In July 1999, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began an official crackdown against the qigong cultivation group known as Falun Gong. Intended to quickly contain and eliminate what the PRC considers an evil or heretical cult (xiejiao), the suppression has instead created the longest sustained and, since the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989, most widely known human rights protest conducted in the PRC. The Falun Gong has received worldwide recognition and support while the crackdown continues to provoke harsh criticism against the PRC as new allegations of human rights violations arise.

Fragrant Harbor is the literal translation of the Chinese (pinyin Xiang Gang) for Hong Kong. Once a British colony and now a Special Administrative Region within the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong is also a global financial center. In June 2006 I had the privilege of conducting legal research as a visiting scholar at the Universities Service Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research topic was the influence of Hong Kong banking law on banking reform in the People's Republic of China. The following is a brief summary of my research and experience there.

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as “authoritative,” or “the official” word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital legal materials.

This article examines the contents of legal data and information on the Internet, with a special focus on the United States. It then evaluates the quality of the data, its impact on legal research and access to legal information, and addresses some issues raised by the digital medium, such as its reliability and permanent access concerns.

On January 1, 1988, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (the Convention) became effective in the United States. In general, the Convention (also referred to as the “Vienna Sales Convention,” the “Sales Convention,” the “CISG,” or the “UN Convention”) applies to contracts for the sale of goods between enterprises having their places of business in different countries, provided these countries have adopted the Convention. Freedom of contract, however, is a fundamental principle of the Convention, and the parties may opt out or modify the effects of its provisions.

Ireland is a small common law jurisdiction with a devolved legal system. These two factors combine to present a number of significant problems with regard to legal information sources:

• Devolution has promoted incremental and incidental change. There has been little systemic review and the law is a complex mix of amendment, addition and judicial review.

• Much of our legislation is reactive to social or political requirements.

• Until recently, sources of law have not been prioritized as an important national resource requiring investment in terms of review and access.

• Consolidation is infrequent and ineffective. Codification has only recently been considered.

• Current sources of modern Irish law have been substantially shaped by major historical events of the last three centuries. Today's Irish legal system and sources of contemporary law owe a lot to the pragmatic adoption and adaptation of the Westminster model and the English common law as it stood in the early twentieth century.

Law is changing, and with it, so too the systems of higher education and research. Over the past two decades, both have been undergoing a progressive process of transnationalisation. In the field of law, we are currently experiencing a proliferation of transnational law. In the systems of higher education and research, national structures of knowledge production are giving way to transnational institutional frameworks. Disciplinary boundaries are becoming more permeable. Today, legal scholars have to engage in an increasingly interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue on law. The aim of this piece is to provide an overview of that process and highlight several significant consequences this development might potentially hold for legal scholarship (and its media).

A decade after the inauguration of the national working group on the reform of criminal justice administration in Nigeria by the then Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Akin Olujinmi, SAN, Nigeria was presented with a newly signed law—Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), which was a direct response to the growing call for reforms that would address the plethora of problems confronting the administration of the criminal justice system in Nigeria. The 495-section law harmonized the existing two principal laws: the Criminal Procedure Act (CPA) and the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC), which hitherto governed the administration of criminal justice system across all Federal-owned Courts in Nigeria and the Courts within the Federal Capital Territory. Both CPA and CPC operated for many decades in Nigeria, but had many challenges, hence the urgency for the newcomer— ACJA.

Early last summer, I received a phone call from a law student in the litigation department of a large firm. He was working with a team on a case involving Czech law and, as part of a due diligence review, he was seeking an English translation of a piece of Czech legislation before the firm outsourced the bulk of the foreign legal research to Czech attorney-experts. Although it was easy to find the Czech legislation in Czech from a Czech government website, we could not find an English translation – official or otherwise – from any of our free or subscription-based databases. In the end, we relied on the flawed magic of Google Chrome's translate feature to “translate” the Czech legislation from the Czech government website into English. Despite my protestations and disclaimers, the student was thrilled with our results and insisted he had satisfied his due diligence duties. I hung up the phone and thought to myself: certainly, other American litigants have taken cases involving Czech law. What happens to the foreign law and legal analysis they obtain from their Czech attorney-experts? Assuming they submit some of it to our U.S. courts in the course of litigation, why can't we easily retrieve it?

Outside of the common law and civil law legal traditions, what is termed “Islamic law” forms one of the world's largest legal systems. There are more than one billion Muslims world-wide, and millions of those Muslims populate some of the world's richest trading zones. As of 2005, the Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.), comprised of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, was the United States' fifth largest trading partner.

On May 7, 1996 about 50 politicians were gathered together in the Parliament buildings in Cape Town negotiating the final details of South Africa's long-awaited democratic Constitution. There, too, were huddles of advisers, the long-suffering members of the administrative staff of the Constitutional Assembly, and members of the press who, generally absent from the process, had come to record the last moments. Behind the scenes the lay-out team was ready to put the last touches to the document and printers stood ready. Late that night, Cyril Ramaphosa, the Chairperson of the Constitutional Assembly, pleaded with the group in his characteristically ironic fashion: “I know it's late but just 20 minutes more, just 20 minutes – for our Constitution which is for the next 20 years, no, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. …”

The necessity to counteract corruption effectively has lead to an increased integration in judicial cooperation. This paper analyses the legal instruments adopted by the EU for fighting bribery in order to explore in detail existing interrelationships (i.e. differences and peculiarities) between European and Italian rules. The latter is of singular relevance particularly since 1992, when a widespread system of corruption had been discovered and a broad campaign to prevent corruption (“mani pulite“) had been undertaken which resulted in an important work of reform and brought existing rules up to date. Finally, Italy also played an active role at the European level: the 1997 Anti-Corruption Convention was adopted on the basis of an Italian proposal.

It is more than ten years since our new constitutional era dawned, and nearly ten years since the Constitutional Court was established. It is a fitting time then to reflect upon those first ten years: what have been the achievements, and what challenges remain for the future.