The advancement of technology has drastically changed the way information is being stored in the law library. With current technology, many have found that legal information is easy to retrieve from federal or state government websites in Malaysia. But while federal legislation can be accessed via the internet, some of the law cannot be accessed for the public to review or download. Also, older law is unavailable from the federal gazette website, and it is crucial for the lawyer or law librarian to publicly access it. This paper, by Qudri Ali Abu Bakar, discusses the restriction of access to legal information and looks at some alternative ways of gaining full access to federal and state law in Malaysia.

Democracy is usually relied upon as an important argument against the excessive influence of international and foreign law on the domestic legal order, and especially on domestic constitutional law. Both in Germany and the United States, skeptics and opponents of the Europeanization or internationalization of domestic constitutional law repeatedly raise democratic concerns. From a comparative perspective, this Article examines the German and American democratic arguments against an overreliance on international and foreign law in constitutional interpretations. In exploring the democratic concerns expressed in German and American discussions, this Article focuses especially on the contrast between German dualism on the one hand and American exceptionalism on the other hand. This Article shows that, while the German dualists and the American exceptionalists base their arguments on different understandings of democracy, they share the viewpoint that democracy can only be realized on the national level, whereas international law aims at uniformity und thus inevitably runs counter to democratic self-governance and self-determination of the states. Precisely in this sense, it can be said that there is no qualitative, but rather only a quantitative distinction between German and American democratic arguments. Thus conceived, the alleged contrast between the principle of open statehood emphasized by German constitutional law scholars and the Constitutional Court and the idea of American exceptionalism embraced by a number of critics of the use of foreign law lies only in the extent to which the reference to international or foreign law in interpreting the domestic Constitution is deemed legitimate and justifiable.

Hester Swift writes about the successful one-day courses on foreign and international legal research that have been run since 2009 at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in conjunction with BIALL. These courses have been a collaborative venture between the Foreign and International Law Librarians at the Bodleian Law Library at Oxford, the Squire Law Library at Cambridge, and the IALS Library, together with law librarians from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Cardiff. The courses have attracted delegates from many different sectors of the legal information profession. The post of Foreign and International Law Librarian, or Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian, is relatively new to the UK, but has a long history in the United States. The BIALL-IALS foreign and international law training initiative complements the cooperation of the Foreign Law Research (FLARE) Group.

The judicial use of foreign law in constitutional cases is often unsatisfactorily explained in terms of persuasive authority, judicial learning or judicial dialogue. In this article, I argue that the central case of the judicial use of foreign law involves judges treating foreign case law as theoretically, rather than practically, authoritative. The justification for this approach lies in how case law emerges from a process that is structured in such a way that its outcomes deserve respect. There is, in contrast, no justification for any attempt on the part of judges to treat constitutional cases as an opportunity for interjurisdictional judicial dialogue.

This paper focuses on the practice of making reference to foreign law in legal adjudication. On the one hand, this practice has received overwhelming attention from legal scholars in the last two decades under the headings of “judicial dialogue”, “judicial cross-fertilization” or “constitutional conversation”; on the other hand, a systematic, theoretical picture of this practice is still lacking. The paper aims to bridge this gap by elucidating the structure of legal comparison in judicial decision-making from the point of view of argumentation theory. To this end, the paper examines the various forms of comparative reasoning, identifies the set of their implicit premises and shows under what conditions referring to foreign law in legal adjudication is justified on its own grounds. This analysis will lead us to discuss the thesis according to which comparative reasoning by courts is changing the nature of law and the structure of contemporary legal systems.

The approach of Indian courts towards international law has been consistently evolving. Initially, the Indian constitutional framework provided a flexible basis for the application and use of international law, the reasons for which could be seen in the socio-political context of India as a developing country. India, for its part, continued to argue that it remained essentially at the periphery of the mainstream international law, as it had no role in formulating some of the basic principles of international law. For the Indian courts the first substantive encounter with international law emerges in the context of several territorial-related issues. The socio-political context forms the next phase, for the Indian courts to have recourse to diverse international legal norms relating to the environment and human rights and applying them as a persuasive tool. Later, the development context brings a complex array of commercial, environmental, and other related international legal norms into the Indian legal system. For Indian courts, in the present context, the correct sourcing and identification of international legal norms and their application remain a huge challenge. The majority of the legal systems of developing countries for varied historical reasons continue to treat international law as an exotic legal tool to be used sparingly, perhaps only to broaden the interpretation of or sustain a comparable domestic legal norm.