Introduction-–General Approach
Updated March 5, 2002; MW.
- When you research international or foreign law, you will look for and use
different types of information: laws, cases, and regulations from national
bodies; practice guides or overviews of legal topics; scholarly discussions
of the law; news stories; policy studies.
- You will find this information in different types of sources (or formats):
books, periodicals, microfiche and microfilm, locally mounted databases,
commercial online services, Internet sites.
- And you will obtain those sources in different locations, using different
methods: at this library, at other libraries on campus, through interlibrary
loan, on library terminals, through your own computer, in the Computer Lab.
- What this means is that you may need to be creative and flexible in your research
and to plan ahead in order to gather the materials you need.
- Be prepared for the limitations of any library you use. You can expect your
county law library to have your state’s statutes, but it will not have
statutes for all the countries of the world. Even very large law libraries
cannot have deep collections for all jurisdictions. For example, the
Gallagher Law Library has very strong collections for China, Japan, and
Korea, but has very little for most Latin American countries.
- Use research guides to help you form a research strategy and find appropriate
sources.
- Use secondary sources to get an overview of a topic and to find citations to
other sources. Consider when you can and cannot compromise – e.g., do you
need the current text of a statute or would you be satisfied with a summary
that is a few years old?
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