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.

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.

In his Introduction to the study of the Law of the Constitution, which appeared in its first edition in 1885, Professor A. V. Dicey of the University of Oxford emphasized in particular the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty and the concept of the Rule of Law as guiding principles of the constitution. His exposition was clear and trenchant, inspired by the self-confidence of late Victorian Britain, and through nine editions it provided the authoritative text which to this day has influenced judges and lawyers, politicians, observers from abroad, and many others in their interpretation of the constitutional law of the United Kingdom.

Arbitration is frequently the most effective way of resolving international commercial disputes. In a typical dispute the parties will be of different nationality and have different legal and cultural backgrounds. Neither side will be content to allow the dispute to be decided by the national courts of the opposing party. Arbitration offers the parties the opportunity to choose their own arbitrator, the location of the arbitration, the procedures and the law in accordance with which the dispute is to be resolved. It also offers them privacy and in many cases this is likely to be a very important consideration.

There has been a high level of activity in the development of standards concerning access to public sector information in Europe in recent years. At domestic level, freedom of information (FOI) legislation has been introduced to the overwhelming majority of member states of the European Union and to a number of former Eastern bloc countries. Freedom of Information has also increased its impact at supra national level, both in terms of progress towards the development by international bodies such as the European Union and the Council of Europe of FOI norms for their Member States and with respect to the opening up of access to documents of the international institutions themselves. There is, however, considerable variation in the content and scope of the various FOI measures introduced. The aim of this paper is to assess the scope and operation of two contrasting examples of recently introduced or proposed FOI measures, namely the Irish FOI Act and the proposed Regulation on Access to Documents of the European Institutions. The overall theme of the paper is that strong FOI measures are needed to combat the tendency toward secrecy in public administration in Europe but that even where access measures are relatively strong in their formulation, their effectiveness can be limited through under-funding or more direct interference with the operation of the access scheme.

Once on a plane to New Orleans I chanced to half overhear a conversation between two passengers who shared the same row of seats with me. Somewhere between wakefulness and drowsiness, my ear caught a telltale accent that betrayed one of my seatmates as an Orleanian as they chatted animatedly about the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the ways that both diverged from the rest of the country. The native noted reverently the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, he remarked grandly on the extraordinary cuisine, he waxed pridefully about the city as the birthplace of jazz, and he spoke warmly about the manifold ethnic origins of his fellow Louisianians. Then, as if to fortify his contention that he hailed from a truly unusual place, he pointedly observed that Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose legal system rested upon the Napoleonic Code, even as he confessed to an uncertainty about why that difference existed or what it meant precisely.

There is an independent Scottish legal system today because, until the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns in 1603 and the Union of the Parliaments of the two countries in 1707, Scotland was an independent sovereign state. When King James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Great Britain in 1603, there was considerable interest in the possibility of establishing a single legal system for the newly united kingdoms, while during the Cromwellian interlude of the 1650s the possibility moved some way towards actuality. But the 1707 Act of Union showed a recognition that the establishment of a single legal system and body of law for the whole of the United Kingdom was not really a practical proposition, in articles which remain the formal basis for the continuing existence and independence of the Scottish law and legal system. Article XVIII provided for the continuation of Scots law after the Union, excepting only the ‘Laws concerning Regulation of Trade, Customs and … Excises', which were to ‘be the same in Scotland, from and after the Union, as in England.’ Change to Scots law was allowed under the Article, but in matters of ‘private right’ such change had to be for the ‘evident utility’ of the Scottish people. Only in matters of ‘public right’ might the aim be simply to make the law the same throughout the United Kingdom. Article XIX laid down that the principal Scottish courts, the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, should ‘remain in all time coming’ as they were then constituted, and further provided that Scottish cases were not to be dealt with by the English courts ‘in Westminster-hall’ (which likewise continued to exist post-Union).

This article examines the development of a policy by the Government of Ireland on the modernization of its statute law and describes recent developments in statute law revision and related policies in Ireland. In theory, the ideal and ultimate aim of such a policy should be the development of an easily accessible code.

In practice, there is no political requirement for such grandiose idealism and what is taking place is much more pragmatic and modest. The article places these policies in the wider context of the modernization of government and anticipates some of the likely developments to emerge in this field in Ireland in the next 5 years.

The title of this paper comes from the famous ‘Schuman Declaration’ of 1950, which signaled the placing of Franco-German production of coal and steel under a single High Authority. It is quite astonishing that from this humble beginning, evolved the European Union of today. The phrase takes on new relevance as the Treaty of Nice paves the way for the biggest single enlargement of the European Union. The current Treaty, completes the Intergovernmental Conference which began in February, 2000. The founding treaties, signed in Paris and Rome in 1951 and 1957 respectively, and the amending treaties, most notably the Treaty on European Union, (Maastricht), and the Treaty of Amsterdam, form the Constitution of the European Union. It is important to note that while the earlier treaties concentrated on economic integration, the later treaties have shifted towards political questions. Bibliographic references to the various treaties have become quite complicated because the Treaty of Amsterdam brought about a renumbering of the articles to both the Treaty on European Union (EU) and the Treaty establishing the European Community (EC).

This paper provides an introduction to the SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) Law Gateway a web based descriptive database of high quality legal information resources on the Internet (www.sosig.ac.uk/law). The Law Gateway is a new research support service being developed by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London) in partnership with the University of Bristol as part of the UK's Resource Discovery Network initiative. The project seeks to provide access to the expanding range of global legal materials now being delivered over the Internet. In effect, the Law Gateway aims to offer the UK and international legal communities appropriate new ways to find, assess and access law in the new century.

Despite its recent development, the Web already contains an astonishing variety of legal materials from dozens of countries. Significant collections of legislation are already available on the Web from over 50 countries. The full text is available on the Web of all legislation from almost all the jurisdictions of the USA, Canada, Australasia, many Latin American countries and some European countries (such as Norway and Germany), and extensive collections from many other European counties (such as the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal). Substantial collections of legislation are available from many developing countries, including India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Vietnam, Zambia, China, Mexico and Israel.

I am now going to transfer you rapidly from the global information service to a locally targeted and focused legal information service designed to meet the particular needs of a small jurisdiction like Northern Ireland.

SLS Legal Publications was established in 1980 as a unique and profoundly innovative experiment in Northern Ireland (N.I.). Its continued existence 20 years later is testament to the fact that it has not only become a success story but is now an integral part of the legal system in Northern Ireland. SLS Legal Publications is a legal publishing and training company based within the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) and sponsored by the NICS, the Law Society of N.I. and the Bar Council of N.I. QUB's sponsorship takes the form of the provision of accommodation and accounting services. The purpose of SLS is to provide a legal information service in various ways to the Northern Ireland legal profession and the wider community and I will expand on those various ways later in this talk.

The Communications Directorate of The Scottish Parliament is responsible for the development and implementation of strategy and policy in respect of information generation, publication and dissemination. Within The Directorate, it is the Information Systems business unit that has particular responsibility for the external information policy, that is to say, the policy regarding the provision of parliamentary information to the world outside The Parliament.

Ireland is a small common law jurisdiction with a devolved legal system. These two factors combine to present a number of significant problems with regard to legal information sources:

• Devolution has promoted incremental and incidental change. There has been little systemic review and the law is a complex mix of amendment, addition and judicial review.

• Much of our legislation is reactive to social or political requirements.

• Until recently, sources of law have not been prioritized as an important national resource requiring investment in terms of review and access.

• Consolidation is infrequent and ineffective. Codification has only recently been considered.

• Current sources of modern Irish law have been substantially shaped by major historical events of the last three centuries. Today's Irish legal system and sources of contemporary law owe a lot to the pragmatic adoption and adaptation of the Westminster model and the English common law as it stood in the early twentieth century.

This article addresses the question of electronic access to legal resources in Ireland, with special reference to the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) project. The first section of the article explains the origins of BAILII and the Irish resources which it makes available without charge on the web (as well discussing as other free websites). The second section considers official sources of access to Irish legal material (i.e. government sites), while a final section outlines the commercial services currently on offer. An Appendix provides some “Notes on Using BAILII.”