The World Treaty Index (WTI), first published in print form in 1974, has been a mainstay of treaty research for over a quarter of a century. A second edition was published in 1983 and a reprint of that edition appeared in 1997. Both editions of the print multi-volume set can be found in almost all major law libraries and in research institutes with an interest in international relations, area studies and globalization. The WTI lives on in electronic form and remains to this day the largest collection of treaty citations in the world, with well over 60,000 entries to date. Over the last decade, interdisciplinary scholarly research interests have increasingly focused on the kinds of information that can be extracted from The World Treaty Index.

Switzerland is a federal state that lies in the heart of Europe and is bordered by Germany (to the north), Austria and the Principality of Liechtenstein (to the east), Italy (to the south) and France (to the west).

It is perhaps the vanity of every generation to believe that it is experiencing a unique moment of radical cultural transformation; yet there do seem grounds for believing that this is so in relation to the Irish legal system. In the past decade there have been changes, at a structural and philosophical level, of an intensity that has not previously occurred over centuries.

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are among the most technologically advanced countries in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, to find sophisticated online systems offering extensive access to legal information in each country. This article briefly traces the development of online legal information in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In addition, it provides a country by country overview of the legal databases and online guides to electronic legal resources that are currently available. Most of the databases discussed can be accessed, wholly or in part, without charge via the Internet. A few are restricted to paid subscribers or are available only on CD-ROM. It should be noted that, while Denmark and Sweden are members of the European Union, this article does not cover the databases in either country specifically devoted to European Union law.

The founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution had an abiding faith in the power that knowledge bestows. The notion that “knowledge is power” dates back to the teachings of philosophers (from Bacon to Nietzsche), and was understood and practiced long before that by statesmen, scoundrels, and spies of all ages. The ancient Chinese ruled for millennia by maintaining a monopoly on knowledge and education.

“The world is a global village.” With the advent of the Internet and increased commercial global transactions, these words ring truer today than when they were first exclaimed by Marshall McLuhan in the late 1960's. Foreign business deals are now a commonplace activity. International commercial law, which used to be a specialty, has quickly become an integral element of the practice of a transactional lawyer.

The Member States of the European Union have diverse legal traditions explained in part by the dichotomy of common law and civil law systems. Yet notwithstanding this diversity all Member States have adjusted to the new legal order created by the European Community in accepting the primacy of EC law and the legal principles establishing by the European Court of Justice. This paper examines briefly the Irish experience in making that adjustment.

The Republic of Estonia is one of those European countries for which the year 1918 meant a deep and radical change in the development of their states. During the last decade, these states – Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic (the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic in 1918), Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – have all become Member States of or applicant countries to the European Union. On 28 July 1922, the Republic of Estonia was de jure recognized by the Government of the United States. This was an important act, since soon afterwards, on 22 September 1922, Estonia became a member of the League of Nations. Estonia had thus become a subject of international law.

I. Introduction

We seem, yet again, to be at one of those moments in time, so common in the last quarter of the 20th century, and likely to be continuous in the 21st, when the future appears as a melting pot of possibilities for law libraries, particularly university law libraries. This time the uncertainty is largely driven by the potential advent of Web-based learning, and the as yet largely undeveloped nature of the law school response to the possibilities of education outside of the traditional classroom model. Uncertainty is also due to the growing awareness that IT literacy is increasing rapidly among our user community, and that students in particular now prefer electronic sources of information over print – sources which, increasingly, they can access from places other than the physical law library.