I got the heads-up from a Brazilian law librarian colleague about a significant opinion published on April 12, 2012. I decided to use the opinion for a kind of case study in how to find cases in English translation. The Supreme Court of Brazil ruled that pregnant women carrying fetuses with anencephaly can legally abort them. The Court’s press releases describing its votes and reasoning are here and here. They’re in Portuguese, which I can make out since I know Spanish, but Google Translate helps give the gist in English. Also, because abortion is a hot issue worldwide, there are a lot of English-language news stories about the case, and there’s already a Wikipedia article! From the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Supreme Court’s ruling “amends Brazil’s current law— which criminalizes abortion completely, with only narrow exceptions in cases of rape or to save a woman’s life—to allow abortion in cases where a fetus has been diagnosed with anencephaly.” This is a major comparative legal development, which raises moral and religious questions. And controversy. What are the chances of finding the full text of this case in English translation?

With a very recent case, the chances of finding it in translation are slim to none. The odds improve the older the case gets, but there is no guarantee. It’s usually possible to obtain English summaries from news sources and blog posts. Extensive, more detailed legal analyses in English take longer, sometimes years. For example, there was a 2008 article (PDF) describing an earlier anencephalic abortion proceeding before the Brazilian Supreme Court. The decisions themselves may never be translated into English. In this blog post, I discuss tried-and-true techniques and tools for hunting down elusive translations.

The first step is to go directly to the source. Sometimes courts have selected decisions in English translation or will know who has or will translate the decision and when. In this case, the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) website has an English-language search interface with links (under “Jurisprudence”) to summaries of selected decisions in English translation. Unfortunately, the latest case summary is 2007. The SFT also has links to case abstracts in English, French, and Spanish from mostly 1988 to 2006 on its “Jurisprudência Traduzida” page. So, no joy for my 2012 case.

The next step is to find the case in the original Portuguese, or more information about it if I haven’t yet. To begin to communicate with the Court or anyone about getting the case in English translation, I need exact information. It’s important to get the case name (if available), case number (ADPF 54), and the date of decision. From the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil’s press releases, I have all the information I need. And I can use Google Translate or vLex (subscription database which auto-translates decisions) to get a “good enough” English translation of the decision. I can also use human, professional legal translators. I can also ask the Court when a summary or full translation will be available. I can try contacting the lawyers and organizations involved in the case. Or I can wait.

As time passes, the Brazilian Anencephalic Abortion Case may show up in English translation in the Council of Europe Venice Commission’s CODICES database in summary or full text (while European constitutional courts are its strength, CODICES also contains decisions from Latin American courts). The Library of Congress’ GLIN (Global Legal Information Network) may have an English summary of it. Excerpts or full texts of the case in English translation might be published in databases, casebooks, treatises, and journal articles. Many possibilities!

Artists are cutting, burning, and hanging books to create “shaped prose”, landscapes, and faces. University of Iowa professor, Garrett Stewart, sees these book sculptures as symbols of “renewable intellectual energy.” The resulting art is pretty incredible, albeit bittersweet,and sometimes strangely beautiful (such as the Edinburgh paper sculptures). This “book tree” from a gallery in the Netherlands is a good example:

Click on image to enlarge

Give Law Books to Art

Law libraries in the Netherlands have also gotten into the act. Here is a sculpture created out of law books that have been written in, torn, or defaced in some way. Now, they are art!

This bundle of law books hanging from the ceiling, with a sword. Art!

In the U.S., several artists have used Thomson Reuters West reporters as book art pieces. Mickey Smith created In Memoriam, an interactive piece in which visitors must step across 1,201 discarded Federal Reporters to see the rest of the works in the “Library Science” gallery exhibit. This makes the visitors “active participants in the desecration of physical tomes of legal knowledge.” The Tower of Law exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is constructed from hundreds of West reporters.

There are other uses for discarded books. They can even earn brief fame on movie or TV sets, department store displays (!), or as parts of physics stacking experiments. But most withdrawn library books have other, more mundane likely fates.

Besides re-purposing discarded books as furniture or art, law libraries have so many more alternatives than before. Instead of throwing away or recycling unneeded or unwanted books, we can give them to other libraries or digitize them.

Give Books to Other Libraries

There are several ways offer your books to other law libraries. You can use listservs. Mila Rush at the University of Minnesota started the NEEDSANDOFFERS-L email list to help law libraries exchange legal publications. Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas, hosts the list. Typically, libraries offer duplicates of periodical issues, serial runs, withdrawn or gift books. Libraries can also request missing issues needed for binding journals, and specific serial or monographic titles to build their collections. While there are no geographic restrictions, the NEEDSANDOFFERS-L list is mostly used by U.S. law librarians. Libraries also offer books to good homes or request books on other law library email lists such as LAW-LIB, CALL-L, LIS-LAW, ALLA-ANZ, and OSALL.

You can also use “duplicates lists” such as the Australian Law Librarians’ Association (ALLA) wiki or the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Technical Services Special Interest Section (TS SIS) Exchange of Duplicates Program (for serial titles).

Also, keep in mind, a book or collection that might have become out of scope for your library or for which you do not have space might be a good fit in another library collection. Before throwing a book away, think about what library might need it. Your withdrawn books might help another library rebuild its collections destroyed by floods, earthquakes, war, and other disasters. Your books can fill in gaps in other law library or general library collections. The Law Library of Congress might need that official gazette you’re about to toss! You can target your book offers to specific libraries with strong collections on particular jurisdictions or areas of law. For example, when the Association of the Bar of the City of New York was seeking a new home for its exceptional historical foreign law collection, it found a good match in the George Washington Law Library. Transferring books to other libraries can strengthen their collections. You can arrange for libraries receiving your books to pay the costs of your shipping the books to them.

Give Books to Used Book Dealers

You can give discarded books to Better World Books (BWB). BWB lists the books for sale on their website for anyone to purchase (at a low price). Law students and college students in public policy or other law-related classes buy casebooks, even older ones, making those books some of the top sellers. BWB gives the donating library a percentage of the sales price. And BWB often donates unsold books to Books for Africa. BWB provides shipping materials, and you can easily print shipping labels and schedule UPS pickups online. You can search used books offered for sale by BWB and other second-hand booksellers at Abebooks.com.

Give or Loan Books to Digitization Projects

Besides the good feeling of giving your withdrawn books to other libraries that need them instead of dumpstering them, you can lend or give them to publishers engaged in digitization projects that benefit us all. Our library has given or lent our books to W.S. Hein to help develop its World Constitutions Illustrated and World Trials Library via HeinOnline. We’ve contributed books to other HeinOnline collections, to LLMC-Digital, Hathi Trust, and Google Books. And, as I mentioned in a previous Slaw post, law libraries worldwide collaborated to build a digital library of Haitian law books. Yale Law Library has been a key partner in developing and populating the new Gale Cengage Making of Modern Law foreign law module.

Conclusion, or a New Beginning

The books your library no longer needs can have useful and sometimes creative afterlives. Please don’t dumpster them. Re-purpose them. Give them a chance to make a difference to another library, to become famous, or contribute to the brave new world of ebooks.

I stumbled into this career and it has been a blast! I did not plan to specialize in foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarianship. I just wanted to be the world's greatest general legal reference librarian (ah, youth!). But, here I am, enjoying doing work I never imagined.

Because I've been in the profession for a while, I get asked from time to time – how does one become an FCIL librarian? Here's what I would have done to research career opportunities as an FCIL librarian (besides reviewing job postings to see what current employers are expecting from FCIL librarians) if I hadn't accidentally become one.

Consult the Literature

I would start by reading up on what it's like to be an FCIL librarian. First, I would check out the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section (FCIL SIS) website's "Articles for Considering a Career in FCIL Law Librarianship". It includes articles by seasoned FCIL librarians, Mary Rumsey (Minnesota), Dan Wade (Yale, retired), and me (Chicago). Mary's 2006 article answers frequently-asked questions (FAQs) about FCIL librarians. What types of work do we do? What qualifications do we need? How much do we earn? And what do we like and what frustrates us about the job? Mary Rumsey has written several other publications useful for practicing FCIL and non-FCIL librarians, including a chapter on "Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Librarianship," in Law Librarianship in the Twenty-First Century 129-145 (Roy Balleste et al. eds., 2007). In that chapter, she describes a "Day in the Life" of an FCIL librarian. She estimates that there are about 75 official FCIL librarians in the U.S. with about 150 who are "the unofficial FCIL librarians at their workplace."

Click on the image to enlarge this Wordle.

Dan's 2006 article, "Wisdom from Mount Nebo (Hiei): Advice to a Young Person Aspiring to Become a Foreign and International Law Librarian," begins with the story of Buddhist monks in Japan who must complete a 1000-mile marathon within seven years, then fast for nine days until they're near death. To him, a successful FCIL librarian needs this type of energy, passion, and perseverance. He or she needs to run the monk's race to have a successful career. The small group of FCIL librarians in the United States (which Dan calls a "confraternity") connects to a "world community of law librarians" via the INT-LAW email list. Dan goes on to describe how FCIL librarians must be global citizens and engage in the world. He also stresses that the profession is fun. He discusses the "necessary aptitude" and qualifications, education and training for becoming an FCIL librarian, and future challenges. He concludes by encouraging FCIL librarian hopefuls to meet as many in our "confraternity" as possible and to have fun! Dan mentored many new FCIL librarians and the article reflects his spiritual and caring nature. One piece of advice from him that I've tried to take to heart is to read.

My article (updated as of December 2010 by Mary Rumsey) is about the various ways you can meet our "confraternity" of FCIL librarians and become part of the peer-to-peer global legal information network. Attending conferences, workshops, and other meetings, becoming members of law librarian associations, and subscribing to email discussion lists and other e-fora are just some of the ways to meet FCIL librarians in person. My article also updates a list Dan Wade compiled of librarians who are willing to help other librarians who have foreign, comparative and international legal research questions. It's arranged by topic and by jurisdiction. Mary Rumsey is now updating that directory. We are always looking for volunteers! Hint, hint…

Then, I would read Penny A. Hazelton's chapter at pages 43-64 in the International Association of Law Libraries' IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management (Richard A. Danner & Jules Winterton eds., 2011) in which she discusses the education and training of FCIL librarians in the United States and worldwide. She describes courses to take in library school and law school as well as continuing professional development and training opportunities such as language courses, workshops and institutes, educational programming at conferences, grants and scholarships, internships, and library visits and exchanges.

Talk to FCIL Librarians

Nothing beats going directly to the source. From my literature search, I'll know the names of FCIL librarians and where they hang out (sounds stalkerish!). As I mention in my Jumpstart article, to meet FCIL librarians in person, attend AALL FCIL SIS meetings and programs and introduce yourself. There is usually a joint IALL/FCIL SIS reception at the AALL annual meetings. You're welcome to attend. There'll be food, drinks, and friendly law librarians from the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, the UK, and other countries. Making personal connections and networking with FCIL librarians will help you decide if that's the career for you and, if you do decide to join our "confraternity", you will have friends for life!

Look out for other meetings of interest to FCIL librarians wherever they are, including in other countries and on substantive law topics, and go. For instance, the Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries (CAFLL) held its 2d meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania right before the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting (see the presentation materials here). If you were going to AALL anyway, that would have been an opportunity to meet Chinese law librarians. Joint study institutes (sponsored by AALL, the Australian Law Librarians' Association (ALLA), the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL), and the New Zealand Law Librarians' Association (NZLLA)) are great ways to meet librarians from common law jurisdictions (see history here). The 7th Joint Study Institute (JSI) will be held in Melbourne, Australia, February 13-16, 2013. Closer in time is the next IALL annual course on international legal information. This conference will attract many FCIL librarians and will be held in Toronto, Canada, September 30-October 4, 2012. Mark your calendars!

Alternatively, you can meet FCIL librarians virtually. As Dan Wade mentioned, many FCIL librarians are on the INT-LAW electronic discussion group. It's a free, public email list that to which anyone can subscribe. Join INT-LAW and lurk at first until you feel comfortable asking questions. There are other useful e-fora for meeting FCIL librarians such as the AALL FCIL-SIS community (but you must pay membership fees), the OSALL-LIST Google group (South Africa, must be a member), and the free LIS-LAW (UK), ALLA-ANZ (Australia & New Zealand), law-lib (New Zealand), CALL-L (Canada), BIB-JUR (German-speaking law librarians), and Juriconnexion (France) lists. FCIL librarians are also on the general LAW-LIB email discussion list, and on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Google+, and Twitter.

It's a Wonderful Life!

Finally, I can't imagine what it would have been like not to be an FCIL librarian. When I completed my law degree and was looking for my first law librarian job, it just so happened that the University of Minnesota had an opening for a reference librarian with foreign language skills. I needed a job, and this was my first step to becoming the world's greatest legal reference librarian… It seemed a good fit, and would enable me to use my French, German, and Spanish. They wanted to grow the next generation foreign and international law librarian. The rest is history.

I was able to apprentice with the great Adolf Sprudzs at the University of Chicago to learn about FCIL collection development and the FCIL legal bibliography. I traveled overseas for the first time and visited several European countries, and including a practicum in Kiel, Germany. I attended AALL conferences and IALL annual courses in international law librarianship (including a very memorable one in Heidelberg, Germany). And I co-taught with Suzanne Thorpe the first international and foreign legal research course at the University of Minnesota.

I've met so many wonderful and interesting people and made connections I never expected in Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, the Philippines, the U.S., and many other places. I get to travel, and even if I don't, working with foreign languages is like going to another country every day. I'm able to use the foreign languages (French, Spanish, and German) I know and work my way through the ones I don't to help patrons with reference and questions, to select books, and to communicate with other law librarians worldwide. FCIL librarianship work can be challenging, but never dull, with reference, teaching, collection development and management. I love trouble-shooting technical processes. I've solved puzzles about resources in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian – languages I never learned – with the help of language tools and colleagues worldwide. I am happy to be part of a special network of FCIL librarians. My "confraternity." I wouldn't have it any other way. Being a specialist and not a generalist has been very rewarding. Being an FCIL librarian is fun. I enjoy "running the race." It's a wonderful life!

Decades ago when I was looking for legal information on gays in the military worldwide, resources were scarce. Those gopher, pre-web days are gone and now researchers can find a wide variety of resources on the global legal status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people. So, let’s check to see how these resources cover military law related to LGBTQI persons around the globe.

The newest resource is the International Commission of Jurists’ Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Justice: A Comparative Law Casebook (September 2011). It includes a foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby, former President of the ICJ, which provides a broad overview of the jurisdictions and issues covered by the collected cases. The introduction describes the background, purpose, and limitations of the Casebook, and the ICJ’s observations about the cases therein.

The ICJ…hopes that the Casebook will promote public interest litigation in defence of rights, assist individuals whose rights have been violated to seek redress in court, and enable lawyers to develop effective and persuasive reasoning… [T]he ICJ hopes that the Casebook will stand as evidence for the claim that law on sexual orientation and gender identity is global in nature.

This 417-page ICJ publication sets forth English-language summaries of selected domestic court cases involving sexual minorities from diverse countries. Each chapter includes a general introduction providing an overview of the law, followed by summaries of related cases on the following topics:

1. Decriminalisation
2. Universality, Equality and Non-Discrimination
3. Employment Discrimination
4. Freedom of Assembly, Association and Expression
5. Military Service
6. Intersex
7. Gender Expression and Cross-Dressing
8. Recognising Gender Identity
9. Transgender Marriage
10. Freedom of Religion and Non-Discrimination
11. Parenting
12. Asylum and Immigration
13. Partnership Benefits and Recognition
14. Marriage

The Casebook summarizes 108 decisions from courts in 41 countries: Argentina, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Fiji, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea (South), Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zimbabwe.

The Casebook also includes court decisions from Canada: Haig v. Canada (1992) (omission of sexual orientation in the Canadian Human Rights Act is discriminatory); Egan v. Canada (1995) (whether exclusion of same-sex relationships from the definition of common law spouse violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Section 15 prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation); Vriend v. Alberta (1998) (college laboratory instructor dismissed because of his homosexuality); Hall v. Powers (2002) (student refused permission to attend a prom at a Catholic high school with his boyfriend); Halpern et al. v. Attorney General of Canada (2003) (whether denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples based on the common law definition of marriage was discriminatory under the Charter; a postscript indicates that the 2005 Civil Marriage Act provided for gender-neutral definition of marriage).

The Casebook concludes with a list of other domestic court cases, and LGBT-related decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the European Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Despite the apparent jurisdictional breadth, Michael Kirby points out that the Casebook mainly includes decisions from developed countries. A limitation noted in the introduction is that the Casebook does not cover hate crimes or conditions in detention of LGBT people in custody. Also, there are very few case summaries per legal issue. For example, the Casebook includes only five cases on LGBT military service. Nevertheless, the ICJ Casebook uniquely contributes to LGBT legal resources, covering judicial pronouncements from the last 40 years. Human Rights Watch has a smaller scale compilation covering 1986 to 2009, titled Important International Jurisprudence concerning LGBT Rights.

The LGBT Bibliography, an older, but regularly-updated resource, began as a book first published in 2006 by W.S. Hein with the title: Sexual Orientation and the Law: A Research Bibliography of Legal Literature Discussing Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual Persons, Their Rights and Their Families. It is browsable by table of contents and by author, and keyword-searchable. It includes foreign and international law articles, but only covers the rights of gays in the military in the U.S. thus far. Law librarians, law students, and other volunteers update the LGBT Bibliography with annotations on a quarterly basis via the web. March 2011 is the most recent update. The LGBT Bibliography is an ongoing project of the Standing Committee on Lesbian and Gay Issues (SCLGI) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL).

None of the other places I usually check for legal information on sexual orientation and the law (ILGA; ECSOL; SOL LawGuide; AALS SOGI Global Legal Resources) seem to have made available a current comparative survey of gays in the military. The ILGA website makes available a thematic world map depicting which countries allow gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces, but the website’s country surveys don’t seem to include citations to or texts of the laws. Some individual publications cover the issue, from the old 1993 GAO survey, Homosexuals in the Military: Policies and Practices of Foreign Countries, to the recent Gays in Foreign Militaries 2010: A Global Primer (authored by various public policy researchers at the Palm Center, formerly the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military; the Primer includes a list of the 25 countries at page 137, including Canada, that allow openly gay military service), and Suzanne B. Goldberg, Open Service and Our Allies: A Report on the Inclusion of Openly Gay and Lesbian Servicemembers in U.S. Allies’ Armed Forces (2011). A Wikipedia article lists 43 countries that allow gay people to serve in the military. And a 2004 study mentions that, in 1974, the Netherlands became the first country to allow openly gay military service. For Canada, Aaron Belkin and Jason McNichol published a 2000 study, Effects of the 1992 Lifting of Restrictions on Gay and Lesbian Service in the Canadian Forces: Appraising the Evidence.

Haiti is located in the West Indies, on the island of Hispaniola, between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Its official languages are French and Haitian Créole. It shares a border with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. It lies near Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the state of Florida in the U.S. It has a rich cultural heritage. However, researching Haiti’s law can be frustrating. Haiti is in the Caribbean, but works on Caribbean law mostly focus on English-speaking, Commonwealth Caribbean countries. Works on West Indian law tend to focus on the British West Indies. And works on Latin American law rarely discuss Haiti. Researchers may struggle to pin down legal resources for this small francophone, “créolophone” jurisdiction. The treasures of “la perle des Antilles” can be well-hidden. Researchers often have difficulty finding current Haitian law in the original French. Finding English, Spanish, or other language translations can be even harder. Luckily some resources make the quest for the law of Haiti less difficult for you and your patrons.

Christelle Vaval, Omar Ha-Redeye, Marjorie Florestal, Hope Lewis (IntLawGrrls blog), and others have written on legal issues faced by Haitians and efforts to help, especially in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. The legal issues include child trafficking, crime victimization (gender-based violence, sexual abuse, rapes, crimes in housing camps), unlawful evictions, inadequate housing, dangerous deportations (leading to issuance of precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights), immigration (e.g. need for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) extensions and redesignations in the U.S.), and access to justice and the courts. Pro bono advocates, NGOs, and others researching Haitian law need to find the current law in force. Therefore, they should look for research guides first to learn about the most readily available sources legal materials for Haiti and find out whether those sources provide sufficiently current materials.

Marisol Florén-Romero’s 2008 Globalex guide on “Researching Haitian Law” is a free web resource with a helpful introduction to Haiti’s history, government, and law, and legal literature. It lists sources on agricultural law, banking law, business law, constitutional law, criminal law, cultural property, electoral law, family law, human rights, intellectual property law, labor law, legal education, legal profession, maritime law, natural resources, real property, tax law, and telecommunications law. It also lists primary law sources — constitutions, codes, statutory compilations, treaties, court reports — and secondary sources of law — legal periodicals, news, and books. It has links to websites on Haitian law, including le juriste Haïtien and le Civiliste. It concludes with a brief bibliography. Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law Guide is a subscription database that does something similar in its Haiti section, but with broader depth of coverage. See also the Law Library of Congress’ Guide to Law Online: Haiti, Haiti: Legal Bibliography, Chantal Hudicourt Ewald’s “The Legal System of Haiti” (volume 7, Modern Legal Systems Cyclopedia (e-access via the World Constitutions Illustrated Library in HeinOnline)), and L’Etat de droit: Sources d’informations sur vingt-deux pays d’Afrique et Haïti (1997).

Alternatively, you can direct researchers to existing online databases. If they are looking for a specific constitution, code, law, book, or journal, you can point them to several digital collections with significant Haitian law content. The Law Library of Congress’ Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) not only indexes Haitian constitutional amendments, laws, decrees, and regulations, but it also has PDF full text of Le Moniteur, Journal officiel de la République d’Haïti (Haiti’s official gazette of laws, in French), back to 1953. GLIN includes searchable English summaries of the laws. Haiti’s bilateral and multilateral agreements can be found in the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) and other online treaty sources from jurisdictions such as the U.S., Canada, and France (Base Pacte), Haiti has joined the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations (UN), and other international organizations, which means that the digital law collections of those organizations will cover Haiti. The UNHCR’s RefWorld and FAOLEX are particularly useful databases for Haitian law.

The LLMC Digital law library collection, compiled by the Haiti Legal Patrimony Project that I mentioned in a previous post, also provides useful resources. While LLMC Digital is a fee-based database, the Haiti digitized law content (anticipated to be about 800 titles when completed) is available for free to Haitian libraries and to the whole world. Universal access will enhance global knowledge of Haiti and its legal system. The LLMC Digital content is organized by constitutional, legislative, executive, judicial, and miscellaneous categories, the latter including treatises, periodicals, and documents on Haitian law, and sources on U.S.-Haiti relations.

About 600 items in the LLMC Haiti Legal Patrimony Collection are available at no-fee via the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) platform. The dLOC, of which LLMC is a member, has a separate Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative (PIHI). For more information, check the LLMC Newsletter (issues 46 & 47), Michigan Library Lends Documents to the Haiti Project, and the Haiti Legal Patrimony Project (Center for Research Libraries (CRL)). The non-profit Centre de Recherche et d’Information Juridique has selected primary and secondary Haitian law sources in its Bibliothèque virtuelle du droit haïtien. Another resource with selective content is the Centro de Estudios de Justicia de las Américas which includes the 1987 Constitution of Haiti, its criminal procedure code, and a few criminal justice related titles. The Embassy of Haiti in Washington, D.C. includes key reference documents at its website. Gallica and AMICUS (described below) also contain Haitian legal materials in electronic format.

The databases above are great for immediate gratification (or frustration). Alternatively, if your library doesn’t own the print title needed or if you don’t find them in the above databases, you can identify other library holdings of Haitian legal materials in print and electronic format by checking catalogs such as Open WorldCat, AMICUS (choose “entire AMICUS database” to search through all Canadian library collections, including the e-content), CCfr (Catalogue collectif de France), Gallica (the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital collection), and COPAC (British and Irish university libraries). You can search the following Canadian catalogs in French for Haitian law (keywords: Haïti droit):

• Université d’Ottawa: http://orbis.uottawa.ca/search*frc/X

• Université de Montréal : http://www.bib.umontreal.ca/Atrium

• Université du Québec à Montréal : http://virtuose.uqam.ca/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=UQAM

• Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec : http://iris.banq.qc.ca/iris.aspx

• Catalogue des Bibliothèques du Québec : http://cbq.banq.qc.ca/cbq/f?p=104:30:0::NO

As well, the Law Library of Congress’ Global Legal Information Catalog helps you find Haitian legal materials hidden in multi-national collections of law.

Checking catalogs (and research guides) will also give you an idea of the libraries that have strong collections on Haitian law and might have specialists with expertise who can help you or your patrons with questions. Libraries with notable print Haitian law collections include the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Florida. You might also consult other Florida libraries, libraries in francophone jurisdictions, and the libraries that contributed to the LLMC Haiti Project.

Authors, libraries, research institutes, organizations, agencies, and other key “people” resources concerned with Haitian legal issues such as the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Haitian Lawyers Association may also help. You can also contact library organizations such as the Caribbean Association of Law Libraries (CARALL) and the Association of Caribbean, University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL). Do not forget area studies and documents librarians. Finally, consider posting to CARALL-TALK, INT-LAW, or other listservs which might have document and legal information specialists who can help you help researchers locate Haitian law.

After the 2010 earthquake destroyed Haiti’s law libraries, the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC), a non-profit cooperative of libraries, spearheaded the Haiti Legal Patrimony Project. 13 U.K., U.S., and German libraries contributed unique materials from their collections to help rebuild a collection of Haitian law online via the LLMC Digital database. Many of the 700+ titles on the master list (initially compiled from Law Library of Congress and Columbia University Law Library bibliographic data) have been digitized. The online collection comprises constitutions, statutes, codes, periodicals, and legal treatises. The Haiti Project is one of many digital law library initiatives. Law librarians are individually, and in cooperation with other libraries, research institutions, non-profits, and commercial publishers, selecting and publishing law content online. As LLMC’s project overview states, “What we law librarians currently do best is build digital law libraries.”

Law Library Digitization Initiatives

Individual law libraries are preserving unique or special collections of materials in digital format and making them freely and publicly accessible. Cornell Law Library’s Liberian Law and Donovan Nuremberg Trials collections are excellent examples. Selected libraries are digitizing in-copyright, orphan works. For others, check Pathways to Old Legal Journals and here. Law libraries are also partnering with research institutions and other libraries to digitize legal materials. One major project is the Hathi Trust Digital Library which includes law-related government documents and monographs. The Max-Planck Institute for European Legal History’s virtual reading room features 19th century periodicals such as the Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, dissertations, and texts, plus a collection of German, Austrian, and Swiss books on private law and civil procedure. 

Consortia and groups such as NELLCO and the Northeast Foreign Law Librarians Cooperative Group are collaborating on plans to digitize foreign law. LLMC is digitizing materials from the Common Law Abroad collection. Potential candidates for future digitization include the following LLMC microfiche collections: Canon Law; Civil Law: France; Civil Law: Italy, Spain, Portugal; Civil Law: Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

Other Library & Research Initiatives

National library digitization projects often include law-related materials. For instance, the Bibliothèque National de France created GALLICA, which collects ebooks on the history of French law and justice. A blog post titled "Faire justice, à travers Gallica" discusses the collection. The National Digital Library of South Korea will likely include law-related titles too.

Pixelegis (Spain) has over 800 19th century legal titles. Ius Lusitaniae - Fontes Históricas do Direito Português  contains over 17,000 Portuguese legal historical texts. The Biblioteca Jurídica Virtual (Mexico) has books, documents, articles, and journals such as Cuestiones Constitucionales and the Anuario Mexicano de Historia del Derecho. There are also the Portal Iberoamericano de Historia de Derecho (PIHD) and ViFa Recht (Virtual Law Library, Germany).

Early Dutch Books Online (EBDO) includes a few law titles at its initial launch. (HT Otto Vervaart, Rechtsgeschiednis Blog). The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes in Spain includes constitutional documents, articles, and books, as well as Constituciones Hispanamericanas. Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Chadwyck-Healey’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) also include law-related materials.

Partnering with Commercial Publishers

Librarians have partnered with publishers and Google to suggest and select content, and to lend or donate print volumes, for new digital law library collections. Several have also created publicly accessible e-law collections themselves. For example, the British Library recently announced a partnership with Google to digitize 250,000 books covering 1700-1870 – “from the French Revolution to the end of slavery.”

W.S. Hein has been one of the leaders in publishing historical legal treatises via HeinOnline with the Legal Classics Library, the World Trials Library, World Constitutions Illustrated, and the recently released, History of International Law Library. Hein can potentially digitize titles in the Association of American Law School’s A.A.L.S. Law Books Recommended for Libraries. Gale/Cengage publishes The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926, Trials, and is digitizing its archival collections of primary law. JSTOR, which is considering adding more legal periodicals to its database, has partnered with major university presses to enlarge its collection of academic ebooks. Law librarians have been helping behind the scenes to create some of these digital collections.

Googlization of Law

Looming large at the forefront of digitization is Google. Libraries worldwide are providing books for Google’s digitization projects, and some of the books are coming from law library collections. Thus, Google Books and Google Scholar are becoming useful tools for discovering legal materials. Researchers looking for American law increasingly use Google Scholar in particular as a starting point for their research. However, the breadth and depth of Google’s law content are not clear. 

The “Googlization” of legal materials is not deterring other actors from building e-law collections. The Internet Archive also has ebooks and etexts. Researchers can use its Open Library interface to locate books digitized books by the Internet Archive itself, libraries, and other online ebook collections.

Linking Initiatives

With all the digitization initiatives in progress, several efforts have been made to provide one interface to search them all. And at least one librarian, Dr. Klaus Graf, is attempting to link to them all. The German ZVDD-Portal includes over 500,000 digitized titles, many of them law-related, published from the 15th century to present. The Europeana portal provides a portal to digital collections in Europe (more than 15 million items from about 1500 libraries including a few legal sources such as documents from the Allied Control Council for Germany). Unesco’s World Digital Library project has very little law-related content so far, but looks promising. December 2010 saw the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) project initiative. Harvard’s John Palfrey calls the DPLA a way to ensure interoperability between diverse digitization projects and to link data and efforts. 

Our Shared Digital Future

The DPLA and myriad other digitization initiatives, including the ones mentioned above, are examples of the variety of bottom-up, “smart”, pathways to the future Bob Berring discussed at Harvard’s The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? conference on June 16th. According to Berring, “chaotic development” can work well, especially in times of rapid change. The online law library collections we’re building and partnering to build may be scattered initiatives, but we are progressing lock-step, in tandem, towards a shared digital future of improved access to legal information.

Users sometimes want to find law journal articles on a particular subject. Other users know the title of the article they need, but they don’t know what law journal published the article. And sometimes users want to find all the articles an author has published, when the author has published articles in many journals and even in a variety of languages. They can consult standard journal indexes, but other, nontraditional indexes such as the OPACs and databases described below can be useful for more comprehensive and/or up-to-date searches.

The Peace Palace Library at the Hague, the Netherlands, has made its catalog available online. The library has a rich collection of materials in multiple languages on international law and international relations, but the catalog includes journal articles on comparative constitutional law and other topics as well. Users can sign up to receive weekly e-alerts of new journal articles on topics of interest. The Peace Palace Library won the 2005 IALL Website Award. The International Association of Law Libraries noted that the Peace Palace Library “offers value-added service to its users with up-to-date, customizable alerts based on a very broad international law collection, and is aimed at both law librarians and end users."

Law libraries for several international agencies have catalogs which index journal content. The United Nations libraries in New York and Geneva both have catalogs that enable searches limited by journal article type: Dag Hammarskjöld Library’s UNBISNET and UNOG Catalog. The Vienna-based UNCITRAL has a Geneva-based catalog (and bibliography) that includes journal articles on international trade law topics in all languages, but mostly in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. The JOLIS library catalog indexes the journal articles in the collections of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund (IMF) law libraries. WIPO’s library catalog indexes articles from the European Intellectual Property Review, Managing Intellectual Property, International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), the Journal of World Intellectual Property, etc. Other catalogs in the UN library system similarly include law journal articles. As for other IGO libraries, users can find articles on European Union law in the European Commission Libraries Catalogue, ECLAS. The European Court of Human Rights also makes its library catalog available online, and the catalog indexes individual law journal articles by author, title, subject and keywords. 

Click on image to enlarge.

Major research libraries also have enhanced catalogs. The Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law’s OPAC includes articles from 1996 to date. Its holdings (and those of the Max Planck Institutes for international and foreign private law, criminal law, and social law) are searchable via the Max Planck Virtual Library. The GVK Union Catalogue includes article holdings for over 400 libraries participating in the Common Library Network (GBV) in seven German Länder (Northern Germany). The BVB catalog searches over 100 Bavarian libraries. The Bavarian State Library has an articles e-alert service. I subscribe to e-alerts on European legal history. The form for subscribing is here. Users can search the Baden-Württemberg SWB Online-Katalog (Southwest German libraries) for German-language law journal articles or “Aufsätze.” The Western Switzerland libraries’ RERO union catalog indexes articles in German, French, English, and Italian from over 170 law journals. This includes journal holdings of the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne.

Besides these unique library catalogs, selected online bibliographies and databases index law journal articles. The SSRN Legal Scholarship Network is increasingly adding more foreign law journal article abstracts. Google Scholar includes some full texts, but as yet it does not provide broad coverage for foreign-language legal periodicals. Melbourne Law School’s Asian Law Online is the “first and only online bibliographic database of Asian law materials in the world…[o]ffered to the public as a free service to assist students, scholars and practitioners of Asian legal systems.” It has citations to English-language articles for China, Japan, South Korea, and other jurisdictions.

There are also the Quebec Bar Association’s library catalog (French and English), Dialnet (Spain; not exclusively a law database), Index to Legal Periodicals in Israel (Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law Library; index to law-related articles in Hebrew and in English in Israeli periodicals from 1970 to present; to access, choose English-language interface, then drop-down the menu to selected the ILPI), Dottrina Giuridica (DoGI) (DEMO version; limited searching of Italian legal periodical literature). The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes and includes full texts of over 100 law-related scholarly e-journals. Some resources are very specialized. For instance, Aberystwyth University has created a Bibliography of British and Irish Legal History (1977-2006). And some journals make their tables of contents available at their websites. Journal ToCs are also compiled in databases such as Washington & Lee’s Current Law Journal Content (covers English-language journals from 2005-2011; slated to cease after May 15, 2011) and New York University’s European Integration Current Contents. 

Most of these search tools do not clearly indicate how far back indexing of journal articles go. Frequency of updating varies. The different languages, varied interfaces, and unfamiliar search mechanisms might confuse users, while some search mechanisms do not permit more useful searches for combined terms. The catalogs may be unavailable for maintenance at different times based on their geographic locations. However, these indexes sometimes are more current than the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, and sometimes cover journals not indexed by the IFLP and other subscription databases and print law journal indexes. As of the date of this post, the publishers of these databases have made them available for free on the web. And the databases enable discovery of legal scholarship outside one’s national borders. Users may find these databases helpful for cite-checking, for generating more complete resource lists, for identifying the international influence of law faculties, and for a myriad other purposes.

Users may have difficulty integrating these free resources into their searches for law journal articles on their specific research topics. Simple links will not do. Researchers cannot now use a single search to find resources indexed by all of these tools. I don’t think that resource discovery services, like EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), Serials Solutions Summon, OCLC WorldCat Local, ExLibris Primo Central, are integrating into their databases these freely-accessible journal indexes and bibliographies. The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog does provide for cross-searching of library catalogs worldwide, but does not enable searchers to limit searches to journal articles as far as I can tell. Enhanced catalogs and databases are here, providing users with improved journal article search experiences today. Librarians have the challenge of helping researchers find, and determine when and whether to use these tools. 

Professor Joseph Weiler, Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law, recently posted an entry on his blog about a criminal defamation charge lodged against him in France for publishing a negative book review. [See also Libel Accusation from a Book Review on Slaw] That post got me thinking about how one would go about finding a criminal procedure code of a foreign country. It’s good to know in case someone charges me with a crime because of any of the book reviews I’ve written.

Image from The Life of Emile Zola

Discovery Tools

To find a foreign code of criminal procedure, first you need to identify the title of the code. With the title, you can search for full texts on the Internet or libraries who own the codes in catalogs. Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law Guide, a continually-updated subscription database, lists titles and sources of official texts of criminal procedure codes and major related legislation in the vernacular for over 170 jurisdictions. The FLG also includes English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations, if available, and links to full texts on the web. Here’s an excerpt from the FLG entry for France, for example:

Code de procedure pénal. Loi 93-2 of 14 Jan 1993 in Journal officiel 5 Jan 1993 implements, for the code of criminal procedure, a great range of reforms and amendments made by Loi 92-1,336 of 16 Dec 1992 in Journal officiel 23 Jan 1992…Official text of the code and of the relevant secondary legislation (Décrets or Décrets en Conseil d’État and Arrêtés), when it exists, is on LegiFrance at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/. Current text, consolidated texts to date, in English and Spanish translations also on the LegiFrance database at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/…Criminal procedure code amended by Loi 291 of 5 Mar 2007 in Journal officiel 2007 pg. 4,206. These amendments liberalized procedures and conditions for detention and during the investigative phase and also strengthen the adversarial aspects in the preliminary stages of criminal procedure.

Free resources that similarly list sources of criminal procedure codes include Globalex and GLIN. Globalex is a collection legal research guides for over 100 countries edited by Mirela Roznovschi at New York University Law Library. Most of the guides include sections on major codes in English translation. The aim is to update the guides at least once a year. The Law Library of Congress’ Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) indexes legislation worldwide, with a special focus on Latin American countries. You can also do no-cost searches for library holdings of criminal procedure codes in public catalogs such as WorldCat.org, AMICUS (Canada), COPAC (UK union catalog), and the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, all national catalogs worldwide, electronic full texts/eBooks, book trade, including second-hand, used books), 

Full Texts

Criminal procedure codes can be published as separate monographs, as parts of foreign official gazettes of law (see Government Gazettes Online), as appendices to books, and in legal databases or country law portals. Ministry of justice websites sometimes include such codes. Sometimes journal articles include useful excerpts. Below I list some major compilations of full text sources of criminal procedure codes. Note that some of these are unofficial, non-authoritative sources, and they may not include the most current version of a criminal procedure code or law:

American Series of Foreign Penal Codes (F.B. Rothman/W.S. Hein print series) includes English translations of the criminal procedure codes for China, France, Germany, Israel, and Turkey.

Buffalo Criminal Law Center (BCLC): Criminal Law Resources on the Internet, which the law center last updated in 2002, includes materials for Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Tunisia.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) International Humanitarian Law (IHL): National Implementation Database lists over 170 jurisdictions under “Implementing Laws & Regulations – by State.” Users can search for documents by keyword. 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) Legal Tools Database: once you accept the Terms and Conditions of Use, you can search the National Implementing Legislation Database by keyword or browse by States. For example, you can find Mexico’s Código Federal de Procedimientos Penales (2009). Note that even though the database lists over 100 countries, it does not have criminal procedure codes in full text for all those countries.

Legislationline (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR)) includes the criminal procedure codes of about 30 European countries in English translation. It also includes legislation on police, prisons, the right to a fair trial, and the death penalty.

Lexadin (The World Law Guide) covers extensive legislation, including criminal procedure codes, from over 200 countries.

Sammlung ausländischer Strafgesetzbücher in deutscher Übersetzung = Collection of Foreign Criminal Laws in German Translation (Max-Planck Institute for 

Foreign and International Criminal Law) lists information about ordering criminal procedure codes for Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Jurisdictions looking to reform their criminal procedures might also want to see the Model Codes of Post-Conflict Criminal Justice: Model Code of Criminal Procedure (v.2)(United States Institute of Peace (USIP)).

In India, a woman may marry a goat. In Canada, it’s illegal to board a plane while it’s in flight. In Sweden, it’s illegal to buy sex, but okay to sell it. In France, it’s illegal to name a pig Napoleon. Dueling is legal in Uruguay – provided both parties are registered blood donors. Pillows are considered “passive” weapons under German law. Several countries have laws against kissing in public. Some laws make you laugh out loud, some make you shake your head in wonder, and some are just puzzlers. Could something have been lost in translation? Were these really laws? If so, are they still in force? Why were they enacted?

Simon Fodden’s post about New York City’s “Chocolate Library” ban got me thinking about similar laws and regulations in foreign countries. Finding fun, “silly”, or odd foreign laws is hard. These laws often come to light in newspaper stories, and sometimes in radio broadcasts and podcasts. Sometimes legislatures bring the laws to light when they make systematic efforts to root out outdated, antiquated laws (“Corrections Day”, “Fix-It Day”, “Common Sense Day”).

What are the typical subjects of these laws? Animals, marriage, attire (or lack thereof), sex, drinking, smoking, the body? And are older laws more likely to be funny or unusual than newer ones? Are countries with unique geography, history, culture, religion more likely to have these types of laws? I found no good way to predict. 

Who would have thought of the opera as harmful? Well, for seven years (from 2001 to 2008), Turkmenistan banned Turkmen from attending the opera and circus. The legislature considered these forms of entertainment suitable only for foreigners and ethnic Russians (Global Legal Monitor).

Typical sources for funny foreign laws usually do not include citations, so verifying them is difficult. It’s LOL, but was it really law? The sources usually give insufficient information – no specific jurisdiction (national/federal, state/province, city), type of legislation, date. The sources rarely say if the legislation is still in force. Some of the sources themselves look pretty wacky or vanity-published. It’s all fun and games…until you have to go hunt down the actual law.

Below are some resources for identifying funny, silly, stupid, crazy, strange, and other unusual laws around the world. A few include legal citations. Don’t forget to look at the Global Legal Monitor, JURISTNews, and general news sources. Forget that the laws listed are mostly not sourced, and enjoy! By the way, I did not verify any of these alleged laws.

Nathan Belofsky, The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities: Pizza Police, Illicit Fishbowls, and Other Anomalies That Make Us All Unsuspecting Criminals ( Perigee/Penguin Group, 2010) (gives citations for some of the laws)

Fenton S. Bresler & Nicola Jennings, Beastly Law (David & Charles, 1986) (A Graham Tarrant Book)

Fuller Buhl, Loony Sex Laws Throughout the World: An Outlandish Collection of Rib Tickling Ordinances, Statutes and Decrees of Interest to All Law Abiding Citizens (Booksurge Llc/CreateSpace, 2010)

Ross Clark, How to Label a Goat: The Silly Rules and Regulations That Are Strangling Britain (Harriman House, 2006)

Lance S. Davidson, Ludicrous Laws & Mindless Misdemeanors: The Silliest Lawsuits and Unruliest Rulings of All Times (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998) (includes citations)

• In Arizona, first cousins cannot marry…unless they are over sixty-five. But they still may have children (p. 107)

Dumb, Crazy or Stupid Laws Around the World (Duhaime: Bringing Legal Information to the World; includes citations)(see their “Law Fun” site generally for crazy English laws)

Dumb Laws (occasionally supplies references, usually to books about strange laws; website mentioned in ABA Journal, March 1999, at 74)

• It is illegal to wear hot pink pants after midday Sunday in Australia

Tom Ginsburg, “Constitutional Oddities” (University of Chicago Law School, August 13, 2010 lecture on comparative constitutions)

• The Swedish constitution protects the right of reindeer-herding
• Many constitutions protect the right to leisure 
• 15% of the Prussian Constitution of 1871 concerns the telegraph system
• Under the Chilean Constitution of 1822, the chief executive cannot get married or become a godfather without the consent of Congress

“Hunting For Silly Statutes and Loony Laws,” San Antonio Express-News, July 20,1997, at A19

Dick Hyman, The Columbus Chicken Statute and More Bonehead Legislation (Stephen Greene Press, 1985) (has a section on “Strange, Zany, and Archaic Laws of Countries Around the World” at pages 85-117, but no citations)

• A pig may travel on English railroads if accompanied by a passenger and a ticket (p.89)
• In Bermuda, public profanity is prohibited (p.99)
• Mexico prohibits under-balcony serenades of more than one hour (p.109)
• Section 122 of New Zealand’s Crime Act of 1908 made it illegal to write a letter to a pirate (p.110)

Jeff Koon & Andy Powell. You May Not Tie an Alligator to a Fire Hydrant: 101 Real Dumb Laws (The Free Press, 2002) (includes citations)

• In Schaumburg, Illinois, it is illegal to fly a kite (p.107)

And from the Simon & Schuster, 2006 ed.:

• In England, it is illegal for a lady to eat chocolates on a public conveyance
• In France, no pig may be addressed as Napoleon by its owner (note that there is a website which contends that France never enacted any such law)
• In Scotland, it is illegal to be drunk in possession of a cow
• In Thailand, it is illegal to leave your house if you are not wearing underwear

Legal Grounds (FindLaw Legal Humor Blog)

Legal Humour News (“odd or amusing ‘law-related’ news stories” by Canada-based Daniel & Marcel Strigberger)

Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts, Wacky Laws, Weird Decisions & Strange Statutes (Main Street, 2004)

• In Canada, it is illegal to board a plane while it is in flight (p.23)
• In Kentucky, “[n]o female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway…unless she is escorted by at least two officers or unless she be armed with a club” (p.34)

Kathi Linz & Tony Griego, Chickens May Not Cross the Road and Other Crazy (but True) Laws (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

Nigel Napier-Andrews, This Is the Law?: A Selection of Silly Laws from Around the World (Doubleday, 1976)

Joanne O'Sullivan, Book of Legal Stuff: Wacky Laws, Weird Decisions, & Strange Statutes  (Imagine Pub. Inc, 2010)

Odd Animal Laws, Odd Culture (AnimalBlawg, December 13, 2010)(includes some citations and links to sources)

• In India, it is illegal to maim or kill an animal worth more than 10 Rupees (22 cents)
• It is illegal to give alcohol to a moose in Fairbanks, Alaska (or keep alligators in bathtubs)

Robert Wayne Pelton, Loony Laws That You Never Knew You Were Breaking (Walker & Co., 1990)(has chapter on “Laughable Laws in Foreign Places” at pages 109-119; detailed descriptions, but no citations)

Robert Wayne Pelton, Loony Sex Laws: That You Never Knew You Were Breaking (Walker & Co., 1992) (covers laws worldwide)

• In Peru, it is illegal for unmarried young men to have female alpacas live in their homes or apartments (p.20)

Barbara Seuling, It Is Illegal to Quack Like a Duck & Other Freaky Laws (Lodestar Books, 1988)(no citations)

• Claudius II banned marriage – he claimed that married men made poor soldiers (p.16)
• In 19th century England, the penalty for committing suicide was death (p.40)

Stupid Laws & Dumb State Laws: Outside the U.S. (lawsome.net)

Weird News (CNEWS)

• It is illegal for men to wear make-up in the Sudan, and for a woman to apply make-up to a man

Onika K. Williams, “The Suppression of a Saggin’ Expression: Exploring the “Saggy Pants” Style within a First Amendment Context,” 85 Ind. L.J. 1169 (2010) (one of several articles on laws against sagging/saggy/droopy pants; see e.g. Angelica M. Sinopole’s “No Saggy Pants” (2008))

“In June 2008, a film crew from a Japanese television program, World Travelog, ventured to Opa-Locka, Florida, to shoot footage regarding the city's ordinance banning saggy pants. The footage was for a segment on unusual laws in foreign countries…”

Twitter is a major source for breaking international legal news. It is often the first place where you can find links to recent court cases, new legislation, and international documents. Many blogs have Twitterfeeds so you’re immediately alerted to new posts. Twitter can inform you about legal developments worldwide and upcoming conferences. You can use Twitter to find out about new books, and new law library acquisitions. You can also track news from foreign sources and in foreign languages. Twitter is not only a great source for law, library, and technology news, it also gives you a way to network with colleagues, share ideas, and crowd source.

Of course, Twitter is only as good as the people in it, so if you don’t have a Twitter account, please join today, and let me know so I can follow you. Take part in the international legal information conversation on Twitter!

Selected FCIL Folks on Twitter

Legal Information Professionals, Libraries, Associations, Publishers

@atweber (Andrew Webber, Law Library of Congress)

@AustLawLibAssoc (Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA))

@biall_uk (British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL))

@bnaitax (BNA International)

@Chinese_Law (Laney Zhang, Law Library of Congress)

@clsellers (Christine Sellers, Law Library of Congress)

@cottinstef (Stephane Cottin; French law librarian)

@ecarr42 (Emily Carr, Law Library of Congress)

@HanibalGoitom (Law Library of Congress; Eritrea, African law)

@itspoppet (Clare Feikert, Law Library of Congress; UK law specialist)

@juriconnexion (French law databases/electronic resources)

@kiwi_in_dc (Kelly Buchanan, Law Library of Congress; NZ, Pacific law)

@KluwerLaw (Kluwer Law International)

@kurtcarroll (Law Library of Congress)

@law_book (New Law Books)

@LawLibCongress (Global Legal Monitor, In Custodia Legis blog, FCIL events)

@LyoLouisJacques (Foreign & International Law Librarian, Chicago)

@nats10mil (Mark Strattner, Law Library of Congress)

@peacepalace (international legal news, new library acquisitions, e-alerts)

@precisement (French law documentation specialist)

@rbharrington (Yale Law Library)

@sergiostone (Stanford Law Library)

@sioslo (Foreign and International Law Librarian, Texas)

@susankurtas (Librarian; United Nations documents)

@teresamiguel (Yale Law Library)

@thelawbod (Bodleian Law Library, Oxford)

@UNLibrary (United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library)

@yalelawlibrary (new foreign and international law books, databases, exhibits)

News & Articles

@BBCNews

@CFR_org (Council of Foreign Relations)

@CompPolicyInt (Competition Policy International)

@TheEconomist

@ForeignAffairs_

@FP (Foreign Policy magazine)

@FT (Financial Times)

@GdnLaw (The Guardian – law news, commentary, analysis)

@JURISTnews (foreign and international legal news)

@legalnewsfrance (daily French law news)

Foreign & International Law, Trade, Human Rights

@AmnestyOnline (Amnesty International)

@anticorruption (Transparency International)

@asilorg (American Society of International Law (ASIL))

@BIICL (British Institute of International and Comparative Law)

@bundesgericht (Bundesgerichtshof = Federal Court of Justice, Germany)

@BVerfG (Bundesverfassungsgericht = Federal Constitutional Court, Germany)

@ChathamHouse (Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA))

@clarinette02 (privacy law)

@CyndeeLaw (Canadian international trade & sales tax lawyer)

@dandrezner (Foreign Policy columnist; global politics, economics; international affairs)

@DanHarris (international lawyer, China law blogger)

@Donald_K_Anton (international lawyer, Australian National University)

@echrclfrance (European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Case-Law – France)

@ecre (European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE))

@EILBlog (Joshua Lenon, Everyday International Law)

@forcedmigration (Forced Migration Online (FMO))

@humanrights1st (Human Rights First)

@humanrightsblog (Human Rights in Ireland)

@hrwnews (Human Rights Watch)

@intltradelawyer (Martha Harrison, Canada)

@IntLawGrrls (women’s voices in international law, policy, practice)

@JusticePortal (Hague Justice Portal; international courts; peace, security)

@lsolum (Lawrence Solum, Legal Theory Blog; SSRN international law articles)

@netlex (French lawyer)

@NicolasJondet (UK, US, French digital copyright laws)

@opiniojuris (Opinio Juris international law blog)

@privacyint (Privacy International, London-based civil liberties group)

@slaw_dot_ca (Slaw.ca, Canadian law blog)

@STF_oficial (Supremo Tribunal Federal, Brazil)

@STJBrasil (Superior Tribunal de Justiça, Brazil)

@SusanneUre (Web Editor for Amnesty International, Canada; human rights)

@tradelawyer (John Boscariol, Canada, NAFTA/WTO/FTAs)

@UKHumanRightsB (UK Human Rights Blog)

@USIP (United States Institute of Peace; transitional justice; constitutions)

@WorldTradeLaw (WorldTradeLaw.net; international trade law, WTO)

@wrcommission (Women’s Refugee Commission; detention, asylum, families)

There are many other international law and international relations-related Twitterers. See for instance, Foreign Policy magazine’s Twitterati 100 (login required), a list of think tanks and international organizations on Twitter. Also, Justia has a list of international law “Legal Birds: Legal Professionals on Twitter.” For more general information about Twitter, check Lyonette Louis-Jacques, “Twitter for Law Librarians: Real Life Happens Between Blog Posts and E-Mails,” CALL Bulletin, No. 209, Fall 2008, at 38.

I love a good sports analogy, so I was thrilled to see Frank Houdek’s article in the July 2010 issue of the AALL Spectrum, “Introducing the AALL Hall of Fame.” Ooh, I thought, what would be the law librarian equivalent of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 300 wins, 500 home runs, 3,000 hits, and similar measurable longevity and career athletic achievement stats? And did any of my foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarian colleagues make the AALL Hall of Fame?

For the AALL Hall of Fame, “a nominee…must be or have been a member in good standing of AALL for 25 years or more, must have provided years of distinguished service to the Association over a substantial portion of his or her period of membership, and must have made significant contributions to the profession.” One can objectively measure longevity, but the other criteria are not so easily quantified.

However, the 2010 inaugural class of inductees gives us examples of the levels of career achievement to which future nominees should aspire. The AALL Hall of Fame automatically includes all winners of the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award. AALL established the following criteria for giving the Gallagher Award:

The Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award is presented to an individual who has completed or is nearing completion of an active professional career. The Award is given in recognition of a career of outstanding, extended and sustained service to law librarianship and to AALL. Honorees may be recognized for exceptional achievement in a particular area of law librarianship, for service to the Association that goes well beyond expectation, or for outstanding contributions to the professional literature. Nominees must be or at one time have been a member of the American Association of Law Libraries. The award may be given posthumously.

The 2010 AALL Hall of Fame inductees also include “other deserving deceased members or members who have been retired/removed from an active career for at least 10 to 15 years…[and] ”Pioneers”…because of the critical roles they played in the formation and early development of AALL.”

Several people who have made major contributions to the field of FCIL librarianship joined the inaugural class of 78 AALL Hall of Famers. They are:

• Sidney Hill, chair of the special committee to establish an index to foreign legal periodicals
• Blanka Kudej, 1993 Gallagher Award winner; key figure in the formation of the AALL FCIL Special Interest Section; author (with Simone-Marie Kleckner) of International Legal Bibliography; biography)
• Thomas H. Reynolds, 2004 Gallagher Award winner; former editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, and co-editor (with Arturo Flores) of the indispensable Foreign Law Guide; regular IALL meeting attendee
• William Roalfe, founding president of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL)
• Fred B. Rothman, original publisher of Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law: Basic Sources of Law and Legislation in Jurisdictions of the World looseleaf service
• Adolf Sprudzs 2000 Gallagher Award winner; two-term IALL president; treaty law research specialist; co-editor (with Igor Kavass) of Current Treaty Index, A Guide to United States Treaties in Force, UST Cumulative Index, Extradition Laws and Treaties of the United States; author of several books of legal abbreviations; biography; memorial; pictured above
• William Stern, former IALL president; instrumental in the creation of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
• Diana Vincent-Daviss (1994 Gallagher Award winner; inspiration behind the University of Toronto’s Women’s Human Rights Resources Database, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library , and Yale’s Project Diana: Human Rights Cases)

Looking at this list, I started thinking of what librarians could be in an international law librarians’ Hall of Fame. Such a Hall of Fame would provide worldwide recognition of FCIL librarian contributions to the profession. Some of the following criteria could be considered:

• Has the candidate received award(s) for distinguished or outstanding service from his or her national law library association (similar to baseball MVP awards)?
• Has the candidate received recognition of important contributions in and out of the field of FCIL librarianship?
• Has the candidate received recognition outside the country or international institution in which he or she works as an FCIL librarian or legal information professional?
• Have others written Festschriften or other memorials in honor of the candidate?
• Did the candidate edit or found major FCIL print or electronic publications?
• Has the candidate made significant contributions to FCIL literature?
• How many citations to the candidate’s work appear in scholarly literature?
• Did the candidate help create or take on leadership roles in major FCIL library organizations such as ALLA, CALL, IALL, NZALLA, OSALL, etc.?
• Did the candidate mentor of other FCIL librarians?
• Did the candidate readily share information and generously help other FCIL librarians?
• Did the candidate recruit others and show initiative in promoting FCIL librarianship?
• Did the candidate build an excellent FCIL collection? The extent of interlibrary loans from a collection might provide one measure of its excellence.

Potential nominees for an International Law Librarians Hall of Fame include in alphabetical order:

• Claire M. Germain, teacher of French law and legal bibliography; author of Germain’s Transnational Law Research; creator of French Law in Action (240+ video clips of interviews with French judges, lawyers, and professors); recipient of the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur medal, France's highest honor, for her efforts in bridging the American and French legal cultures; biography
• Jolande E. Goldberg, author of the Library of Congress foreign and international law classification schemes; recipient of the AALL Joseph L. Andrews Bibliographical Award; TS-SIS Long-Time Member Profile
• Igor I. Kavass, co-editor (with Adolf Sprudzs) of several U.S. treaty indexes; of KAV number fame (KAV Agreements); former editor of the International Journal of Legal Information (IJLI); co-editor (with Michael Blake) of United States Legislation on Foreign Relations and International Commerce which received the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit; author of Soviet Law in English Research Guide and Bibliography, 1970-1987  for which he received the Joseph L. Andrews Bibliographical Award.
• Prof. Dr. Holger Knudsen, former IALL President; chair IFLA Law Libraries Section; biography; video of him talking about the Library of the Max Planck
  Institute for Private Law in Hamburg, Germany
• Denis LeMay, 2003 recipient of the CALL/ACBD Denis Marshall Award for Excellence in Law Librarianship; author of La recherche documentaire en droit
• Dr. Rubens Medina, spearheaded the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) initiative
• Dietrich Pannier, subject of Festschrift für Dietrich Pannier zum 65 geburtstag am 24.Juni.2010 (Detlev Fischer and Marcus Obert eds.);co-author (with Helmut Dau) of Bibliographie juristischer Festschriften und Festschriftenbeiträge; videos of him giving a tour of the Library of the
  Bundesgerichtshof / Federal Court of Justice: outside, part 1, part 2, part 3.
• Ellen Schaffer, co-editor (with Randall Snyder) of Contemporary Practice in International Law; established the FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians to support attendance at the AALL annual meeting
• Dan Wade (oral history; first recipient and honoree of the Daniel L. Wade FCIL SIS Outstanding Service Award)
• Jules Winterton, two-term IALL president; editor of Information Sources in Law

Perhaps we could consider publishers such as William S. Hein, LLMC, and Oceana too. And libraries such as the Peace Palace Library and the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

Who do you think should be in an International Law Librarians Hall of Fame?

Almost two decades have passed since the United Nations began digitizing its documents. The UN started the Official Document System (ODS) as a pilot project in 1992, and officially launched it in 1993. Since then, there has been an explosion of UN documents and publications available in electronic format from a variety of sources, for free and via subscription. I recently checked the current status of UN documentation online, and here’s what I found. And what I expected to find, and didn’t. And some worrisome developments.

Discovery Tools

UNBISnet, the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library bibliographic information system, indexes e-versions of UN documents and is a great starting point for finding them as you can search by the traditional library catalog access points and UN document symbol. AccessUN is a subscription database that indexes UN documents, and includes external links to free e-versions. PDFs of some UN documents are Google-able, and Bing-able. You can sometimes find random volumes from sets such as the Yearbook of the International Law Commission digitized in Google Books.

Official Document System of the United Nations (ODS)

The ODS database includes formally-published UN parliamentary documents from 1993 to date, and all UN resolutions (from the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and Trusteeship Council) back to 1946 in PDF format. The majority of the documents can be found in six languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. For the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), documents related to its drafting history from 1946-1948, the “travaux préparatoires”, were added to the ODS.

The ODS database does not include UN publications and sales documents, the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS), press releases, public information materials, and “non-papers”. The ODS has multiple search interfaces and includes the ability to search by UN document symbol. It does not have browseability options, however. The UN’s “Documents” page provides that feature for selected UN bodies.

The UN aims to retrospectively digitize older documents. These documents are being scanned and added daily. The UN reached a major milestone in this effort in 2009 when it added Security Council documents from 1946-1992 to the ODS. However, S/AC and other subsidiary SC documents are not online. The UN now is prioritizing adding older General Assembly official records and meeting records. Pre-1993 Economic and Social Council documents (though selected documents of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, E/CN.4/Sub.2, seem to be in the ODS from 1949 to date) and the Trusteeship Council remain to be digitized.

I somehow expected the ODS to be a central hub for all digitized UN documents and publications, so there would be one place to check for them, but it is not. The ODS is easy to search, but it is not easy to link directly to documents therein from the library catalog.

United Nations Treaty Collection (UNTC)

The continually updated version of Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General (MTDSG, or formerly known as the “treaty bible”) is online at the UNTC website. In a May 5, 2010 statement, UN Legal Counsel Patricia O’Brien indicated that, as part of a “green” initiative, the paper version of the MTDSG will no longer be published. 2009 will be the last print edition. She also indicated that the Statement of Treaties and International Agreements Registered or Filed and Recorded with the Secretariat will only be available electronically after April 1, 2010.

The UNTC database includes all published volumes of the League of Nations Treaty Series (LNTS) and the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS). A 1998 article on the UNTC on the Internet (92 Am. J. Int’l L. 140) indicated an eight-year gap between registration of a treaty and publication in the UNTS. Per Ms. O’Brien, The UN is undertaking a major initiative to reduce this gap:

As announced last year, a great effort is being made to make the texts of treaties registered with the Secretariat electronically available on the Treaty Section’s website, shortly after their registration. While treaties are today published electronically in their authentic languages, the goal is also now to publish on line the translations in English and French, as soon as they are received from the UN translation services. This will ensure prompt electronic publication of individual treaties registered with the Secretariat. The Treaty Section is looking at ways to maximize the opportunities provided by new technology to reduce the number of copies of the UN Treaty Series printed on paper and to make them available on the Treaty Section’s website as early as possible. Let me recall that nearly all publications issued by the Office of Legal Affairs are available through HeinOnline, a well-known internet source to which many libraries are subscribed.

More rapid dissemination of treaties online via the United Nations Treaty Collection will benefit researchers. However, the UNTC database has still one major flaw. Users cannot retrieve treaties by citation. They have to perform a keyword or popular name search to get the full text of the treaty for which they already have a UNTS citation.

International Law Commission (ILC)

Most of the International Law Commission’s publications are digitized – its yearbooks, reports, and other documentation, from the very first session in 1949 to present. Some limited publication (“L”) documents are not available in electronic format. Searches for documents with the A/CN.4 UN document symbol in the ODS system indicate that the ODS system has not incorporated most of these documents, although they are available at the ILC’s website.

United Nations Office of Legal Affairs

The UN Office of Legal Affairs has digitized all of the UN’s legal publications back to the first volumes. These include all the proceedings of UN diplomatic conferences on law-related topics such as the Law of the Sea (1958, 1960, 1973-1982) and the Law of Treaties (1968-1969), the Reports of International Arbitral Awards (RIAA), and the various UN yearbooks. They are browseable and full text keyword searchable. These publications are also available online via the United Nations Audiovisual Library for International Law (AVL)(winner of the 2009 IALL Web Site Award) and via the Hein United Nations Law Collection subscription database.

Documents of UN Adjudicative Bodies

The UN’s AVL Library and “International Law” page link to the webpages of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR), the Permanent Court for International Justice (PCIJ), the United Nations Administrative Tribunal (UNAT), and other special courts. Most international tribunal publications, reports, documents, decisions are online. Notably, the decisions are not published online as they would look in official print reports.

Other UN Bodies

Publications and documents of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) are digitized, including meeting documents back to the first session in 1968 and the UNCITRALYearbook. The ODS database also includes these publications and documents (A/CN.9 document symbol). The Yearbook of the United Nations is online back to 1946. UN Disarmament Commission documents seems to go back to 1952. Apparently free e-versions of UN General Assembly Sixth Committee (Legal) documents pre-1993 are unavailable. Documents are also available via a new UN “Rule of Law” page.

United Nations Law Collection via HeinOnline

The Hein United Nations Law Collection enables users to immediately find full texts of treaties by UNTS citation, but is expensive to subscribe to. It also includes ICJ Reports, the RIAA, ILC, ICJ, and UNCITRAL yearbooks, ILC monographs (such as its Analytical Guide), the UN Juridical Yearbook, the UN Yearbook on Human Rights, UNCITRAL publications, official records of the UN Law of the Sea (LOS), Law of Treaties, and other diplomatic conferences, the United Nations Legislative Series, and multi-volume Documents of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (1945). The UNLC includes summary records for the 6th Committee (Legal) from 1946-1983. The UNLC duplicates many UN law publications available freely at UN websites. Its high annual subscription cost may make libraries wonder if the UNLC’s convenient get-treaty-by-UNTS-citation and other search features, and potential as a centralized, complete collection of UN legal materials, are worth the ongoing price.

What’s Missing?

As can be seen, digitized UN documents are all over. Researchers need a central resource for accessing all law-related UN documents and publications in electronic format. For the UN, that seems to be UNBISnet and not the ODS. I think it would be optimal for it to be both. Hein’s United Nations Law Collection could serve as that central hub, but it seems to be focused on UN publications and not documents. Also, for human rights research, digitization of pre-1993 ECOSOC documents is key and should be the next priority. And the Treaty Section should find a way to enable retrieving a treaty by UNTS citation via the UN Treaty Collection database. Because of the "green" initiative, print versions of the UNTS may disappear in the future. This prospect makes clear the paramount importance of enhancing and improving access to the online version of the UNTS.