Gallagher Law Library - UW School of Law

International Law of the Sea


Updated March 28, 2011.
Contributors: Kelly Aldrich, Lori Fossum, Jonathan Franklin, Ann Hemmens, Peggy Roebuck Jarrett, Cheryl Nyberg & Mary Whisner.

Introduction

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, databases, commercial online services, and 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 computers, and through your own computer.

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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Definitions

Foreign Law
The domestic law of a country other than your own.
 
Comparative Law
Study comparing the laws of two or more countries or two or more legal systems. This often includes the study of foreign law -- to find articles about foreign law, you may need to use the terms "comparative law" or "comparative method" in some indexes.
 
Public International Law
Rules dealing with the relations between two or more states (i.e., countries).
Rules dealing with some relations between states and persons (e.g., human rights)
Rules dealing with international organizations.
International economic law is the branch that deals with economic exchanges between states -- it may include monetary law, trade law, customs law.
Sources of international law
(1) international conventions (treaties)
(2) international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law
(3) the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations
(4) judicial decisions and teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations. Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice.
 
Private International Law (Conflict of Laws)
Rules dealing with relations among individuals that have an international element, typically rules concerning which country's laws apply to a particular dispute.
 
Soft Law
""Int'l law. Guidelines, policy declarations, or codes of conduct that set standards of conduct but are not legally binding." Black's Law Dictionary (9th ed. 2009).
 
Transnational Law
Rules governing certain disputes that are accepted regardless of national jurisdiction.
Some people promote this as a solution to some problems of international commercial law: contracting parties from different countries would both be bound by this transnational law, rather than by the law of either party's country.
Some writers refer to it as "the international law of lex mercatoria."
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Research Strategy

Preliminary Analysis

When you begin a project, ask yourself what you already know about the topic.

  • Is there a convention that applies?
  • Are there important cases?
  • What is the factual background?

Get an overview of the legal issues by reading a secondary source, such as a law review article or textbook.

Write a list of questions you want to answer. These can include factual questions as well as questions about the law. You should revisit this list as you go along.

Write a list of search terms you think will be useful in indexes and databases.

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