While both New Zealand and Australia have a shared history, each tells a separate story of sovereignty. Both began as British colonies and, when Australia became a federation in 1901, there was opportunity for New Zealand to join. It chose not to do so. To use an image from Moori, New Zealand's indigenous language, it decided to paddle its own waka (canoe). A century and a bit later, the New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII) is another iteration of that drive to differentiate, born of a hope that an indigenous online identity might help to build more comprehensive free access to its legal information.

The content of this essay is the result of more than ten years of trial and error. It was envisioned as a tool for personal guidance when drafting papers. If the recommendations included in this essay are correctly implemented, they will help law students and researchers write a law paper of publishable quality.

At the 2007 Charleston Conference, Elaine Yontz and Jack Fisher, library science professor and librarian respectively at Valdosta State University, gave a presentation on their study of indexing by the leading information science indexers of the seventy-eight open access journals (OAJ) listed for library and information science in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). They discovered that less than 47% of the journals listed in the DOAJ were indexed. Additional observations made were the relative newness of many of the library science journal titles listed in DOAJ, the breadth of languages in which OAJ were being published, and the quality of many of the publishers or groups behind the journals. Yontz and Fisher are concerned that American scholars overlook these potentially helpful journals because of the lack of indexing.

The acquisition of legal information is critical to how lawyers conduct their work. The use of information-seeking models as a theoretical lens to analyze user behavior has been exhausted in the scholarly literature. However, very few models illustrate the dynamic relationship between lawyer and information professional. Furthermore, these models do not consider the demands of accessing legal information in a time-constrained environment. This paper explores this phenomenon and proposes a model that aids in understanding how practitioners obtain legal information in a law firm environment.

The debate regarding whether the origin of Louisiana civil law is based in the Spanish or in the French legal tradition has been ongoing since that state's incorporation into the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. Distinguished legal scholars have argued in favor of one tradition being dominant over the other, and each has been staunch in support of that view. This article proposes and demonstrates that the Spanish, not French, civil law had an enormous influence on the creation and evolution of Louisiana civil law, and that this legacy resonates today.

This article explores HIV-specific laws in Central America: why they exist, where their terms come from, what choices have been made, and what the laws do. Part I outlines the influential work and standards of the U.N. and USAID. Part II presents contours of debate over AIDS law and policy in the United States. Part III reports on the HIV epidemics in Central America. Part IV compares the Central American laws, applying some of the lessons and theories presented in earlier Parts. The article concludes that HIV laws in the region do not function to provide the basis for claims of individual rights or impositions of responsibilities, the way U.S. laws often have. Rather, the Central American laws represent national aspirations toward a reasonable response to the epidemics. Central American aspirations toward safeguarding individual rights, while tracking heightening international standards, nonetheless are profoundly challenged as the epidemic is measured and expands: the law in Nicaragua, with its very low measured incidence of HIV infection, is very “rights” oriented, while the law in Honduras, where HIV incidence is relatively high, is very “duties” oriented.

Improving information literacy in law translates into developing methods for improving legal research competencies among lawyers, law students and the general public. This paper summarizes four approaches for improving legal research skills of prospective lawyers in U.S. law schools and discusses their successes and shortcomings to help assess their potential application in an international environment. These approaches include: (1) offering mandatory law school courses in legal research; (2) adding elective (or optional) credit based courses in legal research; (3) offering non-credit legal research support to law students at their point of need; and (4) testing prospective lawyers on their legal research competencies as a requirement to being licensed to practice law.

This paper aims to give an overview of education of librarians, professional associations, publications and the types of libraries in Turkey. In addition, the activities of the Turkish Platform of Law Librarians and law librarianship in Turkey are presented.

Modern legal education began in China late in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), and then expanded during the period of the Republic of China from 1912. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, legal education entered a new and difficult period. The compilation of English language materials offered here includes a few materials relating to the Qing and Republican periods, but after 1949 only materials relating to the People's Republic of China (mainland China). Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan all have separate legal education systems and structures, and are excluded from this compilation.

This paper aims to present the historical development of academic libraries and librarianship in Turkey. It takes its starting point from the first years of the Republic and follows the reforms, improvements and setbacks in this field.

In the past five years, we have witnessed extraordinary growth in the amount of legal scholarship, legal practice, and public policy at the intersection of law and neuroscience. For instance, in 2010 the first Daubert hearing was held on the admissibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection evidence; a Florida court was the first in the nation to admit quantitative encephalography (qEEG) evidence; and a Supreme Court decision on life imprisonment for minors cited brain development research. In France, the Prime Minister established the first Neuroscience and Public Policy program within the France Ministry for Social Affairs, and in the United States, multiple state legislators proposed bills related to neuroscience and law. Academics, too, have taken notice, with a number of symposia being offered around the country over the past few years.