The Soviet passion for secrecy is by now proverbial. Anybody who has ever worked on a topic related to Soviet diplomacy has had occasion to bemoan the incompleteness and unreliability of the factual record. The situation smacks of rare irony when one remembers that the Soviet leadership first made a mark on the international scene by its vociferous advocacy of open diplomacy. In a dramatic gesture, the revolutionary directorate proceeded then to denounce the former tsarist regime and its bourgeois confederates for constantly dabbling in secret machinations aimed at deceiving the international community as well as their own people and to publish scores of confidential documents drawn from the tsarist archives to demonstrate the gross inequities of the imperialist system.

Considerable changes took place in Romanian law after the conclusion of the Second World War and the establishment of the Romanian Socialist Republic. Pre-war legislation was not abolished in toto. It was replaced gradually by new laws more suited to the new government programs.

During the early period of legislative change and reform, there was no option for systematic and codified modification of the existing law. Therefore, a greater than usual emphasis was placed on ministerial decrees, orders, instructions, and regulations. These, as well as the regulations and instructions of other government agencies, proliferated extensively. More recently, some of these temporary legislative methods either have been repealed or have become obsolete through passage of time.

The ensuing uncertainty of repealed statutes and other legislative provisions eventually led to the adoption of the following legal measures:

1. 1) Establishment of a consultative body, known as the Legislative Council;

2. 2) Creation of a register (or index) of legislation in force (for this purpose the entire legislation before 1973 was scanned and, as a result, 2300 laws and other legislative acts were cancelled and another 3000 were found to have lost significance);

3. 3) Establishment of a clear program of legislation, with fixed objectives for the areas of law requiring improvement and codification;

4. 4) Formulation of a set of rules (methodology) governing all legislative activity and dealing with the initiation and passage of legislation, legislative drafting, delegation of legislative power, public discussion of legislative projects, and other matters pertaining to the making of laws.

Comparative law has a long history, and it has long been a tradition among legal scholars to compare one legal system with others. Even in the days when Rome ruled the so-called “known world”, there were other legal systems which existed either with the Roman Empire, side-by-side with the Roman jus civilis, or outside the Empire in the German tribes, in the Parthian Empire, among the Celts, and so forth. Law is the element which regulates and harmonizes human activity, behavior, and endeavor within any ordered society, primitive or advanced, and few if any societies could exist for long without some sort of law and legal system. Law is therefore part of the culture, the daily life, behavior, civilization, and yes, even the history of a people and their civilization. Unless a civilization or folk-group is a carbon copy of another, then it is normal to expect differences in the manner in which rights are vindicated, differences resolved, and an orderly solution found for the conflicts in human life.

Academic legal literature in the USA is punctuated at regular intervals by discussions of the quality of legal research and writing tuition in the law schools. None of these discussions makes question of the place of such courses within the curriculum. The debate centers upon what should be taught, when, and by whom, and how effective such teaching may be. My first contact with such courses came during a period of work in the USA and when, on my return to the UK, I was required to set up a course in legal information studies, I turned to the UK literature for material on teaching legal research. The result of my search was a complete blank. Indeed, it is difficult to find discussion of any kind on such topics as curriculum planning and the interrelation of legal subjects in teaching programs. The structure of legal education in the UK has been the subject of government reports, but in the main these deal with mechanical and financial aspects—what the apprentice lawyer should learn—and how his professional ability may be enhanced by his education is barely touched upon. There is certainly nothing in the UK literature since the turn of the century on the methods of teaching legal research, nor any debate upon the desirability of teaching such a subject. Basic textbooks on legal bibliography exist, most of which offer guidance, at various levels of sophistication, as to how the novice may handle the literature of law, but it is apparent on examination that none of these are teaching texts, evolved and tested during the repetition of a course of instruction, as are many US texts. We possess nothing in print that might be compared with Price and Bitner's Effective Legal Research (to name just one such book), with its guidance on search strategies and evaluation of sources and facts. I decided to do some basic research and ask all the UK institutions teaching law courses leading to eventual professional qualification what, if anything, they offered by way of instruction in legal research techniques.

Rogelio Pérez Perdomo is a Professor of Law at the Central University of Venezuela and an active member of the Latin American Council of Law and Development. A longstanding student of the purposes and methods of legal education, he has also made a special point to acquire knowledge about legal education in Europe and the United States.

In this article Professor Pérez Perdomo discusses the inadequacies and shortcomings of the existing legal education programs in Latin America. He recognizes the growing awareness of such inadequacies on the part of many Latin American law teachers, and their dissatisfaction with the traditional systems and methods of law teaching. This dissatisfaction has generated many studies and discussions in the different Latin American countries, and it has also produced some changes and improvements. Professor Pérez Perdomo believes, however, that such changes fall significantly short of modern needs of adequate legal education. Concentrating on the situation in Venezuela, he compares it with current legal education innovations and developments in other Latin American countries, as well as in the major European countries and the United States.

Professor Pérez Perdomo clearly admits his preference for further reforms of the legal education methods and programs in Venezuela (and, presumably, in other countries of Latin America). He views, however, student unrests as an invalid reason for such reforms because improvements must emerge from substantive needs rather than the temporary considerations of political expediency. Reforms must proceed from an appreciation of the true role of law and the legal profession.

In a brief survey of the traditional and modern role of the law, especially its use as a vehicle for social and economic development, Professor Pérez Perdomo demonstrates the significance of their impact on legal education. Equally important, in his opinion, is the influence of foreign financial aid, e.g., the Ford Foundation, the International Legal Center, etc., which must have had a considerable impact on the emergence of new legal education trends. The effect of such influences has not yet been evaluated, but it is an important topic in any study of the effectiveness and desirability of international transfers of educational methods from one country to another. Thus, the United States legal education model encountered many difficulties in Latin America when the attempt was made to apply it there, and it can be used there only in a limited sense and in a significantly modified form.

Professor Pérez Perdomo notes the following trends of legal education reform in Latin America:

1. 1) The reorganization and “semestization” of law courses.

2. 2) The use of new teaching methods–tutorials, class discussions, working groups, and legal clinics–by various law schools in their efforts to enrich the content of their educational programs.

3. 3) The identification of the purposes and responsibilities of legal education in coordination with the general aims of law and the legal system.

Professor Pérez Perdomo recognizes that many of these aspirations for reform are seriously affected by such factual limitations as, for example, the unfavorable numerical ratio of students to law faculty, inadequate teaching abilities of the professors, poverty and the small size of libraries, and the encumbersome administrative organization and fiscal procedure of universities. Despite these difficulties, Professor Pérez Perdomo is confident that the reform efforts will prevail and that many salutory improvements will eventually become evident in Latin American legal education.

The attempt by the United States government to preserve competition and its benefits has produced a succession of legislation, popularly known as the antitrust laws, which began with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. This law prohibits combinations in restraint of trade and monopolization of trade. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 established a federal agency to enforce antitrust and outlawed “unfair” competition. The Clayton Act, passed in the same year and amended by the Robinson–Patman Act in 1936, forbids price discrimination, mergers, and other actions when judged destructive of competition.

These statutes have generated an enormous quantity of litigation and have stimulated a plethora of literature. The following article, written by an expert who teaches and writes in the. field of antitrust, describes the more important works on the subject which, taken together, could constitute a basic collection of antitrust literature for law libraries inside and outside the United Slates.

Italian administrative authorities are local, namely, communities and cities, intermediate, the provinces and regions, and central, the highest offices of public administration, such as the ministries and the presidency. Italian administrative courts are of two levels: the regional administrative courts at the lower, and the council of state at the final level. In addition, there are several administrative courts exercising jurisdiction over matters specially conferred on them by statute.

Copyright is a monopoly conferred upon authors or creators of literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works to produce, reproduce, adapt, or perform their works for a limited time. The Copyright Law, by conferring this monopoly upon authors and their assignees, provides an economic incentive “to those with the requisite ability to create intellectual property” and to “publishers, recording firms, and similar enterprises to package and distribute these intellectual creations to the general public.” Prior to the invention of the printing press the possibility of commercial gain from the production of intellectual property was severely limited by the drudgery involved in manual copying of manuscripts, which work was performed by slaves in ancient times and monks under a vow of obedience later. Private patrons and universities provided the only economic incentive to authors to produce intellectual property and the book trade was small. Although both law and literature existed in abundance in ancient and medieval Europe, Copyright Law was unknown.

This year the Italian Parliament celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its formation under the Republican Constitution of 1947, which went into effect on January 1st of the following year. Because of the parliamentary system established by the Constitution, the role of the Italian Parliament extends far beyond the law-making function.

The main campus of the University of Illinois, commonly known as the UI-UC campus, is located at the twin cities of Urbana-Champaign, about 135 miles south of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. The campuses of Chicago Circle and the Medical Center, both located in Chicago, are other components of the University of Illinois system. Many departments and colleges of the UI-UC campus, especially in the fields of science and technology, have outstanding reputations for research achievement. The University Library ranks first in size among state universities and third among all universities in the United States. Its total collection reaches approximately 5.5 million volumes.

The foreign attorney new to the field of US taxation is likely to find it an alien, frustrating terrain, crisscrossed by a forbidding network of vaguely interrelated statutory provisions. His initial reaction will undoubtedly be to seek out a competent text to guide him through the maze. But selecting the right text may prove a chore in itself. Some works assume an initial familiarity with the area which the attorney will lack; others may gloss over a particular point of interest or not address it at all; conversely, the work may narrowly focus on an aspect of taxation with which the attorney has little concern.

Copyright statutes have traditionally dealt primarily with questions related to reproduction of writings by the printing press. Since the previous general revision of United States copyright law in 1909, a variety of technological advances such as the phonograph, the tape recorder, radio, television, the photocopier, and the computer have generated other copyright issues. The need for a new law which would resolve these questions led to five years of Congressionally-funded study of copyright in the 1950's. Thirty-four separate reports came out of this research. In the 1960's the Register of Copyrights, in consultation with copyright attorneys and experts, drafted a general revision bill. The Copyright Office modified this draft and had it introduced in Congress in 1965. Although it did not pass at that time, it became the basis for copyright revisions introduced in subsequent sessions of Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a copyright bill in 1967 but the Senate did not act on the proposal. In 1974 the Senate passed a copyright bill but it failed in the House. Not until 1976 were draftsmen able to write a law acceptable to both legislative bodies. The President approved the act on October 19, 1976, and most provisions of the law became effective on January 1, 1978.

It is an indisputable fact that there are not many English or other translations of the primary legal sources of Spain and Latin America. The situation with secondary Hispanic language law sources is not much better. There are very few entries registered in the sections for Spain and Latin America in the AALS Law Books Recommended for Law Libraries that appear to be written in languages other than Spanish. The same situation is detected when browsing through the AALL Basic Latin American Legal Materials. Furthermore, of the hundreds of articles indexed in the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals that refer to the legal systems of Spain and Latin America only a few appear to be written in a foreign language.

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.

The Federal Republic of Germany, including West Berlin, has some 9,000 commercial enterprises engaged in publishing and book distribution. Of these, 2,268 are Verlage (publishing houses) located in 480 cities and 6,672 are Buchhandlungen (bookstores) in 1,585 cities. By far the largest number of the better-known enterprises are concentrated in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart. Most publishing houses are small to medium-sized. In 1975 one-third produced only one imprint a year. Three-quarters of all publishers produced between one and ten imprints a year. Only 3 per cent of all publishers produced between 51 to 100 imprints a year and 2.6 per cent more than 100 imprints. Approximately 70 per cent of all publishers have a yearly turnover of up to one million DM and 70 per cent of the bookstores have a turnover of up to DM 500,000. Some 60 publishing houses have placed emphasis in their production on works dealing with law and public administration. Between 100 to 200 bookstores specialize in the distribution of this literature.

South Africa has a long tradition of law journal publishing. The Cape Law Journal was founded in 1884. Its name was changed to the South African Law Journal in 1901 and it has continued to appear ever since. Certain other journals commenced in the past, then either disappeared or now appear in another guise. For instance the South African Law Times was published for a few years in the 1930's only. Similarly Butterworths South African Law Review was the precursor to the current Acta Juridica. However, today a wide range of titles are published. Juta and Company Limited (P.O. Box 123, Kenwyn, Cape Province 7790) publishes the South African Law Journal and several other law and law-related periodicals and law reports. Another regular publisher of legal journals is Butterworths and Co. (S.A.) (Pty) Limited, (P.O. Box 792, Durban 4000).

The needs of the clients of law libraries in Israeli universities (Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Bar Ilan) have long shown the importance of, and the need for, collaboration and cooperation among these libraries in order to present the best of services to their clientele. Therefore, the work of Mrs. Bar-Niv, from the Law Library at Jerusalem University, has been wholeheartedly welcomed. With the cooperation of the other two law libraries, Mrs. Bar Niv published in 1975 the Union List of Periodicals in Law Libraries in Israel (updated through a supplement in 1976). This list has proved an indispensable aid for staff and students.