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Foreign and International Law Collections in Selected Law Libraries of the United States: Survey, 1972 – 1973

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2019

Igor I. Kavass
Igor I. Kavass*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, U.S.A.
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Extract

From time to time during the past several years many law librarians in the United States with institutional commitments for the development of foreign and international law collections have voiced their deep concern about the intrinsic research value of their existing holdings of foreign and international law materials and, even more so, about the ability of their libraries to maintain the future growth of such collections at a sufficiently high scholarly level. Their disquietude was not without a reason. The United States could always pride itself in having several distinguished law libraries with some of the best research collections of legal materials in the world. The reputation of these collections was so great that generation after generation of legal scholars did much of their research work in them. There were also many other law libraries in the United States but they were generally small and did not specialize in foreign and international law. An unexpected development occured, however, in the two decades after World War II. Many of the smaller law libraries as well as a number of new libraries began to expand their holdings at a phenomenal rate of growth. They began also to branch out into areas they had not been previously familiar with, and some of them succeeded in establishing sizable collections of foreign and international law materials within the relatively short period of less than twenty years. After several decades of this unprecedented and frequently indiscriminate expansion, culminating in the emergence of a wide variety of foreign and international law collections, many of these libraries were suddenly faced in the early 1970's with a series of critical problems.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Law Libraries , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , November 1973 , pp. 117 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © International Association of Law Libraries 1973 

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References

1 The survey was conducted by the writer on behalf of the Foreign and International Law Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries. The opinions and conclusions expressed in the survey arc, of course, his own.Google Scholar

2 Schwerin, Law Libraries and Foreign Law Collections in the U.S.A., 11 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 537 (1962)Google Scholar

3 Library of Congress Guides to the laws and legal literature of selected foreign countries; e. g., Borchard, Guide to the Law and Literature of Germany, 1912; Clagett, A Guide to the Law and Legal Literature of the Mexican States, 1947; etc. Of latter vintage and somewhat different in style was the Mid-European Law Project at the Library of Congress under the general editorship of Vladimir Gsovski; e. g., Legal Sources and Bibliography of Hungary, Legal Sources and Bibliography of Yugoslavia, etc. Some of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University publications are also within this category; e. g., Szladits, Charles. Guide to Foreign Legal Materials: French-German-Swiss, 1959; Grisoli, Angelo. Guide to Foreign Legal Materials: Italian, 1965; etc.Google Scholar

4 Schwerin, Law Libraries and Foreign Law Collections in the U.S.A., 11 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 537 (1962); also, International Association of Law Libraries, Proceedings of the Meeting at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass., June 24–25, 1961 (Kurt Schwerin, ed.), 36–50.Google Scholar

5 Szladits, Charles. A Bibliography on Foreign and Comparative Law. Parker School of Foreign and Comperative Law, Columbia University, 1955–.Google Scholar

6 Harvard Law School Library. Annual Legal Bibliography, v. 1 (1961)–, supplemented by a monthly Current Legal Bibliography.Google Scholar

7 E. g., Northwestern University School of Law, Elbert H. Gary Library, Selection of Foreign Legal Publications, which is issued on a quarterly basis.Google Scholar