Like most members, I always look forward to the Association's Annual Course on International Law Librarianship. The program offers countless learning opportunities, including scholarly lectures, visits to libraries and information centers, and meetings with publishers and vendors. Last but not least, it offers the chance to meet new colleagues as well as to renew friendships and contacts with law librarians from around the world. I anticipated the 2002 Course with particular excitement, because this would be the first time that I would attend one in my own country. Indeed, it would be the first time IALL met in the United States for over a decade. Having experienced the hospitality of law librarians in many different countries over the years, I knew it would be especially meaningful to be able to welcome colleagues from abroad to the United States.

The papers in this issue were presented at the IALL's 21st Annual Course on International Law Librarianship, held at Yale Law School, October 20 through October 23, 2002. The program featured several of America's great scholars in international law and drew on the rich resources of Yale University and its environs. It also introduced participants to the history of legal education in America and included excursions to America's first national law school, in Litchfield, Connecticut, and to the United Nations headquarters, in New York City. A pre-conference reception was held at the nearby Quinnipiac University School of Law Library, on Sunday afternoon, October 20th, in Hamden, Connecticut, and a post-conference institute on Islamic Law, was held on October 24th, at Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Law publishing — that is, the reproduction and dissemination of statutes, judicial decisions, commentaries, legal forms and texts — is as old as writing and can be found in all literate societies. In the ancient world, written law was essential to political and social relations. That can be seen from the importance given to law codes in the Semitic, Greek and Roman societies. Over the centuries and in every medium from stone and clay, papyrus and parchment, to paper and the electronic media of our day — law has been a major component of literature. The very fact of publication is an essential requirement for the enactment and efficacy of laws in many societies. Publication of law was widespread before the invention of printing and was achieved by reproducing important texts in multiple manuscript copies which could then be disseminated to libraries, officials and others who needed them and could afford them. The printing of law depended not only on the invention of the press itself, but also on the acceptance of what more accessible law might mean to society. In England, for example this was a matter of considerable controversy for over a hundred years.

Histories of law publishing in the United States can be found in a number of sources, several of which are listed in the bibliography that accompanies this article. Although there are no completely up-to-date treatments of the subject, the most comprehensive is probably Erwin C. Surrency's A History of American Law Publishing (1990). Surrency discusses American legal publishing from the colonial era to the late twentieth century, but his book closes before the far-reaching changes resulting from the growth of electronic publishing and dissemination of legal information in the latter years of the twentieth century. A few sources discuss the initial impacts and implications of computer-assisted legal research databases. More recent literature on the Internet's effects on legal research is discussed in section IV of this article. Other useful sources for exploring the history of U.S. law book publishing are found in two edited collections: George S. Grossman's Legal Research: Historical Foundations of the Electronic Age (1994); and Betty Taylor and Robert Munro's four volume set: American Law Publishing 1860-1900: Historical Readings (1984).

The education of all lawyers everywhere in the British American colonies before 1784 was by apprenticeship. Aspirants to the profession, usually without any prior college education at all, read law in the office of an established practitioner. The most important part of this training occurred during the sessions of the local, county, and colony courts when the neophyte would observe, listen carefully, and take notes. After a time, sometimes only months, sometimes two to three years, the student would be examined cursorily and, with senior members of the bar attesting to his good character, admitted to practice. A few whose parents could afford it would travel to London and read law there at the Inns of Court.

All self-respecting legal history is supposed to end by the twentieth century. As we approach our own lives, experience and training — and those events that we have actually witnessed — we allegedly lose that “objectivity” which makes the “science” of history itself possible. Certainly, there is no point in burdening the reader with the “original” materials, including cases and statutes, that make up the bulk of any legal education. But there are good reasons to reflect on our own legal century from an “historical perspective.”

While those of us in the United States have become accustomed to talking about our war on terrorism and its consequences, including its effects on civil rights, we should not ignore the fact that the international community, and specifically the United Nations, is conducting its own ‘war’ on terrorism. I will be addressing the General Assembly's and especially the Security Council's war on terrorism and the challenges these efforts present, including to international human rights.

The fall of the Berlin Wall has substantially changed the global security architecture. The end of the Cold War has opened a lot of new opportunities for international cooperation: Bi-polar world divisions have disappeared, state borders have become softer, and with the assistance of advanced information and communication technology, the process of globalization has been developing rapidly to an unprecedented level.

Working with United Nations documentation can be challenging. For starters, titles of documents are generic. In general, it's a good idea to have a basic sense of how the Organization is structured and its reporting system. (For example, the Commission on Human Rights reports to the Economic and Social Council, the International Law Commission to the General Assembly.) Many tools are available to help in this regard but perhaps the most useful is United Nations Documentation: Research Guide, which is an excellent starting point for neophytes but also has features for advanced researchers which enable them to further hone their skills.

Dr. Kauffman, friends. I am delighted to be back on my old stamping grounds at Yale Law School, which I attended some half-century ago in an era when World War II had been successfully completed and terrorism had not yet been defined as a global threat. The Nuremberg Tribunal was ongoing during part of my time at law school but I'm ashamed to say few of us paid much attention to it. We did not foresee any need to learn its lessons in our “brave new world.” But as we are so often reminded, those who do not heed the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them, and evil has reappeared in new guises over the past 50 years, requiring new responses on an international level. So fast forwarding to the present, I have recently returned from two years service as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Hague; this was after twenty years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Yugoslav Tribunal has been in existence for more than 9 years and I believe its history and accomplishments are a worthy subject for scrutiny, especially in light of the new International Criminal Court just getting off the ground. I am therefore pleased to share some observations on the Tribunal's successes and problems, and to offer some modest recommendations to future tribunals.

To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends.

—Attorney General John Ashcroft, 6 December 2001

The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War established human rights as a legitimate focus of international attention. In the half-century since, there have arisen nearly 100 universal and regional human rights agreements governing issues as diverse as discrimination against women, state-sponsored torture, and fair trials. Yet, as we embark on the twenty-first century, accompanied by the ongoing war on terrorism, there has been surprisingly little talk of these agreements. I want to take this opportunity to consider why, despite their ubiquity, human rights treaties have been largely ignored in current debates over how to address the myriad problems in the Middle East, and to suggest how we can make international agreements work more effectively to prevent abuses of human dignity.

Collectively, you law librarians gathered here must have been affected by the many legal fallouts from September 11: the Office of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, the Use of Military Force Resolution-, the thousands of casualties of all nationalities; the detainees; the military commissions; the prosecutions; the habeas cases. But even as you have studied and researched these individual issues, you have probably wondered whether something bigger is going on. Are these legal fallouts only symptoms of a much larger phenomenon: a post-World War II legal system placed under stress by September 11?

The IALL Board was delighted that Harvard Law School Library offered to host this additional day. The largest private academic law library in the United States, the institution was sure to attract many IALL members. I was especially pleased, since I had begun my career there seven years earlier. I knew well that the staff would provide an excellent Conference, and looked forward to be working with my former colleagues again.