2023 New Year Update From Washington, D.C.

A New Year Has Begun! And good legal information keeps on coming from the law librarians at the Law Library of Congress. Here are some notes from the latest releases:

January 9th, Congress.gov top 22:

“We are always working to incorporate your feedback into making Congress.gov an even better experience. One major request was one of the biggest items that the Congress.gov team worked on last year: the new Congress.gov API (application programming interface).”

January 12^th, Foreign Legal Gazette update:

“In fall 2022, the Law Library of Congress added foreign legal gazettes for the countries of Niger, New Caledonia, Suriname, Cabo Verde, and the Cook Islands.” “The Law Library legal gazette collection is one of the largest in the world.”

January 30^th, Congress.gov New Tip and Top:

“Earlier this month, Andrew took a look back at all of the great new features that were added to Congress.gov in 2022. In this release, we have added member remarks in the Congressional Record as a filter on member profile pages. If you access a member’s profile page, you can perform a search.”

February 1^st, feature: Celebrating Over 10,000 Foreign Legal Gazette Issues Now Online.

“Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Law Library of Congress has been collecting foreign official gazettes and maintains the largest collection of these sources in the entire world. The Law Library’s gazette collection contains current, historical, and subnational jurisdictions from most countries and in most languages.”

February 13^th, their post announced: Time to Retire the Congressional Record App. “The Congressional Record app will be retired on February 28, 2023.”

And on February 16^th, Michael Chalupovitsch posted an article in the Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor about Canada; Haiti: Canada Sanctions Haitian Elites for Ties to Organized Crime.

“The sanctions are being imposed under the authority of the Special Economic Measures (Haiti) Regulations and in accordance with the sanctions regime provided by the Special Economic Measures Act. These sanctions initially targeted former leaders of the Haitian Senate and were expanded to include prominent officials, including former Haitian president Michel Martelly.”

I was particularly interested in this article because I am on the board of the Haiti Democracy Project and am very concerned about the dire situation in Haiti. Our current project is to recruit and train women candidates to run in future elections.