a number of constitutional courts, in particular the German Constitutional Court with its Maastricht decision of 1993, would have voiced their concerns, tracing potential limits to judicially driven integration. As a result, the Court of the 90s would have become wiser, more self-restrained, at times even minimalistic – more like a court and less like an omnipotent legislator or “pouvoir constituent.” With the calling of the European Convention and the drafting of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, the Court would have been more than ever on a second plane, as if constitutional matters had finally returned to the political actors to which they belong.

This paper examines the print sources for English language texts of historical constitutions, both national and subnational. Some of these sources are still reasonably current at the time of writing, but they will be examined here because they will in due course become part of historical collections.

This article aims at analyzing the relations and differences between the United States of America Copyright Law and the European Union Directive 2001/29/CE and how they affect the management of protected work in the libraries.

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.

This paper presents a specific case, in other words, the situation in one of the 25 European countries. It goes over the more general aspects that have been presented just a moment ago by my colleague Marco Marandola on the impact for libraries of the implementation of the European Copyright Directive. I have decided to select two aspects. The first part of my paper reviews briefly the French legal background. In the second part, I stress the actions undertaken at present by libraries and documentation associations in France.

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.