INTERNATIONAL LAW
W.B. Fisch
Some Websites for International Law
(last updated June 27, 2008)
These are some useful sources on the World-Wide Web
relating to international law and international law study (including law study
abroad). These are just some beginning suggestions -- like everything
else on this website, it is "under construction"!
Law Study Abroad
The American Bar Association's Section on Legal Education
has a page listing its approved "Foreign Summer
Programs", with links to other types of approved study abroad
programs. The National Jurist’s website
maintains a similar section on study abroad.
Careers in International Law
The University of Washington School of Law Library maintains a page
on Careers in
International Law, with links to important sites such as the ABA, The American Society
of International Law, the International Law Student Association and many
others, and well as a list of books on the subject.
Official U.S. Sites
The Office of the Legal Adviser in the
U.S. Department of State is a good starting place for current and historical
positions taken by the U.S. on matters of international law, including both
current news and the most recent editions (latest covering the year 2006) of
its Digest of United States Practice in International Law (both in hard copy
and on the OLA site), updates to which are published on a quarterly basis in
the American Journal of International Law; the 2007 edition of U.S. Treaties in
Force; and recent actions of the U.S. and other parties concerning treaties of
interest to the U.S. From the OLA site, of course, you can get to the DOS
home site.
Favorite Starting Places
There are many ways to start investigating web-based resources on international
law, the most obvious of which is a comprehensive collection of links and
documents organized topically. The following are my favorites, each with
a different style and emphasis but with substantially overlapping endpoints and
mutual references. Often I will use all or most of them to get the most
complete look at what is available.
- Cornell Law
School's Legal Information Institute (International Law)
provides a brief overview of the subject and has a comprehensive
collection of links to various international legal sources on the Web,
including materials on the law of the United States relating to
international law.
- The University of Chicago’s
D’Angelo
Law Library maintains a page of links to web resources on a wide range
of foreign and international law topics.
- And also, consider
- For comprehensive
treaty collections, see, for example, The Multilaterals
Project (Tufts
U., Fletcher School
of Diplomacy), which links to the texts and adoption history of a wide
variety of multilateral treaties on various subjects:
- on their main menu
click, for example, "human rights", which takes you to an extensive
list of treaties and conventions on human rights; from that list click,
for example, on the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights and
Biomedicine and get the full text of that convention (it is one of the
treaties mentioned in the 2000 Jessup International Moot Court
Competition)
- the main menu also
has a search engine which allows you to search all of the treaties in
their database for key words that you type in
- The United Nations homepage
- From which you can
click on “Main Bodies” and then on the home page of the International
Court of Justice, listing, among other links, recent actions taken
by or before the ICJ
- At the UN home page
you can click on "International Law" or "Human
Rights" to access UN databases on those subjects; for example, on
the "human rights" page you can link to the homepage of the UN
High Commission on Human Rights
- you can also click on
"International Law" and then "Treaties" to reach the
newly redesigned UN
Treaty Database -- you will need to register and subscribe for a fee
if you can't use an institutional subscription (the MU Law School
now has an institutional subscription, which can be accessed through any
law school computer)
Sites on International Courts and Tribunals
- The Project on International Courts and
Tribunals has a comprehensive page on the full range of international
tribunals, from the International Court of Justice to the nascent
International Criminal Court to the World Trade Organization to the
European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, and everything in
between. It has, among other things: current news; a "research
matrix" which provides essential information about existing
institutions (currently 18 and growing); a "synoptic chart" that
includes "aborted" tribunals as well as past, existing, proposed
and nascent ones by geographic scope and subject matter; recent decisions
of the most important courts and tribunals; and links to the web pages of
most judicial and quasi-judicial dispute-settling bodies.
Jessup International Moot Court
Competition
- The International Law Students' Association,
which is the sponsoring organization for the Jessup Competition, has a
home page with links to a number of other resources; the Jessup page has
the text of the current and a few past problems for the competition, rules
of the competition, etc.
Human Rights
· For home pages of a couple of the most
active and effective non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the field
of international human rights, see: Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch,
both of which have reports and advocacy statements on current events and links
to many other sources
· There are a couple of databases
specifically devoted to Human Rights matters that can be worth a look:
· University
of Minnesota Human Rights Library
· European Research Center on Migration
and Ethnic Relations , which focuses more on the social science perspective
than on the legal but contains a lot of interesting information