Judicial Decisions in International Law - new online tutorial

Law PORT is a collection of free-to-use training resources, created by library staff at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Recently added is an online tutorial on Judicial decisions in international law. This aims to provide an introduction to the background of the international courts (e.g. ICJ, ICC, ECHR)  and the subsidiary role of judicial decisions in international law, as well as giving pointers on where to find decisions from a number of courts and how to access cases which are still in progress.

Worth a look if you're new to this area of law, or would like a refresher on where to find relevant case law. 

Advanced Introductions to Law - new ebooks

Titles within the Advanced Introductions series by Elgar Publishing aim to provide an overview of a particular subject, introducing the essential principles and providing insights which encourage readers to think critically. 

There are 12 titles in the series, with more planned in the coming months. Current titles are:

• Advanced Introduction to Comparative Constitutional Law - Mark Tushnet
• Advanced Introduction to Private Law - Jan M. Smits
• Advanced Introduction to International Sales Law - Clayton P. Gillette
• Advanced Introduction to International Environmental Law - Ellen Hey
• Advanced Introduction to International Intellectual Property - Susy Frankel and Daniel J. Gervais
• Advanced Introduction to the Law of International Organizations - Jan Klabbers
• Advanced Introduction to International Tax Law - Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
• Advanced Introduction to International Trade Law - Michael J. Trebilcock
• Advanced Introduction to Law and Development - Michael J. Trebilcock and Mariana Mota Prado
• Advanced Introduction to International Human Rights Law - Dinah L. Shelton
• Advanced Introduction to International Conflict and Security Law - Nigel D. White

Birkbeck staff and students can access the titles via the library catalogue, or by going directly to the Advanced Introductions web site.

New online resource - Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law

The Library has recently set up an online subscription to the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL).

The Encyclopedia contains peer-reviewed articles on every aspect of public international law and aims to reflect international law from a global perspective while taking into account regional perspectives. It is updated throughout the year by a worldwide team of over 800 academics and practitioners.

To find out more about how to use MPEPIL, please look at this YouTube video. 
To login to the Encyclopedia, please go to: 
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/elib/databases/law/mpepil 

Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals available via HeinOnline

Students and staff now have access to the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals via HeinOnline.
The Index is multilingual and provides information on articles and book reviews published in over 500 legal journals published worldwide.
Coverage encompasses public and private international law, comparative and foreign law, and the law of all jurisdictions other than the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia. 
The IFLP also analyses the content of about eighty individually published collections of legal essays, Festschriften, Mélanges, and congress reports each year.

There are nearly 300,000 index records, and there are links to over 34,000 full-text articles and book reviews via journals available in HeinOnline.

To access the index, login as usual. The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals can be found within the Subscribed Libraries list.

Access to LLMC Digital

LLMC Digital includes full text copies of historical legal material for the US and a wide selection of foreign jurisdictions, particularly within the Commonwealth. Some international legal material is also included. Content is being added all the time, and includes books, treaties, codes etc.

The latest country to be represented on LLMC is Haiti with historic versions of its constitution, individual Acts and documents on US/ Haiti relations available to read online.
 
Thanks to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Birkbeck staff and students have access to this resource. To login go to the LLMC Digital resource page on the Library web site.

GlobaLex

Published by the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU School of Law, GlobaLex aims to disseminate information on international, foreign and comparative law to help those researching and practising in these areas.

The site consists predominantly of  guides on how to find resources as well introductory level articles written by academics researching in the field.

To give you a flavour of the sorts of things covered, here are just a few resources listed under International Law:

• Research Guide on Indigenous Peoples International Law
• The Crisis in Darfur: Researching the Legal Issues
• International Trademark Law: The Madrid System

This site is certainly worth a look as a spring board into other, more specialised sources.

Flagging up international law collections

The Foreign Law Research (FLARE) project has been going for a number of years, but I've not mentioned it before and thought that it was about time that I did!
FLARE is a collaboration between a number of major academic law libraries and aims to improve the coverage and accessibility of foreign legal materials.

The FLARE web site includes links to guides on specific jurisdictions, details of holdings of Official Gazettes for European countries and a link to the FLARE Index to Treaties. This index provides details of over 1500 of the most significant multilateral treaties and gives details of where they can be found in print, with links to the online version where this is available.

Prior to FLARE, there was the FLAG (Foreign Law Guide) project. The FLAG gateway links through to details of the holdings of UK academic and national libraries in the areas of foreign, international & comparative law. So, if you need to know who holds court reports from Colombia or the legislation of Saudi Arabia this is the place to go.

The American Society of International Law - useful guide and database for researchers

The American Society of International Law produces, and updates on a 6-monthly basis, the excellent Guide to Electronic Resources for International Law. Chapter contents include human rights, the EU, international criminal law, private and public international law, intellectual property and the UN.
Within each chapter, the authors set out strategies on how to find international legal materials, as well as providing links to both primary and secondary material available online.

The Society, in collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, has also developed EISIL (the Electronic Information System for International Law), a searchable database with links to quality international law information on the Web. I've carried out a couple of searches and found some useful results, so if you're studying subjects with an international dimension I'd recommend giving this a go.