Currently, in the field of law as well as in other fields, societal developments, global interaction, and the increasing importance of technology in acquiring information resources have led to a rapid growth in the number of information sources. Furthermore, this growth has resulted in greater access to various sources. The great majority of the users of law-related information are legal academicians, law students, practicing lawyers, judges, and law consultants.

Shortly after the Meiji Restoration, under the influence of French law, a modern system of judicial administration was introduced in Japan. In 1871 the Ministry of Justice was created, and in 1872 several kinds of courts were established. However, in this period, the separation of powers had not yet been implemented. Therefore, it was not until 1875, the Eighth year of the era of Meiji, that Japan established a unified judicial system. In that year, for the first time, the judicial service was separated from the executive power and became independent, except that the Ministry of Justice retained responsibility for the functioning of the courts and the appointment of all court personnel, including judges. Under “Taishinin Sho-saibansho Shokusei Shōtei” (the Rules for the Organization of the Great Court of Judicature and Various Other Courts), one highest court “Taishin-in” (the Great Court of Judicature) and two types of inferior courts “Jōtō-saibansho and Fu-kensaibansho” (Higher Courts and Provincial Courts) were set up.

Since 2000, the Overseas Young Chinese Forum (OYCF) has awarded fellowships to American scholars, professionals, and doctoral students to teach short courses (three to eight weeks) in various fields, including law, at mainland Chinese universities. The award amounts range from $2,000 to $2,250 each and are meant to help pay travel, housing, and food costs. Fourteen awards were announced in mid-September 2008 for the 2008–09 academic year. I was lucky enough to win one: specifically, an OYCF-Gregory C. and Paula K. Chow Fellowship. I was to teach a seven-week, one-credit, upper-level elective course I proposed at Touro in spring 2007 and taught there in spring 2008 and 2009. From mid-May to early June 2009 I would be teaching foreign and international legal research at Wuhan University (Wuda) in central China.

One of the principal difficulties involved in the search for and use of Latin American publications, whether of an official, legal, economic, or general nature, is a haphazard identification of resources. This is not to say that those in need of Latin American information are less than resourceful in their investigation, but rather, that the very character of the literature they seek can be an elusive and sporadic one.

Land law in the West Bank is a mess of multi-layered legal regimes representing the complicated political history of the region. From this confusion flow some of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, such as the legitimacy of settlements and the legality of the security barrier. Whether one's concerns regarding the “Question of Palestine” are humanitarian or political, one fact is clear: the legal muddle of land law must be addressed.

But addressing the law first requires that we understand what that law is. This paper is not an investigation of the relative legitimacy under domestic or international law of each of the innumerable changes that were made to land law over the course of multiple legal regimes. Rather, it attempts to develop a purely descriptive answer to the seemingly straightforward question: what is the state of land law? To do this, I reconstruct the law of land as much as possible, from the still-operative, sedimentary layers of Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian and international law. In compiling this information, I hope to contribute to the efforts to fully understand where we are, so we can honestly assess where we may go from here.

This paper endeavours to dispel the logical conclusion which one may draw from the territorial nature of intellectual property rights and aims to show that the term “international intellectual property” may refer to the underlying products of intellect which give rise to rights granted internationally and which are, themselves, rights of a different sort.

To suggest that “there is no such thing as international intellectual property” may have been particularly reasonable prior to the end of the 19th century when there was little or no international obligations to protect intellectual property. Nowadays, however, the term “international intellectual property” is, at the very least, misunderstood, if not a clear term that has worked its way into the international legal lexicon with each international intellectual property agreement entered into since the beginning of the beginning of the international period.

It is quite plain that individual intellectual property rights such as copyright, patents, registered designs, and registered and unregistered trade mark rights are not international in scope or nature. It is also quite clear that intellectual property rights are territorial in nature as they are derived from national law and are governed exclusively within jurisdictions of such law. This principle is trite and was better observed in a World Intellectual Property Organization survey:

Each country determines, for its own territory and independently from any other country, what it is to be protected as intellectual property, who should benefit from such protection, for how long and how protection should be enforced.

Despite an apparently logical conclusion which one may draw from the territorial nature of intellectual property rights, the term “international intellectual property” may infer something more than this. Rather than confining the term to basic interpretation of the words which make the term, international intellectual property may refer to the underlying products of intellect which give rise to rights granted internationally and which are, themselves, rights of a different sort. While the standards of recognition and rights granted in relation to such products of intellect may vary between nations, the source of such products remains the same and it is such property which various international agreements seek to govern. It is given through developments in international intellectual property agreements, that a definition of the term may be implied, if not derived.

In this paper, I endeavour to establish that there is such thing as international intellectual property. As such, I will first establish that there is such a thing as „intellectual property,” despite arguments against the term. I will then move on to establish that there is such thing as international intellectual property, particularly in light of the developments in international intellectual property agreements.

On the eve of independence from European colonialism, Egypt, like most other developing countries, undertook the project of de-linking itself from colonial economy through initiating domestic industrialization. The economic project known as Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) was designed to liberate Egypt from raw commodity production, agricultural and mineral, servicing its previous colonial master Great Britain. The engine of development would be an expanding public sector with nationalization and socialism as leitmotif. In re-orienting the economy towards industrial production, it was hoped that the terms of trade with the international economy for Egypt would significantly improve, leading thereby to an improvement in the living standards of its population.

I propose to present a bird's eye view of the eventful life led by the famous Dutch jurist and statesman, Hugo Grotius. This I will do by discussing five of his portraits. These portraits have been made in five subsequent phases of his career. As a scholar who enjoyed a reputation that steadily expanded and that soon transcended the boundaries of the Dutch Republic, he went to the trouble of ordering famous artists, some of which were his friends, to immortalize him in copper or paint.

Legal databases in Austria go back to two different sources. In the public sector decisions of the three major (or high) courts, the Constitutional Court, the Administrative Court and the Supreme Court, have been stored in local databases. In the private sector the major legal publisher MANZ created a limited company in 1982, RDB (Rechtsdatenbank), with the participation of representatives of the legal profession and a big bank. The legal publisher ORAC and EDP professionals joined the team. Most of the journals in RDB are available in full text starting in 1978, but the Hohenecker-Index goes back to 1947.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the legal regulation of same sex couples in Spain and Catalonia. It will present how regulations have evolved, from legal disregard of same sex couples to the admission of same sex marriages by the Spanish Law in 2005, upheld by the Spanish Constitutional Court. Reference will be made to Catalan law, as it provided the first comprehensive regulation on same-sex cohabitation. And finally, it will highlight some challenges still faced by same sex couples, as regards assisted reproduction.

Protection and preservation of the marine environment is a topical issue around the Baltic Sea. Not least does it refer to vessel-source pollution. The Baltic Sea is a particularly vulnerable sea area with its narrow waters, often severe climatic conditions, and growing tanker traffic, especially to and from Russian ports at the far end of the Gulf of Finland. By way of example, oil transports in the Gulf of Finland tripled in 1995 to 2003, recently reaching to some 78 million tons a year.

This article examines the implications of globalization for legal practice, law students, and law school curricula. It opens with a review of the impact of globalization on the legal profession, together with an overview of the benefits and challenges that come with globalizing legal education. The article then examines the current state of U.S. legal education by identifying some of the schools that have expressed or demonstrated a commitment to providing a global legal education, and surveying the types of reforms that these schools have adopted in order to meet this objective. The article considers schools’ attitudes to and choice of reforms in light of the view that the typical new American lawyer is inadequately prepared to practice law in today's global legal order, in which he or she is increasingly likely to be called upon to resolve legal issues of a transnational nature. Preparing students to practice law in a globalized society, the article contends, should therefore be a key objective for American legal educators. With this goal in mind, the article examines the current program at Northwestern University School of Law as a case study and offers recommendations that can help to achieve the goal of globalizing legal education while responding to the needs and concerns of today's law students and future legal practitioners.

The law library is an essential service in the functioning of an academic library. Unlike other disciplines where the library is just one of a number of supporting overhead services provided to enable the researcher and student to do their work, the law library is like a laboratory, thus making it an essential service to legal research.

As a glance at his bibliography shows, Dr. Sipkov, as well as a law librarian, was a publicist in the original sense of the term — a scholar of public, in particular public international, law. It is therefore fitting that our comment deals with a basic issue that arises at the intersection of international law and librarianship. We would like to evoke the problem of defining and then finding the “material sources” of customary international law. That means understanding, then locating, the concrete, usually documentary, materials that must be used to confirm the existence of a state practice. The consistent, generalized, though not necessarily universal, practice of states forms the objective element of a customary rule. This basic problem of international legal research is not new, but as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations International Law Commission, it makes sense to examine it again. Developments over the last half century should help in understanding how we try currently to solve the difficulties and will do so in the future.

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

The effects of international law on the domestic legal order of the various countries of the world are manifold and so are the issues covered in this bibliography. In some countries, some international treaties or treaty provisions can be invoked before and applied by national judges. These are the so-called self-executing treaties or treaty provisions. Whether treaties are self-executing is a domestic legal question for national judges to decide on an ad hoc basis. In other countries, no treaty can be applied by a national judge unless it has been transformed into national legislation by an act of the national legislature. The concept of self-executing treaties has much less significance in these countries. This difference relates to two theories of international law known as monism and dualism. Under these theories, the international and domestic legal order are considered as one indivisible hierarchy or as two separate hierarchies respectively.

The title of this paper comes from the famous ‘Schuman Declaration’ of 1950, which signaled the placing of Franco-German production of coal and steel under a single High Authority. It is quite astonishing that from this humble beginning, evolved the European Union of today. The phrase takes on new relevance as the Treaty of Nice paves the way for the biggest single enlargement of the European Union. The current Treaty, completes the Intergovernmental Conference which began in February, 2000. The founding treaties, signed in Paris and Rome in 1951 and 1957 respectively, and the amending treaties, most notably the Treaty on European Union, (Maastricht), and the Treaty of Amsterdam, form the Constitution of the European Union. It is important to note that while the earlier treaties concentrated on economic integration, the later treaties have shifted towards political questions. Bibliographic references to the various treaties have become quite complicated because the Treaty of Amsterdam brought about a renumbering of the articles to both the Treaty on European Union (EU) and the Treaty establishing the European Community (EC).