Introduction
Three generations of foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarians have shaped the field into what it is today. The postwar 20th century gave rise to the first generation of FCIL librarians (Generation One) in the United States (US).Footnote 1 The FCIL librarians of this generation were born overseas between 1905 and 1935Footnote 2 and were educated as foreign lawyers.Footnote 3 Since they were “unable to practice law when they emigrated to the United States, [they] sought employment as law librarians.”Footnote 4 As refugees from World War II, they had foreign-language skills as native speakers, usually in multiple languages, and often legal training in civil law systems.Footnote 5 “They built large collections of foreign law materials, created classification systems to organize these collections, produced important scholarship in FCIL, and participated with energy and imagination in the AALL [American Association of Law Libraries].”Footnote 6 Unsurprisingly, given the era in which they served,Footnote 7 the first generation of FCIL librarians relied on traditional “cool tools” to find and distribute information: print materials (bibliographies,Footnote 8 indexes,Footnote 9 scholarly books,Footnote 10 and articlesFootnote 11) and human networks (colleagues and friends).Footnote 12 Prominent members of this first generation of FCIL librarians included Jolande Goldberg,Footnote 13 Igor Kavass,Footnote 14 Simone Kleckner,Footnote 15 Blanka Kudej,Footnote 16 Vaclav Mostecky,Footnote 17 Thomas H. Reynolds,Footnote 18 Kurt Schwerin,Footnote 19 Adolf Sprudz,Footnote 20 William B. Stern,Footnote 21 Marta Tarnawsky,Footnote 22 and Florence Ferner Zagayko.Footnote 23
By the late 1980s, the first generation of FCIL librarians was nearing retirement.Footnote 24 A report published in 1989 explained that “[t]he environment in which legal information services are being provided is rapidly changing. […] In areas where law librarians and new users are only now becoming adapted to new technologies, certain barriers need to be overcome. […] Although shortages exist in other areas, the most severe personnel need of the legal information community is for foreign law specialists to replace the postwar émigré lawyer-librarians reaching retirement.”Footnote 25
The second generation of FCIL librarians (Generation Two) entered the profession around this time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the first generation of FCIL librarians was retiring.Footnote 26 Although a few notable members of the second generation were foreign lawyers who arrived with foreign-language skills as native speakers and formal training in civil law legal systems,Footnote 27 most FCIL librarians of the second generation developed foreign-language skills through personal study and graduated from American law schools without much formal education in foreign or international law.Footnote 28 A few FCIL librarians of the second generation were lucky enough to receive some training in international and foreign law librarianship early in their careers, briefly serving as apprentices to members of the first generation of FCIL librarians before they retired,Footnote 29 but training was not comprehensive or systematic.Footnote 30 According to one scholar, “there was a palpable concern” amongst the FCIL librarians of the second generation;Footnote 31 they did not feel capable of providing the same quality of service previously provided by the FCIL librarians of the first generation because they lacked adequate professional training.Footnote 32
This generational shift in FCIL librarianship coincided with two significant changes in the FCIL information landscape: (1) the rise of globalization, which led the American legal academy to recognize the practical importance of an education that included foreign, comparative, and/or international law;Footnote 33 and (2) the digital revolution, which enabled public access to the World Wide WebFootnote 34 and publication of FCIL materials in nontraditional formats, those being CD-ROMs and/or online databases.Footnote 35
On the ground in law libraries, these changes within the legal academy and the publishing world meant that FCIL librarians of the second generation received a greater volume of research requests covering a broader breadth of topics and jurisdictions than the FCIL librarians of the first generation.Footnote 36 Additionally, FCIL librarians of the second generation had to seek information in far more source types and formats than FCIL librarians of the first generation. Some were even expected to teach a course in FCIL research.Footnote 37 The overwhelming scope of presumed expertise in FCIL information, coupled with the lack of formal training, eventually led FCIL librarians of the second generationFootnote 38 to demand more support from their professional association, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL).Footnote 39 Their efforts were successful, resulting in a formal training program, which consisted of five institutes intended to offer a comprehensive education in FCIL librarianship.Footnote 40 Each institute had its own subject focus (foreign legal systems, international organizations, transnational legal transactions, tax and business, and public international law) and a curriculum that included public services and technical services components designed to train the “whole librarian.”Footnote 41 FCIL librarians of the second generation participated in the institutes as both instructors and students, forming a tight-knit collective of shared knowledge, and they eventually published the training materials as self-instruction manuals on foreign, comparative, and/or international law and legal research.Footnote 42
As FCIL librarians of the second generation developed in their careers, they discovered and embraced the primary “cool tool” of their era as a means to identify and distribute FCIL sources and knowledge: the internet. They became adept at searching the World Wide Web, and they created electronic research guides, hosted freely on institutional websites, to highlight important print and digital sources on a plethora of FCIL topics.Footnote 43 Additionally, FCIL librarians of the second generation stayed current with (and sometimes helped create and maintain) an array of FCIL information databases;Footnote 44 they listed these databases in their FCIL research course textbooks, along with tips on how to apply sophisticated search strategies to navigate the databases effectively.Footnote 45 Despite increasing reliance on digital sources, though, FCIL librarians of the second generation recognized the threat to information literacy standards onlineFootnote 46 and continued to revere traditional sources, both print materials and human connections.Footnote 47 Prominent members of the second generation of FCIL librarians included Francisco Avalos,Footnote 48 Victor I. Essien,Footnote 49 Claire Germain,Footnote 50 Marci Hoffman,Footnote 51 Lyonette Louis-Jacques,Footnote 52 Radu Popa,Footnote 53 Jonathan Pratter,Footnote 54 Marylin J. Raisch,Footnote 55 Jeanne Rehberg,Footnote 56 Mary Rumsey,Footnote 57 Ellen G. Schaffer,Footnote 58 Maria Smolka-Day,Footnote 59 and Daniel Wade.Footnote 60
The authors of this article are FCIL librarians of the third generation (Generation Three). We are the FCIL librarians active in the profession now, five years after the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of us were born and educated in the US and developed an interest in foreign and/or international law while in American law schools, but some FCIL librarians of our generation are foreign lawyers who arrived with foreign-language skills as native speakers and formal training in civil law systems. Regardless of our varied paths to the profession, we arrived with the same professional values as FCIL librarians of prior generationsFootnote 61 and have access to an array of self-instruction materials about FCIL research and librarianship.Footnote 62
Like our predecessors, some of us do not have formal FCIL librarian titles,Footnote 63 but we perform core skills of FCIL librarianship as modeled by the first generation of FCIL librarians and as articulated by the second generation of FCIL librarians in their scholarship.Footnote 64 We use various “cool tools” to perform our work. Some of these “cool tools” are classic holdovers from the prior generation; others are new resources that integrate an emerging technology that may eventually define us as a generation: artificial intelligence (AI).
This introduction has provided a broad overview of the three generations of FCIL librarians. The pages that follow will examine these three generations in more detail by exploring how their members performed and perform core skills of FCIL librarianship: treaty research, translating foreign-language materials, locating documents from international organizations and specialized areas of public international law, and identifying private international law sources to resolve cross-border disputes.Footnote 65 In describing how the generations of FCIL librarians performed and perform their work, this article will highlight select sources, or “cool tools,” which they consulted along the way and in some cases still consult today.Footnote 66 This article will conclude with a rallying call for continued evaluation of FCIL “cool tools” throughout the profession and increased opportunities for training the FCIL librarians of this generation and beyond.
Core Skill: Treaty Research
Definition of Treaties
A key skill for FCIL librarians is the research of treaties. Treaties are binding agreements between nations and are known by several names, such as conventions, international agreements, covenants, protocols, etc.Footnote 67 Treaties may be bilateral (between two nations) or multilateral (between three or more nations).Footnote 68 The Vienna Convention defines a treaty as “an international agreement concluded between States in written form and governed by international law, whether embodied in a single instrument or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation.”Footnote 69 While there are different names for treaties (such as agreements, conventions, and protocols), these names are often used interchangeably with no impact on the legal significance of the document. However, conventions have broad application and are usually multilateral,Footnote 70 and protocols may refer to agreements made after a treaty becomes effective.Footnote 71
Even still, States may have their own definitions of treaties. For example, according to the US Constitution, a treaty is an international agreement that is confirmed by two-thirds of the Senate and signed by the President,Footnote 72 which is a narrower definition of treaty than that of the Vienna Convention.Footnote 73 However, the US also recognizes international agreements called “executive agreements,” which are signed by the President when the President is acting under the authority of a federal statute, “congressional executive agreements,”Footnote 74 and “sole executive agreements,” which are executive agreements that the President makes and signs without any input from Congress.Footnote 75 Per the United Nations (UN) Charter, all treaties of member States should be published and registered.Footnote 76 Treaty research strategies have adapted to the addition of electronic resources for legal research, and there are many resources for accessing treaties. What follows is an overview of treaty research and then a discussion of the FLARE Index to Treaties and its place in treaty research.
Overview of Treaty Research
Textbooks, Research Guides, and Other Open-Access Sources
Researching treaties is a critical FCIL skill, and there are many sources and strategies for researching treaties. Law librarians research where and how to find treaties at the request of patrons in a variety of law libraries (academic, firm, and public) and in some cases provide instruction to students on the importance of treaties and where and how to find them. Law students become lawyers who may practice in the area of international law. Lawyers may need to provide legal advice to their clients who may be governments or people whose dealings involve a need to know how agreements among nations affect their lives. For example, a lawyer representing a government trying to prosecute a person accused of a crime may need to know if there are extradition treaties that are applicable and where to find these treaties. Textbooks dealing with international law researchFootnote 77 and research guides (many of which are produced by academic law libraries)Footnote 78 provide instruction on researching treaties.
In the 21st century, the full texts of many treaties are available online in open-access databases or in subscription databases that have digitized treaties. For example, texts of treaties may be available through open-access governmental websites such as that of the US Department of State’s Office of Treaty Affairs, which has the texts of treaties and agreements from 1981 to 2024.Footnote 79 Often, other nations maintain the texts of treaties to which they are a party on open-access, government-sponsored websites. For example, treaties from the Canada Treaty Series are available on a Government of Canada website.Footnote 80 The texts of over 180,000 bilateral and multilateral treaties are available in the subscription database World Treaty Library, which is available in HeinOnline. Footnote 81 Other treaties between nations, pertinent to a certain time period or having to do with certain subject matter such as environmental law or arms regulation, are available through open-access sources like the United Nations Treaty Collection,Footnote 82 Yale Law School’s Avalon Project,Footnote 83 the UN’s ECOLEX,Footnote 84 and the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs Treaty Database.Footnote 85
How Three Generations of Librarians Have Researched Treaties
Reviewing how three generations of FCIL librarians have described researching treaties, we see how the process of researching treaties has evolved over time. Generation One, which conducted research in the 1970s and 1980s, was conducting research in a world where print materials were preferred and predominated (although subscription databases existed). Generation Two, which conducted research from the 1990s to approximately 2010, was still relying primarily on print resources; however, internet-based resources and subscription databases moved from being novelties to being sources for quick access to updated materials. Generation Three, which has conducted research from 2010 to the present, has not discarded official print materials; however, internet resources and subscription databases from reputable sources are de rigueur. There is overlap among the generations, as some authors who were actively conducting research during the time of Generation One continued conducting research during the periods of Generations Two and Three.
Generation One
Generation One found treaties almost exclusively by using indexes in print and collections of treaties in print. Writing in 1976, in How to Find the Law, Vaclav Mostecky recommended the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS), which he noted was incomplete, which delayed publishing some treaties and did not publish other treaties at all.Footnote 86 While noting that indexes are useful because they can be searched chronologically by signature date, chronologically by list of multilateral agreements, and alphabetically by country and subject, Mostecky also observed that publication of the citation to the full text of a treaty in an index is not immediate.Footnote 87 Writing five years later, in 1981, in Fundamentals of Legal Research, J. Myron Jacobstein and Roy M. Mersky still recommended print indexes and treaty collections—namely, collections of treaties in the Treaties and Other International Acts Series (TIAS) and United States Treaties and Other International Agreements (UST);Footnote 88 indexes of treaties in Treaties in Force (TIF), which is published by the US Department of State;Footnote 89 and collections of treaties (regardless of whether the US is a party), such as the Consolidated Treaty Series (CTS), UNTS, the League of Nations Treaty Series (LNTS), which is one of the earliest treaty indexes, and Major Peace Treaties of Modern History (among other sources),Footnote 90 which all have indexes.Footnote 91
Generation Two
With the second generation of FCIL librarians, print resources still predominated. However, internet-based resources such as web pages and online databases came to be seen as items of value to speed up the research process, with the caveat that these items should come from reputable sources. In the sixth edition of Fundamentals of Legal Research, published in 1994, Jacobstein, Mersky, and Donald J. Dunn noted that researchers should still search for treaties to which the US is a party in TIAS and UST.Footnote 92 Jacobstein, Mersky, and Dunn mentioned a “recent development” in 1993, a database of US international agreements in Westlaw that was available then and contained treaties dating from 1979 to the present, although “coverage is spotty.”Footnote 93 Writing for the Law Library Journal in 1997, Jonathan Pratter acknowledged the “advent of the digital dispensation”Footnote 94 and recommended Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General in print, yet noted that constant updates to treaties in the source could be found on the UN’s home page.Footnote 95 Writing in the seventh edition of Fundamentals of Legal Research in 1998, Jacobstein, Mersky, and Dunn still recommended TIAS and UST as sources for treaties to which the US is a party.Footnote 96 However, this time they mentioned resources from both leading subscription databases for legal research (Lexis and Westlaw) as a “supplement” and not a “substitute” for print research.Footnote 97 The authors continued to recommend UNTS, LNTS, and CTS as some of the other sources of treaties published by non-US publishers.Footnote 98
Generation Three
The third generation of FCIL librarians still references official print sources, yet internet-based sources are more fully integrated into the research process and in some cases are actually a substitute for print research. Writing in 2013, a time when internet searches had become commonplace, Anthony S. Winer, Mary Ann E. Archer, and Lyonette Louis-Jacques described both print-based and internet-based research,Footnote 99 yet warned of the disadvantages of what they called “generalized search methods” (e.g., using the Google search engine and Wikipedia to search for treaties).Footnote 100 For the text of these treaties, the authors recommended the United States Statutes at Large, TIAS (and suggested the US Department of State’s website), and UST.Footnote 101 For researching treaties regardless of whether the US is a party, the authors recommended the established sources that prior generations of librarians had recommended, although there was a greater emphasis on internet-based resources. For example, the authors recommended navigating to the UNTS website and additional websites, including the FLARE Index to Treaties and International Legal Materials (ILM) in Lexis and Westlaw.Footnote 102
In the tenth edition of Fundamentals of Legal Research, published in 2015, authors Steven M. Barkan, Barbara A. Bintliff, and Mary Whisner noted that the internet had not changed the sources, but it had changed research by making documents that were once hard to obtain easily accessible.Footnote 103 For finding treaties to which the US is a party, they mentioned the same sources as other librarians (TIAS and UST), the US Department of State’s website, and subscription databases as resources for finding the texts of treaties.Footnote 104
Writing in 2018, Heidi Frostestad Kuehl and Megan A. O’Brien recommended that researchers first search on the internet for the text of a treaty and then consult an index to find a treaty’s official title.Footnote 105 This is an example of the generalized search method that Winer, Archer, and Louis-Jacques had described.Footnote 106 Kuehl and O’Brien stated that the goal was to find the text of a treaty on the website of a depositary institution.Footnote 107 They went on to note that when a generalized search method for finding a treaty does not work, researchers should navigate to a website that has a database that may contain a treaty and then search in that database.Footnote 108 The authors also recommended treaty indexes available online, among them the FLARE Index to Treaties. Footnote 109
In the 2020 publication, Principles of Legal Research, by Kent C. Olson, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld, and Ingrid Mattson, internet-based resources were presented as sources that researchers would consult as a matter of course. For treaties to which the US is a party, the authors recommended the established sources that other law librarians recommended: United States Statutes at Large, Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949 (compiled by Bevans), UST, and TIASFootnote 110 However, they were writing at a time when internet-based legal research was commonplace, and they noted that Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, could be found in HeinOnline and on the website of the Library of Congress. Moreover, Olson, Kirschenfeld, and Mattson recommended searching in Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline for treaties.Footnote 111 For accessing the texts of treaties regardless of whether the US is a party, the authors recommended ILM in Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline, and UNTS, LNTS, and CTS, which are all available in HeinOnline (and note that UNTS is available for free on the website of the United Nations Treaty Collection).Footnote 112 In addition, the authors recommended the websites of the African Union, Council of Europe, and Organization of American States,Footnote 113 and the FLARE Index to Treaties.Footnote 114
The evolving prominence of internet-based research for treaties has occurred in the context of publishers increasingly making information available electronically and discontinuing or limiting print production. In 1982, the US Department of State stopped publishing the bound volumes of UST (however, these volumes may be found in federal depository libraries).Footnote 115 Since 2006, the US Department of State has published TIAS exclusively in a digital format (however, previously published pamphlets are still available at federal depository libraries).Footnote 116 As of October 2022, all documents in the League of Nations archives were digitized and made available to the public in open-access form.Footnote 117 The UN now publishes Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General, the source for determining the status of and parties to major conventions, exclusively online.Footnote 118 At its website, the UN notes that it updates Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General in real time.Footnote 119
Three Steps of Treaty Research
There are various steps to treaty research, however. While conducting internet-based research, researchers may simplify their steps to selecting a database and then doing keyword searching. Before the advent of internet-based legal research, treaty researchers would begin with an index for the type of treaty sought (e.g., an index for treaties to which the US is a party or an index to bilateral or multilateral treaties between other nations). In these indexes, researchers could search by party to the treaty, subject matter of the treaty, or title.Footnote 120 After locating the citation to a treaty in an index, researchers could find the treaty in a treaty series published by a government or private publisher. In a 1983 article, the late Adolf Sprudzs, Foreign Law Librarian and Lecturer in Legal Bibliography Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School,Footnote 121 provided three steps for beginning international law research: 1) use a secondary source such as a treatise or encyclopedia to get an overview;Footnote 122 2) get to know the sources of the law and the finding aids for those sources;Footnote 123 and 3) recognize and find the primary and secondary sources needed.Footnote 124 As part of step three, Sprudzs recommended writing notes for each source on index cards.Footnote 125 Sprudzs also saw “a fully computerized facility” as a solution for the growing body of treaty documentation for multilateral treaties.Footnote 126 The “fully computerized facility” has come to fruition on the website of the United Nations Treaty Collection, which is not only computerized but also online, where anyone with internet access can use it.Footnote 127
Sprudzs’s three steps are still important in the 21st century, although they may be implemented differently (e.g., accessing secondary sources in databases), and new approaches to research (such as keyword searching) have emerged. While researchers should begin with treatises and encyclopedias, they could just as easily derive descriptive keywords, begin searching in databases that yield results, and then glean the sources from the search results. Keyword searching, rather than thinking of a relevant publication such as an index or treaty series, has become more popular as online databases and internet searching have become more ubiquitous. Subscription databases that return a variety of results in response to researchers’ inputs of keywords encourage researchers to think first in terms of searching by keywords (such as words that describe the parties or subject matter) rather than publications (such as indexes and treaty collections).Footnote 128
This strategy of keyword searching may persist even when researchers recognize that they should first navigate to the specific database within the database—for example, navigating to the World Treaty Library in HeinOnline or typing “USTRTY” in the global search box in Lexis to navigate to the database that contains treaties to which the US is a party. Knowing the published sources for texts and citations of treaties is important, whether for the purpose of knowing where to look in print for the treaty’s text or for a pertinent index, or for the purpose of performing more targeted searching in a database that is drawing from multiple sources.
Sprudzs’s step two, which consists of knowing the appropriate finding aids and publications to consult, is still useful, and many of these finding aids are now internet-based. Step three consists of locating primary and secondary sources and taking notes. In the 21st century, these notes are likely to be digital, whether through a web-based system such as an online reference manager,Footnote 129 or documented in an application in an electronic tablet or computer. The second step in treaty research, after searching in print using an index (and sometimes also after using internet-based indexes), would be to take the treaty number or name and find the text of the treaty in the collection specified in the index.Footnote 130 Generally, researchers will want to find the following: 1) the text of the treaty; 2) the parties to the treaty; 3) ancillary agreements or other documents, such as reservations, understandings, and declarations to the treaty; and 4) modifications that came after the treaty entered into effect.Footnote 131 As stated above, there are many internet-based resources for researching treaties. Some of these internet-based resources consist of both an index and the full text of treaties, and others consist of indexes only. The FLARE Index to Treaties (one of many “cool tools”) is one such resource that is an index alone; however, it is an open-access index that provides links to open-access, full-text versions of treaties where available.
“Cool Tool”: The FLARE Index to Treaties
Origin
The Foreign Law Research Group (FLARE) and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) published the FLARE Index to Treaties in March 2009.Footnote 132 The acronym FLARE comes from the initial letters or letter in the name of the Foreign Law Research Group: FLA, which comes from the first letters in the words “foreign” and “law,” and RE, which comes from the first letters of the term “research group.”Footnote 133 FLARE consists of institutions in the United Kingdom (UK) with substantial foreign law collections (IALS, the Bodleian Law Library at Oxford University, the Squire Law Library at Cambridge University, the British Library, and SOAS, University of London), and IALS is the chair of FLARE.Footnote 134 Peter Clinch, a former law librarian at Cardiff University, provided the concept for the database and the list of treaties to be included.Footnote 135 Steven Whittle, a former digital manager at IALS, created the database and its search engine on IALS’s website.Footnote 136 Clinch and Whittle designed the database for both scholars and legal practitioners.Footnote 137 The University of London’s Vice-Chancellor’s Development Fund provided the initial funding for FLARE.Footnote 138 The information on treaties in the database is from established and respected sources, with Multilateral Treaties: Index and Current Status by M.J. Bowman and D.J. Harris and the World Treaty Index by Peter H. Rohn being the foundational sources.Footnote 139 A host of other treaty indexes and websites listing treaties were also included in the creation of the database.Footnote 140
Coverage
The FLARE Index to Treaties contains over 2,000 multilateral treaties that date from the 1600s to 2010.Footnote 141 It also includes selected bilateral treaties dating from 1353 to 1815. Users may search for treaties by keywordFootnote 142 (keywords may include the official, popular, and alternative titles of treaties),Footnote 143 date concluded, and place concluded. For each treaty, the database provides the title, date concluded, place concluded, citations to the treaty in other indexes, citations to the treaty in print sources, and, if available, a link to the full text of the treaty in an open-access source.Footnote 144 The database itself does not contain the full texts of treatiesFootnote 145 and does not maintain information on whether a treaty is still in force.Footnote 146 At the initial launch of the database, the creators expressed a desire to update the index once a year and update listed URLs as needed.Footnote 147 If a researcher clicks on “Search” from the homepage without placing information in the search boxes, then the FLARE Index to Treaties will display a listing of every treaty included in the index.Footnote 148
Observations Regarding the Place of the FLARE Index to Treaties in Treaty Research
As far as what researchers will want to find regarding a treaty—that is, 1) the text of the treaty; 2) the parties to the treaty; 3) ancillary agreements or other documents, such as reservations, understandings, and declarations to the treaty; and 4) modifications that came after the treaty entered into effectFootnote 149—the FLARE Index to Treaties is useful for step one of the research, finding the text of a treaty, because the FLARE Index provides the title, date concluded, place concluded, citations to the treaty in other indexes, citations to the treaty in print sources, and, if available, a link to the full text of the treaty in an open-access source.Footnote 150 In essence, the FLARE Index provides a citation that can be used to get the full text of a treaty. For the second half of step one, which consists of actually getting the full text of the treaty, as well as steps two, three, and four, researchers will have to consult another source.
Finding the Text of a Treaty
There are many sources for locating the full texts of treaties. For treaties to which the US is a party, there are UST, TIAS, the US Department of State’s website (which has TIF), and a host of other sources.Footnote 151 If searching for the texts of treaties for other nations, check the official treaty series of a known party to the treaty for the text of the treaty, international governmental organizations’ treaty series, official gazettes, statutes, loose-leaf services, websites, subscription databases, and periodicals such as ILM.Footnote 152 Sources of State Practice in International Law has a detailed list of sources for treaties for the following nations: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.Footnote 153 Also, there is a listing of treaty compilations covering multiple jurisdictions, such as UNTS, LNTS, CTS, ILM, and websites with the texts of treaties, as well as indexes to treaties by subject.Footnote 154
At the time of its publication in 2002, Sources of State Practice in International Law included descriptions of many sources that had not been described before,Footnote 155 and the editors anticipated that the internet would become a more valuable source for publishing treaties as time progressed.Footnote 156 In the second revised edition of Sources of State Practice (2014), the editors noted that the Internet was not yet an all-compassing source for treaties, but there were many more treaties available on the Internet than in the past.Footnote 157 In the second revised edition, there was also a detailed list of sources for treaties for the following nations: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Romania, Russia, Singapore, the Republic of South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the Swiss Confederation, the UK, and the US.Footnote 158
Finding the Parties to a Treaty
The FLARE Index to Treaties focuses on world treaties, not just treaties to which the US is a party. Users can search by keyword in the FLARE Index. While there is no search field specifically for parties, users can use the “FREE TEXT search for a treaty” field and type in a party’s name. Furthermore, the titles of treaties do not always denote every party to the treaty. A source for searching for the text of treaties to which the US is a party is TIF, which is available at the US Department of State’s website.Footnote 159 Also, UST and TIAS, which are both available in HeinOnline, are additional sources.Footnote 160 However, historical treaties to which the US is a party may be found in other sources.Footnote 161 Sources for searching for treaties regardless of whether the US is a party are mentioned above and are available online in subscription and open-access databases. For example, researchers may search by “participant” (party) on the UNTS OnlineFootnote 162 page and by party using the various indexes in HeinOnline.Footnote 163
Finding Ancillary Agreements to a Treaty and Finding Modifications that Came After the Treaty Entered into Effect
For treaties to which the US is a party, TIF will have information on protocols and citations to amendments if there are amendments.Footnote 164 For other treaties, researchers should search the websites of treaty secretariats and depositories to find ancillary agreements to treaties.Footnote 165 When the UN Secretary-General’s office is not a depository for a treaty, UNTS may still provide the text of the reservation in or near the text of the treaty.Footnote 166 Nations that have acceded to a treaty after the treaty took effect will have their reservations published separately in UNTS.Footnote 167 Again, for treaties to which the US is a party, TIF will have information on protocols and citations to amendments if there are amendments.Footnote 168
Core Skill: Translating Foreign-Language Materials
FCIL librarians working in US law libraries connect patrons with accurate and authoritative sources of legal information about foreign law (the law of foreign jurisdictions), comparative law (the study of foreign legal systems), and international law (the law that regulates sovereign nations and international organizations). Oftentimes, legal information about foreign, comparative, and/or international law is published in a language other than English. Since it is impossible for any one person to be fluent in every language, FCIL librarians seek out a variety of translation tools to help them navigate foreign-language materials.
Overview of Foreign-Language Translation Tools
In the context of FCIL librarianship, translation tools are sources that help FCIL librarians discover and analyze foreign-language materials. The best translation tools are official (or quasi-official) English-language versions of foreign-language materials published by governmental (or intergovernmental) institutions and/or certified by professional (human) translators. In the absence of authorized translations, FCIL librarians consult classic reference sources for translation assistance, such as friends and colleagues with foreign-language skills, catalog subject headings, bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, thesauri, indexes, and research guides. All these classic reference sources rely on the human expert, who, ideally, is well-versed not only in foreign language(s) and English but is also deeply knowledgeable about the law(s) and legal culture(s) of the foreign jurisdiction(s). In addition to these classic reference sources, FCIL librarians working in US law libraries today consult non-human translation tools that rely on advances in AI. As discussed below, these non-human translation tools are valuable resources, but they do not yet provide high-quality legal translations comparable to those offered by authorized translations or classic reference sources, and their future potential to do so depends very much on expert human intervention.
Foreign-Language Translation by Generation
FCIL librarians of all three generations have preferred and prefer translation tools created by humans with demonstrated expertise in the language, law, and/or legal culture of a foreign jurisdiction. The specific translation tools available to FCIL librarians in each generation have differed, of course, depending on technological capabilities and source quality. However, FCIL librarians of all generations have believed that human experts are best able to understand and convey the meanings and contexts of words that appear in foreign-language materials, particularly in foreign-language legal materials, given the importance of precise terminology in the study and practice of law.
Generation One
As mentioned in the introduction of this article, most FCIL librarians of the first generation arrived in the US as refugees from World War II. They were native speakers of at least one (and oftentimes several) foreign language(s). Additionally, as noted above, most FCIL librarians of the first generation received their legal education overseas, usually in a civil law jurisdiction.
Prior to the arrival of the first-generation FCIL librarians, most professional literature about foreign and international law and legal research centered on English-language materials and English-speaking jurisdictions.Footnote 169 Once the first generation of FCIL librarians entered the profession, however, they brought their existing expertise with them. Their language fluency allowed them to expertly search and work with literature across borders, and they eventually began producing their own scholarship—dictionaries,Footnote 170 bibliographies,Footnote 171 indexes,Footnote 172 and articlesFootnote 173—about law and legal culture beyond the English-speaking world. These sources served as translation tools that FCIL librarians of the first generation shared with each other and the wider network of scholars working in the American legal academy at the time. These sources did not, however, prescribe a step-by-step process for identifying, translating, and analyzing foreign legal materials for an audience that lacked the relevant foreign-language skills and/or existing knowledge of civil legal systems. This was why FCIL librarians of the second generation did not feel as prepared to succeed FCIL librarians of the first generation; many second-generation FCIL librarians lacked not only native foreign-language fluency but also a structured approach to FCIL research and librarianship.Footnote 174
Generation Two
FCIL librarians of the second generation, to overcome their professional insecurities, embarked on a collective effort to create a formal and comprehensive training program for FCIL research and librarianship.Footnote 175 As mentioned in the introduction, the training program (under the auspices of AALL) was composed of five institutes, each with its own subject focus.
The Institute on Foreign Legal Systems was one of the five institutes developed as part of the training program. Its curriculum (and resulting textbook) provided a basic framework of how to research the law of selected foreign jurisdictionsFootnote 176 and addressed various concerns about overcoming language barriers. On the topic of foreign law in translation, one participant noted the following:Footnote 177
All translation involves choosing synonyms that most nearly reflect the meaning of the original words. Because few languages are absolutely equivalent, some alteration in the meaning of the translated document is inevitable. To one who merely seeks a general idea of what the law says, this alteration may not be important. But, when you consider the number of lawsuits that turn on the meaning of words in a statute written in a language common to all of the parties, you quickly realize that, under some circumstances, any alteration of the meaning of the statute may be critical.Footnote 178
Despite the inherently limited nature of foreign law in translation, FCIL librarians attending the Institute on Foreign Legal Systems sought “Tools for overcoming language obstacles.”Footnote 179 In response, the Institute on Foreign Legal Systems recommended that FCIL librarians consult three types of translation tools: (1) English-language secondary sources about the laws and legal systems of foreign jurisdictions;Footnote 180 (2) foreign-language and foreign legal dictionaries; and (3) people “familiar with both the languages and the legal systems involved.”Footnote 181 The textbook published by the Institute on Foreign Legal Systems provided articles, bibliographies, and even a directory of FCIL librarians around the world to help FCIL librarians locate all three types of translation tools. The directory included the names of FCIL librarians with jurisdictional, subject database, and/or language expertise, as well as FCIL librarians with an interest in a particular subject or jurisdiction but without demonstrated expertise.Footnote 182 More than anything else, though, during the Institute of Foreign Legal Systems’ comprehensive training program, FCIL librarians of the second generation learned one key message: seek information from multiple sources, especially when navigating foreign-language materials, and recognize that “perfect” translations may not be available or even necessary for all purposes.Footnote 183
A couple of second-generation FCIL librarians with foreign-language fluency led discussions about the challenges of foreign-language translations. Francisco Avalos, who compiled a dictionary of Spanish and Portuguese legal abbreviations,Footnote 184 delivered a lecture at the National Language Resource Center about the sanctity of accurate legal translations.Footnote 185 In his lecture, Avalos explained, “Legal translating demands a precision that may not be required in other types of translations. The legal translator has to comply not only with the rules of a foreign language but also with the rules of a foreign legal system. […] Precision in legal translations requires fidelity to the text and to the context.”Footnote 186
Similarly, Claire Germain, in Germain’s Transnational Law Research, warned that word translations could not fully convey foreign legal concepts because they lacked the requisite cultural context.Footnote 187 For example, she wrote:
To translate Conseil d’Etat simply as the Council of State is not very meaningful if one ignores the fact that the Conseil d’Etat serves both as a counseling body to the government and as the highest administrative court in France, and that, more importantly, in France and several other civil law countries, the government and its employees (at the national, regional, and local levels in a unitary state) cannot be sued in ordinary courts (at least for most purposes) but only in administrative courts.Footnote 188
Additionally, Germain warned against the danger of “faux amis,” or words that look or sound similar in different languages but carry very different meanings.Footnote 189 As an example, “[T]he concept of ‘notary’ is a good illustration of misleading synonyms. In civil law countries, the ‘notaire’ is a highly trained legal professional with a law degree and a specialized training similar to the one required of judges or attorneys.”Footnote 190
Nonetheless, despite the inherent limitations of legal translations, both Avalos and Germain acknowledged the need for tools to translate foreign legal materials. According to Avalos, “The primary tools of the legal translator are going to be dictionaries. […] A translator will need several bilingual legal dictionaries to perform his/her work.”Footnote 191 In addition to legal dictionaries, Germain recommended, as the “best place to start,”Footnote 192 a source that remains current today—the Foreign Law Guide, which provides background information on foreign jurisdictions, as well as citations to foreign-law translations if they exist.Footnote 193
By the early to mid-2000s, FCIL librarians were adapting their research to the online environment. As one librarian noted, “The trend towards online access over print, which was still developing in 2001 is now unquestionable and the amount of law-related material on the Web has expanded exponentially.”Footnote 194 In the context of foreign-language translations, FCIL librarians began consulting “Web-based translators” like BabelFish as supplements to traditional translation tools.Footnote 195 These free services relied on machine translation, a type of AI, and were valuable for getting a general idea of the content of a foreign-language document, but did not provide quality legal translations.Footnote 196 As one librarian who taught a legal research class explained, “Language is very important to lawyers, and I want to get the point across to my students that you cannot rely on these programs for a translation that you plan to use in the actual practice of law.”Footnote 197 After all, these web-based translators were not legal dictionaries; they did not always understand when words had legal connotations. For example, the tools would not necessarily provide a useful translation of the word “antitrust” because they understood the word as the literal words “anti” “trust” together, rather than the representation of the concept of what is more commonly referred to around the world as “competition law” or “antimonopoly law.”
In International and Foreign Legal Research: A Coursebook, Marci Hoffman and Mary Rumsey, two prominent FCIL librarians of the second generation, explained the price researchers pay when seeking English-language translations of foreign legal materials—that is, the loss of authority.Footnote 198 Also, they admitted the unfortunate reality that “[w]ithout knowing the language in question, you can’t evaluate the quality [of the translation] yourself.”Footnote 199 With respect to machine translation systems like BabelFish and Google Translate, Hoffman and Rumsey simply stated that “[n]o matter how much you want an English translation of a law, relying on online translators will at best embarrass or confuse you. At worst, it might lead you to provide inaccurate legal advice.”Footnote 200 Instead of online translation tools, Hoffman and Rumsey recommended conducting research in the Foreign Law Guide, subject collections of translations in print and online, legal research guides on foreign jurisdictions, government websites, journal articles, catalog records, and human experts.Footnote 201
Generation Three
FCIL librarians of the third generation entered the profession with access to a wealth of scholarship about FCIL research and librarianship, as cited throughout this article. This foundation of professional knowledge included recommendations and analyses of foreign-language translation tools. Third-generation FCIL librarians still consult many of the high-quality translation tools valued by FCIL librarians of prior generations (e.g., legal dictionaries,Footnote 202 institutional thesauri,Footnote 203 catalog subject headings,Footnote 204 and research guides),Footnote 205 particularly when these tools are updated and/or available online.Footnote 206 This article will highlight one of these time-tested authoritative tools (EuroVoc), below.
In addition to these classic reference translation tools, FCIL librarians of the third generation also still consult free online translation tools that leverage innovations in AI. These translation tools are great in a pinch, but they do not provide consistent, high-quality legal translations unless they offer customizable expert human intervention. This article will highlight one of these AI-powered translation tools (DeepL), below.
Foreign-Language Translation “Cool Tools”
“Cool Tool”: EuroVoc
Although many of the tools discussed in this article have been created by librarians or legal information vendors, some—like TIF—are crucial resources developed by governments for official purposes but also serve to benefit the public. For jurisdictions with two or more official languages, the necessity to ensure parity between official documents in each official language has required the creation of specialized legal thesauri. Nowhere is that more evident than in the European Union (EU), which currently has twenty-four official languages,Footnote 207 and which must produce legally binding documents in each of them. To do this, the EU has undertaken work over the past forty years to not only create but also widely share a number of large-scale, multilingual, parallel language resources.Footnote 208 Of greatest interest to legal researchers is EuroVoc,Footnote 209 which was created in 1984 to serve as a “multilingual thesaurus to facilitate the indexing and retrieval of documents across the diverse linguistic landscape of European institutions.”Footnote 210
Although EuroVoc is referred to as a multilingual thesaurus, for the purposes of an FCIL “cool tool,” it might better be envisioned as an ontology.Footnote 211 The value of an ontology is that it provides a “formal representation of what, to a human, is common sense.”Footnote 212 To take the example used earlier in this section, an antitrust legal scholar in the US would know to look for articles on “competition law” or “antimonopoly law” when looking for comparative treatments of cartels, as it would reflect their expert knowledge that “antitrust law” is synonymous with “competition law.” Conversely, the FCIL librarian may not commonly be aware of the jurisdictional variance in describing the same area of law when being asked to generate a comparative literature review. Because print legal dictionaries and thesauri are not always readily available, the FCIL librarian will want to look for an authoritative, specialized electronic resource like EuroVoc to assist in generating search terms for foreign databases.
Using EuroVoc purely as a thesaurus, the FCIL librarian will quickly learn from the scope note for “anti-trust legislation” that this is “to be used for national laws, primarily American and British,” and should not be used in the context of EU competition policy.Footnote 213 The librarian will now realize, if they weren’t already familiar with the topic, that the preferred English-language term for searching material on international antitrust issues is “competition law.”Footnote 214 By then selecting the preferred term of “competition law,” the user can utilize EuroVoc in a more ontological way; the “Language Equivalents” list on the page for this English-language term will provide the equivalent term in all twenty-four official languages.Footnote 215 What does this allow the FCIL librarian with no foreign-language skills to accomplish? By utilizing EuroVoc’s language equivalents, the librarian is able to search catalogs and indexes for the contextually correct term as opposed to the sometimes-incorrect translation that a basic tool like Google Translate provides. Further, in utilizing another second-generation highlight—the electronic research guide—an FCIL librarian can successfully identify primary-source legal databases in which to run the correct search term to mine for hits. Although dictionaries and thesauri like EuroVoc cannot themselves provide full-text translations, they facilitate searches to obtain the full-text documents that can then be fed into translation tools like DeepL, as described below.
Much focus is being placed on AI’s ability to provide real-time, high-level translations of legal proceedings and documents; however, the translations are still not considered perfect enough to meet legal standards.Footnote 216 The need to guarantee exact translations of legal documents is of critical importance to any transnational practitioner, but even for the research librarian, there is a need to ensure they are searching for the correct term in another language.Footnote 217 With large language models (LLMs) being trained on open-access tools such as EuroVoc, and other semantic web initiatives being applied to domestic legislation in Europe,Footnote 218 it is likely that there will be more reliable AI-powered translation products moving forward. But if tools such as EuroVoc are not continually updated and supported by experts and institutions, they will surely lose their “coolness” factor for FCIL librarians and LLMs alike.
“Cool Tool”: DeepL Translator
DeepL Translator is an example of a machine translation tool that leverages recent advancements in AI.Footnote 219 Its system uses artificial neural networks trained on vast amounts of data from a proprietary dataset.Footnote 220 The proprietary dataset includes all the data that DeepL gathered from its original translation product, Linguee.Footnote 221
Linguee provides a free online dictionary and translation database that DeepL publicly launched back in 2009.Footnote 222 To build Linguee, DeepL utilized web crawlers to extract translations from multilingual websites (usually governmental and intergovernmental websites that provided official or authoritative translations).Footnote 223 Once extracted, DeepL further refined translations by employing algorithms and integrating a user input system to capture natural language patterns.Footnote 224 According to DeepL, this process created higher-quality translations than the translations provided by competitors, which relied on data indiscriminately gathered from across the internet.Footnote 225
In 2017, DeepL launched DeepL Translator as a separate product and offered it at various price points, marketing it primarily as a translation tool for sophisticated corporate clients.Footnote 226 DeepL Translator offers two features across all product price points—a general, multilingual language dictionary and a glossary.Footnote 227 The dictionary provides translations of, synonyms for, and grammatical information about foreign words and phrases (replicating information from the Linguee dataset). With a subscription, the glossary provides opportunities to personalize and refine translations in the context of a task or particular industry. For example, a business that wants to upgrade its DeepL Translator subscription can hire people with foreign-language fluency and industry expertise to customize its glossaries, thereby automating future translations of foreign-language materials in the specific context of its company and the wider industry.Footnote 228 To become a reality, however, the aforementioned scenario requires a human expert to personalize the translated output. Absent such an expert, DeepL Translator performs similarly to or arguably slightly better than other machine translation services like Google Translate.Footnote 229
Regardless of performance amongst other machine translation tools, DeepL Translator cannot replace and is not equivalent to a classic print translation tool like a bilingual legal dictionary edited and curated by a scholar,Footnote 230 or an ontology developed by an intergovernmental organization with a controlled vocabulary approved by professional translators.Footnote 231 The latter tools provide a level of quality that machine translation tools, absent expert human intervention, have yet to (and may never) achieve. Yet, DeepL Translator and other contemporary machine translation tools still provide value. Unlike bilingual legal dictionaries and EuroVoc, which require users to search for individual words or legal concepts, DeepL Translator allows users to paste many textual characters into the system at once and receive a translation in context.Footnote 232 Users can also upload documents into the system, which yields translations in the context of an entire document and not just within a certain number of characters. DeepL Translator’s output in response to these user engagements may not be a perfect translation, but it may be enough to satisfy the immediate needs of an FCIL librarian before they supplement their research with more authoritative sources.
Observations Regarding Foreign-Language Translation “Cool Tools”
FCIL librarians have always recognized the inherent limitations of foreign-language translations, especially in the legal context, and yet, despite these limitations, FCIL librarians have always valued translation tools that help them overcome language barriers enough to get a general idea (the “gist”) of the content of foreign legal materials. That said, although there are many translation tools on the market today, the translation quality can vary dramatically, and legal researchers around the world would benefit from a collective effort to articulate standards for quality assessment.Footnote 233 Further concern comes from the still-developing field of generative AI tools and how they will continue to evolve. A potential future research agenda would address this underdeveloped topic in the professional literature and create a framework for evaluating the foreign-language translation tools of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Core Skill: Locating Documents from International Organizations (IOs) and Specialized Fields of Study—Public International Law
Overview of IOs and Specialized Fields of Study in International Law
Legal documents and materials produced by international organizations (IOs), such as the treaties discussed above, serve as sources of international law. They are thus indispensable to international legal research. As jurisprudence and literature emanate from these institutions, specialized fields of international law emerge over time in tandem. Naturally, FCIL librarians have been paying close attention to these developments over the years, leading the charge in forming best practices and learning the tools of the trade for research as part of their core skill sets.Footnote 234
This portion of the article will trace the development of IOs and specialty international law research in the public international law context. Given the limited scope and space constraints, the historical developments of IOs and international criminal law (ICL) research (an example of a specialized area) will be explored summarily across the three generations of FCIL librarians. This will be followed by a deeper dive into the “cool tool” implications for the ICL field and what specialized research entails. Two key “cool tools” have been selected for illustrative focus—Lexsitus,Footnote 235 for ICL, and the now-defunct International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) Art Law & Cultural Property DatabaseFootnote 236 (IFAR Database) for specialized research. The latter “cool tool” also brings up the important issue of database preservation and longevity, which will also be addressed here.
To begin understanding how researching IOs and international law specializations have evolved over time, it is necessary to articulate a definition of IOs, how they contribute to sources of international law, and the relationship between IOs and specialized fields of international law. Broadly, the UN has defined an IO as “an organization established by a treaty or other instrument governed by international law and possessing its own international legal personality.”Footnote 237 A distinction exists between intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with the former created by international agreements between States and the latter established by private parties.Footnote 238 The UN definition is limited to the former, and so is the scope of our discussion of IOs in this article.
IOs are important producers of sources of public international law. These sources, under Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ Statute), include international conventions, custom, and general principles of law as formal sources of international law, while judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists are subsidiary means for determining the law.Footnote 239 Various IOs, such as UN bodies, actively contribute to these sources by issuing conventions, facilitating treaty-making, and codifying custom.Footnote 240 They may also produce UN resolutions and other non-binding recommendations or juridical acts, which are not themselves formal sources of law within the remit of the ICJ Statute, but they may create soft law or serve as evidence of the formal sources.Footnote 241 IO materials are therefore essential to research.
To research international law effectively, particularly specialized international law topics, one must appreciate the significance of the relationship between IOs and the specialized domains of international law. Historically, IOs arose out of States trying to meet the needs of their people through “productive interactions […] transnationally across borders.”Footnote 242 Early IOs, such as the International Telegraphic Union in 1865 and the Universal Postal Union in 1874, are examples.Footnote 243 These IOs, along with their promulgated norms and principles, grew to shape the course of international activity. Targeted activities of IOs meeting specific needs eventually formed specialized substantive fields of international law. As suggested by the UN’s International Law Commission,
New types of specialized law do not emerge accidentally but seek to respond to new technical and functional requirements. The emergence of “environmental law” is a response to growing concern over the state of the international environment. “Trade law” develops as an instrument to regulate international economic relations.Footnote 244
Therefore, the establishment of the first IOs helped set the foundation for the emergence of a new academic discipline of international lawFootnote 245 and specialized topics in international law by extension. Any attempt to research these specialized fields is inextricably intertwined with IO research.
In examining specialized areas of public international law research, it also helps to examine what specialized legal research entails conceptually. To that end, specialized legal research can be many things, but at its core, it often means a subset of legal study that requires specialized vocabulary and background knowledge that may not always be covered in one of the main doctrinal or bar classes. Most novice researchers, such as students, would likely not have received much, if any, specialized legal research training. Hence, it is even more important for the newest generation of FCIL librarians to offer those opportunities when available.Footnote 246 Foreign and international legal research itself may be too big a topic to be seen as specialized (this is subject to debate), but what happens when an FCIL librarian needs to tackle an even more specialized area of international law? This is where the librarian may see additional databases and tools on those specialized topics become more valuable.Footnote 247 How lawyers organize themselves, or how concentrated and significant the resources devoted to that area are, the more likely that area of specialized legal research merits adding a specialty database to a collectionFootnote 248 or providing additional guidance and training on that database.
An article in the ABA Journal in 2018 compared the algorithms of six general legal research databases, comparing them to each other and seeing which cases were commonly found across the databases and which were not.Footnote 249 The article’s author considered such factors as the additional resources databases pulled from to refine their search algorithms, proximity limits, grammar, prioritization, and the amount of machine learning incorporated into the backend.Footnote 250 Ultimately, what all researchers want is relevant results, and yet the relevant results as presented in the article were between 40% and 70%, depending on the database.Footnote 251 One of the article’s main takeaways was that every algorithm is different, and every database has a point of view; using a specialized database for a specialized area of legal research can hopefully help increase the relevancy of results.Footnote 252
Having carved an understanding of IOs and specialized FCIL research, the development of how research has been conducted in these areas will now be traced across the three generations of FCIL librarians.
IO and ICL Research Under Three Generations of FCIL Librarianship
Similar to the sections above that analyzed developments across generations, we have observed how facets of international legal research of IOs and specialized domains of international law have evolved over time, while noting that certain norms and practices have endured the times.
As a general starting point, the contemporary sources for how FCIL librarians in the current generation may learn about conducting research in these areas include both traditional publications and newer media. These are sources used across generations. The traditional publications usually comprise reference works, such as a chapter found in a textbook, manual, or handbook, or a stand-alone journal article. A classic example of a nontraditional medium is the online research guide, frequently relied on by librarians. Several are known as “LibGuides,” based on the hosting platform Springshare,Footnote 253 though some may be independently hosted. Naturally, the current generation makes use of both traditional and nontraditional works, while Generations One and Two primarily tapped into traditional publications.
Examples based on the above archetypes include the following:
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• Books and book chapters:
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○ Book: Mumm, James A. International Military Tribunal for the Far East: A Legal Research Guide. Legal Research Guides Series, vol. 97. William S. Hein, 2023.
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○ Chapter/Part: Hoffman, Marci, and Mary Rumsey. “Part Five: International Organizations.” In International and Foreign Legal Research: A Coursebook, 2nd ed. Martinus Nijhoff, 2012, pp. 167–222.
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• Articles:
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○ Kearley, Timothy. “American Researcher’s Guide to European Communities Law and Legal Literature.” Law Library Journal 75, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 52–97.
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○ Miller, Steven Robert. “United Nations Databases and Websites for Legal Research and Education.” Res Gestae 54, no. 3 (October 2010): 12–20.
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○ Bestafka-Cruz, Anthony. “Searching Through Systems: Research Guide for UN Criminal Tribunals.” International Journal of Legal Information 40, no. 3 (2012): 516–82.
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• Research guides:
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○ Partin, Gail. “e-RG Electronic Resource Guide: International Criminal Law.” American Society of International Law. April 1, 2015. https://www.asil.org/sites/default/files/ERG_CRIM.pdf [https://perma.cc/KY63-ZTY3].
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○ Jacob Burns Law Library. “Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Law.” George Washington University. Updated October 18, 2024. https://law.gwu.libguides.com/artculture [https://perma.cc/3LKR-AJUT].
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In the FCIL profession, librarians have suggested various canonical texts for teaching and learning purposes.Footnote 254 The recommended literature on international legal research will typically dedicate chapters to IOs in general, major IOs in the landscape, and major topics in international law.Footnote 255 With an understanding of how these different sources are situated currently, their historical trajectories can be analyzed.
IO Research
IOs have proliferated under the international legal landscape over the course of the three generations. According to the 2024/2025 edition of the Yearbook of International Organizations, published by Brill, there are more than 77,000 international organizations, including IGOs, NGOs, and other bodies.Footnote 256 When the Yearbook was first published in 1909, there were only 213.Footnote 257 With the growing abundance of IOs and documents they generate, it is no wonder that there are observable changes in the resources and strategies used by librarians in their research. Yet, certain aspects remain the same.
Generation One
A full historical analysis of the evolution of IO legal research remains outside the scope of this article, but snapshots of past and current practices are still insightful. The work of Robert Schaaf is illustrative. Schaaf worked as the Senior Specialist in UN and International Documents at the Library of Congress (LOC) throughout his career. In one article, he elucidated how the LOC approached IGO documents and publications back in the 1980s.Footnote 258 At that time, IGO publications were available from the library catalog, “first in card and book form and more recently in machine-readable form.”Footnote 259 These have morphed into our modern library catalogs of the day. For IGO documents, researchers had to rely on “appropriate indexes, such as UNDOC: Current Index.”Footnote 260 Physical indexes still exist today, but full-text database searches, such as the UN Official Document System website,Footnote 261 tend to be the preferred ports of call. Other scholars discussed the nature, use, availability, and accessibility of IGO documents back then.Footnote 262
Generations Two and Three
As new reputable sources have emerged, scholars such as Marci Hoffman have shared their recommendations for modern IO research.Footnote 263 Many of these resources are direct successors to the traditional publications used during the time periods of Generations One and Two. The Oxford International Organizations (OXIO) online platform is one example, being an authoritative, annotated repository of international institutional documents that is part of Oxford University Press’s Public International Law suite.Footnote 264 Internet searches outside publisher platforms are also prevalent today, unsurprisingly. Hoffman suggests performing an advanced Google search with site or domain filters applied as a way to optimize the retrieval of IO documents publicly available online.Footnote 265 Jeroen Vervliet considers this increasing availability of IO documents online to be a point of celebration, as their dissemination is becoming more democratized compared to the past when IOs were limited to publishing their documents in print with a commercial publisher.Footnote 266 Nevertheless, print retains an advantage in some situations, as Hoffman acknowledges that it may sometimes be the only option for historical materials.Footnote 267 Print indexes in particular can also be valuable for providing a normative framework for understanding how the materials are organized. Therefore, although a significant number of research tools have had their media changed, and new tools of this nature constantly emerge, the current generation of FCIL librarians still acknowledges that some traditional tools and resources maintain their relevancy.
Cross-Generational Similarities
When it comes to practices and principles as opposed to tools, these tend to be more technology agnostic, and most remain relevant as they withstand the currents of time. Some are common sense in our profession, as Hoffman exhorts: “Follow the oldest research advice in the world and know the territory before you enter it” by starting with a research guide or an article about the subject matter at hand.Footnote 268 Others may require more advocacy and initiative. For instance, Schaaf noted that the training of new librarians in IO research was an important priority and remains so to date. Earlier, in the 1970s, librarians realized that “the lack of training” contributed to the underutilization of international documents.Footnote 269 Back then, the “average documents course in a library school” was mainly limited to US and UN documents.Footnote 270 It was only through early initiatives that training opportunities expanded. For instance, the American Library Association’s Government Documents Round Table and International Documents Taskforce have crucially held “more conferences and training courses on international documents since the early seventies.”Footnote 271 Training remains an ongoing priority in the current landscape. We see it exemplified by the premise of this article itself, along with the good work of professional bodies such as the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) Education Committee.Footnote 272 This theme of building our human and social capital in our profession continues to prevail across generations.
Relatedly, it is significant that Schaaf emphasized the need to tap into the “reference librarians in the various reading rooms” as a resource and, in particular, their expertise in “keep[ing] on top of their fields […] new LC acquisitions […] and exploit[ing] a network of contacts.”Footnote 273 To date, this is still important and has not changed—that is, the notion of FCIL librarians being wellsprings of expertise and the importance of maintaining a robust professional support network. Although it was harder to obtain specific documents then, Schaaf and his colleagues at the LOC were able to overcome these hurdles with their valuable networks and resourcefulness.Footnote 274 While some of the tools that FCIL librarians use for IO research have changed, human expertise and collaboration remain paramount throughout the generations, and this is also true for other areas outside IO research.Footnote 275
ICL Research
Introduction
Developments in the field of ICL and ICL research are spread unevenly across the generations of FCIL librarians. This is directly tied to the ongoing movements (or lack thereof) throughout the time periods. These developments can be broken down across the three generations into roughly three time periods based on different key founding events:Footnote 276 (1) Generation One—Post-World War II (WWII) Nuremberg/Tokyo Trials (1945–1990); (2) Generation Two—Post-Cold War influx of international criminal courts and tribunals (1990–2010); and (3) Generation Three—2010 to the present.
Before examining each generation in the following analyses, there are three preliminary points. First, although the focus of this subsection is on FCIL librarianship and ICL research movements, these are still closely dependent on the substantive developments in ICL itself. The latter will naturally feature heavily in the analyses, and some conflation may be inevitable. Second, as caveated from the outset, the historical analysis does not purport to be comprehensive.Footnote 277 The limitations of space here will not do justice to the rich tapestry of ICL history, though an effort will be made to offer a window into the past. Third, a sense of the timeline may still help situate the various developments in the broader longitudinal context. To facilitate this understanding, Table 1 comprises a list of criminal courts, tribunals, and adjudicatory bodies with an international characterFootnote 278 established over time, as outlined by the UNFootnote 279 and the Hybrid Justice project.Footnote 280
Table 1: Chronological Overview of Major International/Hybrid Criminal Courts, Tribunals, and Adjudicatory Bodies Established over Time:
Generation One and Prior
A common refrain is that ICL faced a lull period up until the end of the Cold War,Footnote 283 hence the earlier characterization of these developments as “uneven.” An almost five-decade gap is observable from Table 1. There are multiple theories for why ICL arguably stagnated in this period,Footnote 284 though this remains outside the scope of this article. The main takeaway is that it was a time for incremental growth, with the gradual emergence of figures, institutions, and literature in ICL being established over time. FCIL librarianship unsurprisingly mirrored these movements.
Pre-WWII: Before the rise of Generation One, ICL was in its formative stages. International criminal trials were sparse but did arguably exist, and a number of well-known international treaties on the subject, such as the First and Second Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, were created.Footnote 285 From an institutional angle, the oldest ICL organization was the International Union of Penal Law, founded in 1889, which was succeeded by the International Association of Penal Law (IAPL), established in France in 1924.Footnote 286 Early literature on the subject included a major five-volume treatise by French jurist Maurice Travers.Footnote 287 The IAPL also spearheaded various intellectual endeavors, including the publication of one of the earliest ICL journals—the Revue Internationale de Droit Pénal (International Review of Penal Law).Footnote 288 This time period saw some scholars debating the evolving positionality of criminal law within the public international law landscape.Footnote 289
From an FCIL librarianship standpoint, the tools of the trade were not any different than those of other fields at that time—that is, the use of traditional reference works such as bibliographies and indexes still applied. Frederick Charles Hicks, a known giant in the field, reviewed one of the international law bibliographies of that time and identified a sample typology of available bibliographies: “(1) bibliographies in the form of independent books, (2) treatises in which bibliography is a prominent feature, (3) bibliographic information to be found in periodicals, (4) catalogues of law libraries, jurists or publishers having bibliographic value, and (5) bibliographies on special subjects.”Footnote 290 Some examples were materials like the “Bibliography on Jurisdiction with Respect to Crime,” published in the American Journal of International Law. Footnote 291
Post-WWII: World War II was an inflexion point with the formation of the first modern international criminal courts in Nuremberg and Tokyo.Footnote 292 A key figure driving the developments from this point onwards was M. Cherif Bassiouni, fondly referred to as the “father” of modern ICL.Footnote 293 He had undertaken a more “systematic examination of the discipline,”Footnote 294 resulting in the publication of a two-volume treatise in 1973, A Treatise on International Criminal Law,Footnote 295 co-authored with Ved Nanda. This, alongside International Criminal Law by Mueller and Wise (1965),Footnote 296 were then the “only books published in the United States on the subject.”Footnote 297 This suggests that there was a postwar shift towards increasing consolidation and synthesis to address a perceived dearth in the literature (at least from an Anglo-American-centric perspective).
Several emerging works were useful for Generation One librarians, some falling squarely in Hicks’s typology.Footnote 298 Bibliographies in treatises have always been useful, serving as finding aids; Mueller and Wise’s book was lauded in a book review for its “yeoman services” in its “pioneer[ing] effort” in “providing a detailed bibliography” and being a useful “source book.”Footnote 299 Another category, the stand-alone specialist bibliography, is exemplified by the useful landmark reference text, Bibliography on International Criminal Law, by de Schutter and Eliaerts (1972).Footnote 300 This work was included in the Recommended Publications for Legal Research,Footnote 301 a tool that allowed the bibliography to be more discoverable by librarians at the time. The Bibliography on International Criminal Law continued to be cited and recommended by librarians on the cusp of Generation One and into Generation Two.Footnote 302 And with the introduction of new international criminal courts, finding aids for their materials naturally emerged as well, like one index created for the Tokyo Trials.Footnote 303 Interestingly, bibliographical tools were not confined to just traditional publications; some of these were compiled as part of formal IO documentation too,Footnote 304 which was simultaneously taking root.
Lawyers recognized the need and critical role of librarians in helping to systematize the sources of international law (and ICL by extension) at this crucial stage. At the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) in 1948, the “highly unscientific character of the development of international law” was lamented, which had to be remediated comprehensively by addressing the “problem of indexing” to create an “international law library […] for the use of lawyers and scholars.”Footnote 305 Fortunately, early international law libraries like that of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law were a part of this effort despite disruptions caused by the war.Footnote 306 And tools catering to the international lawyer and law librarian were created, such as the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP), with the first volume already including International Criminal Law as a subject heading when the IFLP was first launched in 1960.Footnote 307 ICL in the post-WWII decades was growing to be more entrenched alongside general public international law and IO movements, albeit at a slow trickle.
Generation Two
The 1990s, after the Cold War, proved to be a founding moment for ICL. Professor Bassiouni was instrumental as a key catalyst for the movement, bringing about much-needed expertise and resources for setting up the first ad hoc international criminal tribunal and “institutional embryo,” the ICTY.Footnote 308 After numerous setbacks,Footnote 309 it was his dogged perseverance that finally led to a “breakthrough,” allowing the ICL movement to gain sufficient “momentum.”Footnote 310 As the hard work of Bassiouni and countless others finally came to fruition, a precipitated paradigm shift in ICL ensued, with a rapid influx of new judicial institutions,Footnote 311 jurisprudence, and literature, ushering in a new era for the field.
The amount of ICL literature increased exponentially during the two decades from 1990 to 2010.Footnote 312 Based on an n-gram survey in Google conducted by Mikkel Christensen, there was a 600% increase in the number of scholarly publications referencing “international criminal law” from the 1990s to 2008.Footnote 313 According to Christensen, this rise in academic scholarship played an important role in developing and legitimizing the jurisprudence of the newer ICL courts as they sought to experiment with novel innovations in the field.Footnote 314 There was also a new wave of ICL periodical literature, with the addition of the International Criminal Law Review (2001–),Footnote 315 the Journal of International Criminal Justice (2003–),Footnote 316 and the International Journal of Transnational Justice (2007–),Footnote 317 amongst others. The case can be made that FCIL librarianship was even more impactful during this critical period. The contributions of Generation Two librarians, via tasks such as reference and indexing, were particularly helpful in bringing clarity to ICL scholars as they engaged in a sense-making exercise to gather their intellectual bearings during a period of relative flux and information overload.Footnote 318
And indeed, the information needs of scholars and practitioners were pressing. Recall that it was at this time that the first permanent international criminal court, the ICC, was created in 2002 after significant effort.Footnote 319 With the rise of several international and hybrid criminal judicial institutions, ICL libraries had to be rapidly created to meet their corresponding needs. Seasoned library leaders with great expertise and thought leadership were brought in to lead the charge. Elizabeth Naumcyzk was the Foundation Librarian for the ICC Library, and when she was brought in, “she was the library.”Footnote 320 ICL libraries of this time faced unique challenges—many of the institutions were new and in the process of being established themselves—and yet they had time-sensitive requirements since the legal work had already commenced. The libraries had to adapt to IOs’ typical financial and procurement frameworks and gather international legal materials, making those libraries’ formations very different than those of standard domestic law libraries.Footnote 321 Librarians were also brought in to improve ICL libraries, post-establishment. Trinie Thai-Parker participated in the revamp and enhancement of the ECCC Library in Cambodia, playing a crucial role in training personnel, consolidating library projects, and sharing best practices.Footnote 322 Law libraries under hybrid criminal courts, like the ECCC’s, also had transitional considerations, such as potentially moving the materials to a permanent institution in the long term after the work of the tribunal concluded.Footnote 323 Despite these challenges, Naumcyzk and Thai-Parker were able to rise above them with resounding success, serving as models for Generation Three librarians to emulate.
As the number of courts expanded, so too did the amount of jurisprudence. Several useful collections of case law and digests began to emerge. Starting in 1999, the Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals was published and is now the largest international criminal case law series.Footnote 324 As the transition to electronic media took place, databases containing ICL case law, such as the Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL), were launched, with the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law being of specific interest.Footnote 325 ORIL, launched in 2008, was valuable at that time as a one-stop search for major ICL jurisprudence, and it contained value-added features such as expert commentary and citator functions (the latter being of significant interest for librarians).Footnote 326 Open-access databases like the ICC Legal Tools Database (LTD)Footnote 327 have also been key in democratizing the practice of ICL worldwide. Databases like ORIL and the LTD are continuously updated and remain relevant and useful to date, according to thoughtful evaluations by Generation Three librarians.Footnote 328 Other online tools for case law are helpful as well: Lexsitus, which is the key ICL tool discussed below (and a sister tool to the LTD), also has a robust online digest function.Footnote 329
In terms of reference tools, traditional publications like bibliographies continued to be relevant in Generation Two and continue their relevancy in Generation Three. In the early 1990s, print bibliographies were still referred to and recommended as a resource.Footnote 330 Some of these later evolved into online bibliographies and are still as useful as ever. The annotated bibliography on ICL in Oxford Bibliographies is one example, as it provides an analysis of major ICL works and their impact on the field.Footnote 331 The ushering of the digital age also brought about new innovations in the types of reference materials available. Gradually, more ICL bibliographical guides and finding aids were published online, such as through LLRX.comFootnote 332 and ASIL.Footnote 333 The analysis below traces the evolution of some of these nontraditional media.Footnote 334 Online research guides now feature prominently in a common FCIL librarian’s tool set. Many authoritative tools are freely available, including comprehensive sites like GlobaLex that cover specific criminal tribunalsFootnote 335 or tribunals in general,Footnote 336 as well as research guides from leading international law libraries like the Peace Palace Library.Footnote 337
Generation Three
Finally, as the developments in ICL cooled down at the cusp of Generation Two, it was up to Generation Three scholars and librarians to synthesize and perform a round of reconsolidation after the wave of rapid development over the past two decades. Crossing over from Generation Two to Three, there was an observable attitude among both ICL scholars and FCIL librarians who applied a more critical lens and sought avenues of reform. Scholars identified a phenomenon of “tribunal fatigue” after the wave of new tribunals created from the 1990s to early 2000s, when the ad hoc nature and sustainability of several tribunals began to be questioned, with some skepticism emerging as early as the late 1990s.Footnote 338 After momentum petered out from the late 2000s to early 2010s, there was another “resurgence” of ad hoc and hybrid tribunals, which one author deemed a “positive indication of [ICL’s] development and maturity.”Footnote 339 One FCIL librarian, Lyonette Louis-Jacques, also identified emerging gaps in the legal literature as it approached saturation, arguing that “[w]hile much is written on international criminal law, the literature largely lacks representation of the viewpoints of the countries accused of violating international law.”Footnote 340
Further into the library world, there were similar signs that ICL was approaching a certain threshold of substantive development as a scholarly field. The 2011 revision of the LOC classification schedule for ICL was such a milestone.Footnote 341 Discussions on a potential revamp surfaced in 2009, with the eventual update from LOC led by Dr. Jolande Goldberg.Footnote 342 Ranges under Class KZ, International criminal courts and procedure (KZ6304–KZ6332) and other associated classes, were revamped into International criminal law under KZ7000–KZ7500.Footnote 343 New subject headings reflecting Generation Two developments, such as “hybrid international criminal courts” and “complementarity (international law),” were also introduced.Footnote 344
Taken together, all these ebbs and flows, debates, and efforts at reform can arguably be taken to mean that the field had reached a substantial and healthy stage of development by the arrival of Generation Three librarians. With an appreciation of this development stage, readers of this article will now hopefully have more context for the discussions that follow. Namely, we will examine the evolution of some sample IO and ICL tools over time before diving into a significant Generation Three ICL “cool tool” of choice—Lexsitus.
Tracing Trajectories
To identify discernible historical trends in how international legal research evolved over time across the generations, it is useful to look at different established works for longitudinal developments.
Traditional Media
One example of a traditional published work with a longer run is The Guide to International Legal Research (GWILR Guide), a book series published by the George Washington International Law Review since 1989,Footnote 345 with two earlier editions published in the journal itself, in 1981 and 1986. This is a serial reference work that publishes a bibliographic compilation of foreign and international law sources on a regular basis. The GWILR Guide can thus be examined as a sample of publishing patterns in international legal research topics over time, using the different volumes as historical snapshots.
Table 2 is illustrative of the transition over time, starting from the cusp of Generation One (keeping in mind that the GWILR Guide started in the journal in the 1980s). Significant strides were made throughout the time of Generation Two, culminating in the current version available in the time of Generation Three.
Table 2: Changes in the GWILR Guide’s Publishing Patterns in the Areas of IO and ICL Research over Time
Using ICL as a frame of reference in this analysis, it is noteworthy that ICL first formed its own discrete subchapter in 2003. One conjecture is that in the period prior to 2002, new ICL courts were still in their formative periods and were not “ripe” for inclusion. The timing, in 2003, also coincided with the establishment of the ICC in 2002, alongside the fact that the ICTY and ICTR trials were in full motion and had been since they were set up in the 1990s. At this juncture, the aforementioned suggests that the GWILR Guide editors finally recognized a critical mass of ICL jurisprudence and legal publications, and ICL as an area of law was given time to develop from the 1990s to the early 2000s. In 2010, ICL became its own full-fledged chapter in the book, which was also when the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) was established. As highlighted previously, Generation Two librarians and scholars played a critical role in this transitional period.Footnote 355
Although correlation does not imply causation, and the scope of this analysis is limited to this one example, it does lend evidence to the observation that the rise of the significance of ICL in the legal research literature tracks the trajectory of ICL developments in the legal landscape. This conjecture, however, would require more rigorous external validation from the literature.
Nontraditional Media
Another useful example for illustrative purposes is the International Criminal Law Electronic Resource Guide (ICL ERG),Footnote 356 a nontraditional publication in the form of an online research guide. The ICL ERG, authored by Gail Partin, served as an annotated directory of web resources relating to relevant judicial bodies in the area, law enforcement resources, and other specialized categories of international crimes. This resource is part of a set of online Electronic Resource Guides (ERGs) published by ASIL since 1997 that contain key online resources in important areas of international law research.Footnote 357
Tracing the evolution of the ASIL ERGs (and the ICL ERG) sheds some light on the trajectory of IO and ICL research across Generations Two and Three. When the ERGs were first created in 1997, there were only sections on the “United Nations.”Footnote 358 According to a capture on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the ICL ERG was later added as of March 22, 1998,Footnote 359 with the last update being April 1, 2015. Although it has been a while since the last update, the ICL ERG remains a valuable frame of reference for how ICL research resources may evolve over time, especially those in the online realm. For example, in the 1998 guide, sources for the then-proposed ICC spanned five paragraphs,Footnote 360 and by 2015, it had expanded into a six-page list of resources on the ICC—its formation and related issues.Footnote 361 Contemporary issues have also been added, such as a new subsection on “Cyber Crime.”Footnote 362 Our distinguished colleague Gail Partin, who started work on this back in Generation Two, was ahead of her time. She had the foresight to anticipate these important developments in the field, which remain significant to Generation Three librarians. Her work is emblematic of the era when ICL jurisprudence and developments had gradually culminated into an international criminal law “moment.”
These exercises have traced the treatment of IOs and specialized areas of international law with these two examples of traditional and nontraditional legal research reference sources used in FCIL librarianship. Perceptions as to their significance as fields of study have evolved over the three generations, corresponding to their depth of treatment. These exercises arguably evince that, as the number of documents and publications grows exponentially, both IOs and ICL (and other specialized fields that may emerge) will stake their own substantive territory in the research literature over the years.
International Criminal Law and Its “Cool Tool”: Lexsitus
This subsection features the “cool tool” in the field of ICL research: Lexsitus. The analysis includes the tool’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its broader significance within the ICL research landscape. We also examine the implications this tool may have on the FCIL profession, especially Generation Three librarians.
In summary, Lexsitus is an open-access, e-learning platform with a particular focus on ICC practice and ICL. Different modules in Lexsitus enable a researcher to achieve the following goals: (1) learn about the foundations of ICL in the context of ICC practice; (2) retrieve relevant sources of ICL; and (3) analyze and interpret these legal sources with a systematic compilation of the ICL jurisprudence.Footnote 363 Because the contents in Lexsitus have been structured according to the provisions of core ICC statutes, like the Rome StatuteFootnote 364 and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence (RPE),Footnote 365 it is intuitive and easy to use for a wide range of demographics.
Diagram Illustrating Lexsitus’s Framework, © CILRAP. Reproduced with permission.
Preliminary Background
Before diving into the core features of Lexsitus, it is helpful to understand its origin and how to situate it within the ICL research ecosystem. Lexsitus was developed by the Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP), an international nonprofit organization devoted to international law research and capacity building.Footnote 366 Its members include distinguished academics, professionals, and students from around the world.Footnote 367 Much of the work is performed by its Case Matrix Network (CMN) department, which focuses on ICL knowledge transfer and capacity-building projects by providing access to legal information, legal expertise, and open-access tools through its CMN Knowledge Hub.Footnote 368 CILRAP is also the administrator for the leading ICL database, the ICC Legal Tools Database, pursuant to a ten-year agreement between the ICC and CILRAP.Footnote 369
Lexsitus has built on the work of the LTD and should be understood to be part of the same family of platforms under the auspices of CILRAP-CMN.Footnote 370
Because CILRAP has worked on the LTD since 2003,Footnote 371 much of the thinking behind the development of the LTD’s core features also extends to Lexsitus. Lexsitus itself is co-dependent on several features of the LTD, such as permalinks.Footnote 372 The literature surrounding the development of the LTD is thus highly relevant to our discussion of Lexsitus as well, as evidenced by the discussion below.
Analysis of Core Features
Lexsitus is a combination of the Latin words lex and situs, meaning the place of the law, and its name was meant to convey its purpose as a place to learn ICL.Footnote 373 CILRAP first launched this tool on January 30, 2018,Footnote 374 and its second version was released in 2023, following the addition of several new translations.Footnote 375
Contents
There are seven content modules available on the platform. All content is organized according to the provisions found in ICC statutory instruments, enabling a systematic article-by-article analysis. The list below provides a description of the database’s contents and their significance:
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1. Lectures:Footnote 376 Lectures are the primary means through which Lexsitus plays its e-learning role. There are currently more than 230 subtitled lecturesFootnote 377 recorded by fifty-five leading Lexsitus facultyFootnote 378 from around the world. The currency of each lecture can be found by looking at the date of recording in its metadata record. Lectures are pitched at different levels, with the majority classified as “Introductory” lectures and a selected number of “Advanced” lectures that go deeper into the statutory provision. The lectures are subtitled in five languages: English, Arabic, French, Persian, and Russian. All lectures have transcripts with persistent links.
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2. Commentary on the Law of the International Criminal Court (CLICC):Footnote 379 CLICC functions as an encyclopedic commentary of all provisions in the ICC Statute and the RPE. It is an online compilation of three separate volumes of ICC- and RPE-related commentaries totaling more than three thousand pages, now published as a second edition.Footnote 380 A highly authoritative work with a robust editorial teamFootnote 381 and fifty-six contributors who are leading academics,Footnote 382 practitioners, and jurists, this commentary has been adopted into the formal curriculum of ICL courses at several reputable law schools.Footnote 383 As an online commentary, it is continually updated per the dates of each entry and has functionality that is not possible in print, with legal sources hyperlinked and accessible via its integration with Lexsitus and the LTD. CLICC has been translated into Arabic and French as well.
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3. Primary Documents, Preparatory Works, Footnote 384 Case Law, Footnote 385 and Elements of Crime:Footnote 386 The following three modules comprise the full texts of the Rome Statute’s travaux préparatoires, judicial decisions organized according to the relevant ICC statutory provision, and the full text of the ICC Elements of Crime. Like most documents on this platform, the preparatory works and case law are hosted on the LTD with persistent links. The collection of preparatory works is based on a past CILRAP project, the ICC Preparatory Works and Statute Amendments Collection, which was compiled by a team at the ICC and was touted as the “largest collection of these preparatory works available online.”Footnote 387 For case law, new additions are continually added in regular updates by the Lexsitus team.Footnote 388 The Elements of Crime is available in HTML format. Relatedly, the texts of the Rome Statute and RPE can be viewed from the left pane in HTML format.
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4. Elements Digest Footnote 389 and Means of Proof Digest:Footnote 390 The final two modules consist of digests of extracts from case law that correspond to the ICC Elements of Crime, spanning more than 1,050 pages.Footnote 391 The digests are continually updated by the ICC team, like other modules.Footnote 392 They are available in six languages: English, Arabic, French, Persian, Russian, and Spanish.
The Elements Digest helps to identify legal elements of substantive core crimes, while the Means of Proof Digest focuses on factual elements required for practitioners to prove their case for each crime. The digests have been organized into colored hierarchies corresponding to these legal and factual requirements. Effectively, the organizational style of the digests is intended to allow practitioners to swiftly identify the evidential strengths and gaps of their case, thereby “achiev[ing] judicial economy” by “directing limited resources to the weak areas of their case.”Footnote 393
Features
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1. Languages: Most modules on Lexsitus have multilingual offerings as a result of a concerted effort by different international contributors. This is in line with CILRAP’s director, Dr. Morten Bergsmo, whose aim is to “broad[en] the discourse community beyond mainly Western institutions and constituencies,”Footnote 394 thus contributing to an authentically “international” criminal law landscape.
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2. Personalization: By creating a free account,Footnote 395 users can gain access to additional features to facilitate their personal projects. For example, they are able to create notes and build a reading list of sources.
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3. Metadata: There is a very deliberate effort to maintain high-quality metadata, especially via integration with the LTD. Stakeholders from the ICC and CILRAP have expended considerable effort to create a taxonomyFootnote 396 and an appropriate metadata schemaFootnote 397 for the LTD,Footnote 398 which translates to benefits for Lexsitus as well. As a result, persistent links are usually available,Footnote 399 which can ameliorate the issue of link rot.
Further details can be found in the FAQ section of the resource.Footnote 400
Strengths and Perceived Limitations
Strengths
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1. Authoritative: The project is led by leading experts on ICL. CILRAP’s director, Dr Morten Bergsmo, has had a long, illustrious career at the ICC and ICTY and has held several academic and governmental appointments.Footnote 401 The core editorial team, along with the faculty contributors, includes distinguished practitioners, academics, and jurists like Professor William Schabas.Footnote 402 The Chief Editor of Lexsitus’s commentary is Stockholm University’s Professor Mark Klamberg, who is the course director for the university’s public international law and ICL courses.Footnote 403
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2. Longevity: The project appears to be sustainable and has robust financial backing. Lexsitus is funded by a strong network of governments and institutional donors.Footnote 404 The work of CILRAP-CMN has received funding from various governments,Footnote 405 while CILRAP itself is supported by an endowment.Footnote 406 The work of CILRAP originates from Dr Bergsmo’s pre-CILRAP days in the ICC in 2003,Footnote 407 which attests to its longevity. The resource is continually updatedFootnote 408 and is not portrayed as a one-off project. Having safeguards for longevity is essential to address the issue of long-term continuity in information resources, as discussed below in the case of the cessation of the IFAR database.Footnote 409
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3. Open Access: The resources are provided free of charge under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.Footnote 410 CILRAP-CMN has maintained a steadfast commitment to the open-access movement.Footnote 411 Lexsitus itself has been certified by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA, a UN-endorsed, multi-stakeholder initiative) as a digital public good.Footnote 412 Certification requires Lexsitus to be vetted under a rigorous review process for addition to the DPGA RegistryFootnote 413 in accordance with the DPGA Standard.Footnote 414 As an open-access resource, it has received more than one million annual hits.Footnote 415 Overall, these milestones underscore Lexsitus’s impact in the open-access landscape for legal materials and access to justice.
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4. Integration: Lexsitus belongs to a family of tools within CILRAP-CMN’s ecosystem known as the CMN Knowledge Hub.Footnote 416 This means that it is designed with both substantive and technical integration in mind. Substantive integration here refers to Lexsitus’s content being logically structured around the theory and practice of ICL under the ICC regime, as evinced by the article-by-article arrangement of most of its resources. Technical integration refers to its interoperability with other CILRAP-CMN tools, such as the LTD, allowing Lexsitus to leverage strengths and best practices, such as rich metadata.Footnote 417 Together, these allow an ICL researcher’s experience to be fairly seamless.
Perceived Limitations
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1. Scope: The scope of Lexsitus’s content can be limited because it is mostly ICC-centric, and ICL researchers may have to go beyond it depending on the nature of their research. It can be argued that the substantive integration of Lexsitus with ICC materials can be a double-edged sword to the extent that the contents and structures of the resources are solely ICC-centric. However, this critique can be ameliorated because (1) Lexsitus is not ICC-exclusive—some content and commentary will reference and discuss sources beyond the ICC, and ICC practice is premised on and can be extrapolated from general ICL; and (2) it is logical for a significant number of resources to be devoted to ICC-centric practice, as the ICC is arguably the only permanent international criminal court in existence, at least for the foreseeable future.Footnote 418
In terms of the nature of its offered content, commentaries like CLICC are mainly intended to explain what the law is, rather than delve too much into normative debates or cutting-edge research. In a sense, it is akin to an ICL equivalent of a Restatement in the US, which focuses on distilling the law. The digests by their very nature also focus mainly on positive law. Hence, Lexsitus serves as an excellent starting point but should not be the only source consulted for late-stage or novel ICL research. Such research would be better supplemented by groundbreaking academic discourse in scholarship. To address these problems on scope, Lexsitus need not and should not be the be-all and end-all of ICL research. Quality research often requires examining and corroborating multiple sources. As a matter of best practice, FCIL librarians will typically advise researchers to cast a net that is appropriately wide and deep enough to cover their research topic, including sources beyond Lexsitus.
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2. User Experience: There is room for improvement in the user experience. Overall, the platform might seem more dated compared to commercial equivalents. To some extent, this is understandable. Some may even argue that a no-frills approach is preferable in light of sustainability considerations. What follows are some examples of potential points of improvement.
Firstly, the search functionality is somewhat limiting, and it is not clear whether the results are ordered based on relevance, chronology, or other sorting criteria. In contrast, the search function on the sister platform, LTD, is more robust. Secondly, there are certain features that could be enhanced to improve user experience, such as the ability to share reading lists or notes with other users, to add multiple selections of case law or travaux into notes, and to download those selections all at once. Occasional errors have also been observed to arise while navigating the platform and pulling up materials.
All that being said, there is still a “Report an Issue” button to address errors and provide suggestions. Lexsitus itself is an ongoing project with continuous upgrades and improvements, and CILRAP is receptive to accepting feedback and implementing enhancements as seen from some of its newsletter updates.Footnote 419
Observations Regarding the Place of Lexsitus Within the ICL Research Landscape
Why has Lexsitus been highlighted in particular as a “cool tool,” and what larger role does it play in the ICL research landscape? Going beyond just the analysis of the core features discussed above, what makes Lexsitus unique overall is its unifying purpose. It serves as a research tool that coherently brings together different primary and secondary ICL materials for all researchers. It also lowers the barriers of entry for novice researchers in this field, with its logical and substantive structure, e-learning orientation, and open-access approach. It therefore complements the plethora of ICL research sources in the landscape by serving as a springboard and unifying solution, making it stand out from the rest.
The unifying purpose stems from the philosophy behind the creation of Lexsitus and other tools in the same family of CILRAP-CMN’s ecosystem. Here, the legal principle of complementarity is the key driver of this philosophy. The principle of complementarity refers to the ICC’s jurisdiction being “complementary to national criminal jurisdictions” under the Preamble and Article 1 of the Rome Statute,Footnote 420 where the ICC may exercise jurisdiction only if the national legal system “is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution” under Article 17.Footnote 421 Effectively, this means it is the States and not the ICC that have primacy of jurisdiction and the responsibility to prosecute core international crimes and serious violations. The ICC’s remit is complementary to these national jurisdictions. The rationale behind this is based on respect for sovereignty and “practical considerations of effectiveness,” given the ICC’s resource constraints and limitations of its geographical proximity to potential mass atrocities.Footnote 422
One dominant angle to approach complementarity is the notion of “positive complementarity.” This has been defined as
activities and actions of cooperation aimed at promoting national proceedings, with specific reference to the prosecutorial policy of an international criminal court, whereby the International Prosecutor encourages genuine national proceedings when possible, by way of relying on national and international networks, and invites relevant States to participate in a system of international cooperation. The positive approach to complementarity implies that an international criminal tribunal and the State have agreed upon a consensual division of labour. Footnote 423 (emphasis added).
To achieve positive complementarity, nations must be sufficiently empowered with a strong national framework and capacity to investigate and prosecute core international crimes. Three ingredients have been identified—namely, legislative assistance, technical assistance, and capacity building.Footnote 424 Specifically, Lexsitus and other CILRAP-CMN tools all contribute to these elements and thus were built with “positive complementarity” in mind from their inception.Footnote 425
Lexsitus is able to achieve the mission of increasing national capacity in two ways. First, given that it is an open-access tool, it provides tangible access to legal information, which is a bread-and-butter requirement. In ICL, open access performs a bridging function for international criminal justice to be effected in countries that have fewer resources.Footnote 426 Furthermore, the democratization of resources also extends to ideas; ICL as a field is also enriched by broadening discourse and participation beyond the common Anglo-European-centric refrain. Its nature as an open-access resource is therefore critical to positive complementarity and contributes to its overall unifying character.
Second, Lexsitus facilitates knowledge transfer. With its logical format and the practice-oriented approach of content modules like the digests, the tool is intentionally designed to impart experienced ICC practitioners’ existing expertise and knowledge to national regimes that may be less familiar with that information.Footnote 427 This is particularly important in leveling the playing field for States that have suffered the commission of mass atrocities, as they may have access to fewer resources.
All in all, Lexsitus unifies in several senses. On a surface level, there is a coherently assembled set of substantive ICL content for research. Going deeper, the practice of international criminal justice is harmonized, as the materials are modeled from the work of experienced practitioners. At the pinnacle is the commitment to open access that democratizes information and ideas, bringing together diverse international and national regimes under the umbrella of positive complementarity. Lexsitus is therefore unique because of its higher meaning within the ICL landscape, which is what distinguishes it from other platforms or products. CILRAP is not trying to sell the user a tool. Instead, it offers an entirely profound way to approach international criminal legal practice!
For the third generation of FCIL librarians, it is essential to keep these high-level objectives at the back of one’s mind when using, teaching, or assisting with this tool. Using this tool may help ground a researcher’s use in the guiding philosophy of positive complementarity, which will then impact their potential approach to international criminal justice down the line. For that reason, Lexsitus and its associated sister tools will continue being landmark resources in the ICL research landscape for a long time.
Specialized Research
Specialized and Interdisciplinary Research
While most non-FCIL librarians would consider FCIL research highly specialized, FCIL generations of the past have separately considered interdisciplinary and subject-specific research beyond private versus public international law, or criminal versus civil law. As previously mentioned, IOs can be formal organizations or semi-governmental bodies like the UN, or they can be any organization stretching across national borders that focuses on a single area or topic, like international charity organizations or other NGOs. Specialized research often relies on the latter to aggregate sources and make information available in a particular area of law. Later, we will examine the IFAR database as an example of this aggregation.
Generation One
Generation One primarily observed that law librarianship itself encompassed specialized research. In the early 1960s, the prediction that law schools would increase in number and that student bodies would multiply led to the prediction of a need for more and more law librarians.Footnote 428 Because there would be fewer law librarians in comparison to the number of positions, Marke predicted that librarians would be in high demand because of the need to be “educated and trained in greater depth than ever before.”Footnote 429 He knew special collections would grow and need to be highly organized because of the incoming breadth of materials on all of the subtopics and specialized fields of law, not to mention the interdisciplinary work that lawyers, and thus law librarians, would be required to take on.Footnote 430 In addition, Generation One was already aware that “specialized training would become dated so quickly that the law librarian will have to update [their] background periodically to keep pace.”Footnote 431 That training would include AALL conferences and institutes, specialized library school training, and workshops to develop courses and programs for training law students and professors in using the new tools.Footnote 432 Once law librarianship became an established profession, specialization began to focus on specific practice areas where additional resources and expertise might be needed.
Generation Two
In the shift to online materials that happened throughout the time of Generation Two, specialized legal research grew to encompass the use of non-legal databases to a greater extent. In 1989, Pat Ensor wrote an entire article to educate law librarians on non-legal databases. Ensor’s advice was to subscribe to specialized vendors’ products that mirrored the librarian’s field of law but were not legal-specific resources.Footnote 433 Ensor felt those resources were easier to use and created an in-depth focus that would ultimately save the researcher time, even if they were more expensive.Footnote 434 These resources had specialized search capabilities that were not available in broader databases like LexisNexis or Westlaw at the time.Footnote 435 Areas of specialized interdisciplinary research that were brought up most frequently were business, intellectual property (IP), health and medicine, and social and behavioral sciences.Footnote 436
Legal research skills were still broadly applicable even with these non-legal databases. The focus just became compiling resources across types of databases, then pulling and using what was needed from multiple sources, rather than waiting on Westlaw or a similar legal database to aggregate all of the information as seen more commonly in Generation Three.
There was also specialization still occurring within print collections. Mary Whisner discussed an interaction with a public patron looking for forms related to buy-sell agreements, an area she knew little about.Footnote 437 She was left to decide between a general set of forms that had breadth but not depth, or a specialized resource that would offer depth but only if it had what the patron actually needed.Footnote 438 She opted for the general resource that served the patron well, but she later discovered on the shelves a loose-leaf volume specifically focused on structuring buy-sell agreements, the very specialized topic the patron was researching.Footnote 439 Whisner would have needed to rely on a catalog search that captured buy-sell rather than corporations, or more involved shelf reading and scanning to find the print materials. Without previous specialization in the area, locating specialized print materials on point could be difficult. Generation Two’s hybrid world factored into how those law librarians used their versions of “cool tools”—either online or in print—and what expertise could be amassed in any one specialization in an already specialized world like FCIL research.
Generation Three
Generation Three relies on a much larger proportion of digital tools and databases to conduct research, which is helpful and allows for more specialized research. What used to possibly require trips to specialty libraries and discussions with other experts can now be compiled by the researcher on their own through LibGuides, as mentioned above.Footnote 440 Current advice includes skimming substantive legal materials before embarking on the research if the researcher is not a subject-matter expert already.Footnote 441 While FCIL librarians do have subject-matter expertise in international and foreign law, they may not be intimately familiar with the finer points of IP, art, or environmental law and issues. Looking for commonalities among types of research like the authors have demonstrated in this article can help, as well as networking with other librarians and learning from each other—another cross-generational tip.Footnote 442
“Cool Tool”: The IFAR Database
The IFAR database was run by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), an organization founded in 1969 to increase education and cultural awareness around art and art objects.Footnote 443 While the organization itself is much older, IFAR launched its Art Law and Cultural Property database in 2008, making this a specialized tool relied on by Generations Two and Three.Footnote 444 The database was split into two sets of resources depending on the specific legal research needs. One was the International Cultural Property/Ownership & Export Legislation database (ICPOEL), and the other was Case Law & Statutes. These two parts of the database were paid subscription resources. There were other educational resources available in addition to these two databases, as well as a set of publications, news, programs, and events that IFAR promoted. This database was a great example of the interdisciplinary and hybrid nature of specialized legal research previously discussed.
ICPOEL organized information by region, then country. Each country’s summary included a list of relevant legislation with hyperlinks to a PDF or website that contained the law. Often, the legislation was offered with a translation. There were also various definitions of terms of art for that country, names of agencies, and related issues. On the right side of the country, entries were national contacts for cultural property, separated by subject matter if applicable.
The case law and statutes part of the database was divided by subject matter, including World War II-Era/Holocaust-Related Art Loss, non-US versus US cultural property, more general art theft, and more. There were even subsections for copyright, moral rights, and additional issues that were outside the traditional scope of art law. After choosing a subject, the relevant statutes were highlighted at the top with hyperlinks, then case summaries for decided civil cases, out-of-court settlements, decided criminal cases, and pending cases. These results were also available in a matrix view that provided additional information, such as opinion date, jurisdiction, the disputed object, and which claims were covered. In addition to the databases, IFAR had fewer legal portions of the database, making it a good interdisciplinary tool for art lawyers to understand more about the background of the artwork at issue.
Catalogues raisonnés are individual bibliographies for artists, ranging from the famous to the obscure. These are used to help authenticate works in combination with a provenance guide, an art research tool turned legal research guide on the specifics of art origination. As a bibliography with annotations, the provenance guide highlights both print and digital sources that can help with authentication research. The IFAR database also included a “Users’ Guide” and a subscription to the IFAR Journal, a specialized journal for art law and art origination issues, news, and programs.Footnote 445 If someone was trying to conduct art law research or had an interdisciplinary issue in a case having to do with art, the IFAR database was singularly useful.
Observations Regarding Database and Collection Maintenance Issues
Background on Databases and Collection Maintenance
On September 27, 2024, IFAR announced it was going to sunset operations sometime in mid-2025.Footnote 446 A change in leadership at the beginning of 2024 took a “[t]horough and analytical look at IFAR’s ongoing operational and fiscal capacity” and, after six months, determined its only option was to close. IFAR had been the backbone of the art law and art provenance industry for fifty-five years.Footnote 447 Effective immediately, the organization was no longer publishing its journal or hosting any events.Footnote 448 In June 2025, the website was still live and was continuing to take donations,Footnote 449 and the organization actively advertised an in-person Introduction to Provenance Research Course running in May that was searching for students.Footnote 450 As of August 2025, the IFAR website and database were shut down and are no longer accessible. While there are other research options, those are not identical to the IFAR database, and they do not offer the same breadth of information in the legal context. The main replacement, the Getty Provenance Index, is larger than the IFAR database but separated from any legal or policy information like that featured in the IFAR source.Footnote 451
Small specialized databases beyond IFAR have also experienced this issue. In 2016, ASIL published an update regarding its Electronic Information System for International Law (EISIL), a “collaborative, web-based, searchable database of international legal resources” that emerged in 2004.Footnote 452 In that article, the authors began by pointing out the database’s degradation that arose slowly from years of maintenance difficulties. Librarians lacked the time and availability to continue the upkeep of this small database, especially because they were unpaid volunteer coordinators and editors. What little paid staff existed evolved over the years, and then in 2014, the responsible librarian left her position, and no replacement was hired. When the pages on the database became out of date, both the database and the association began to lose credibility. Other electronic resources are also susceptible to this kind of attrition.Footnote 453 As technology evolves, new platforms and ways of presenting and maintaining information and resources need to exist, which all take additional time, money, and expertise.
According to Michelle M. Wu, “the library must have an enduring collection of resources that is accessible and meaningful to both current and future scholars,” with the default for that kind of security being physical collections.Footnote 454 This is particularly true when dealing with smaller specific topics and electronic resources for those topics. In 2005, at the time of Wu’s article, only 30% of periodicals were available in e-formats. In 2014, a study estimated that at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents were accessible on the web through either Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic Search.Footnote 455 Almost 90% of those documents were discoverable through Google Scholar, and approximately 27 million, or 24%, were freely available.Footnote 456 The study’s authors focused on humanities, math, and science; law wasn’t one of the considered subjects.
Generations One and Two’s Collection Maintenance and Preservation
Generations One and Two focused on preservation in a physical sense—how books and stacks can be kept in working order so that materials are discoverable to patrons.Footnote 457 The education of professionals and paraprofessionals was key to maintaining the stacks.Footnote 458 Patricia Denham suggested there were two reasons for this: first, to ensure patrons had the benefit of seeing a tidy library, which led to them wanting to continue their research; and second, to ensure that books and other materials were kept safe and preserved for generations to come. Shifting was also a key part of this strategy; the librarian in charge of stacks maintenance would need to ensure there was room for all of the materials and that materials were dusted and vacuumed as needed (no less than every two to three years), and the librarian would also need to be in charge of creating a plan and then sticking to it.Footnote 459 Preservation was part of a workshop of learning, reflecting years of training in examining a work’s physical characteristics and training others to do the same.Footnote 460 For Generation Three librarians, this evaluation has shifted to a cost and data analysis rather than a physical analysis of a work. For librarians who can potentially keep everything in robust cloud storage networks, or in hard drives on shelves if wholly owned by the library, why discard anything for reasons other than cost or the elimination of a library’s option to retain that work?
In addition, Generation Two librarians across disciplines particularly weighed the pros and cons of electronic versus print resources. Public library patrons in the 1990s and early 2000s could not be assumed to be computer literate.Footnote 461 Simultaneously, law professors and law students were beginning to expect, if not demand, electronic access to legal information.Footnote 462 No one thought that electronic collection development and maintenance could be avoided, but those necessities had to be balanced against the reference and preservation needs in libraries serving a variety of patron types. Reference services also grappled with the shift from print to electronic resources, especially when determining how to offer online reference services and what kinds of questions and answers could be crafted.Footnote 463 It is noteworthy that, in 2016, approximately 15% of the population did not have access to a computer at home—that is, 15% of people who might find themselves in a law library were at an extreme disadvantage when doing research.Footnote 464 In a 2002 study conducted through the University of Washington’s Information School, 80% of users felt digital reference services would serve the community well, but librarians believed the opposite.Footnote 465 As experience with digital reference services increased for librarians in Generation Two, those preferences for digital reference services, one-on-one assistance available virtually, and dependence on electronic materials just seemed to grow.Footnote 466 This rapid shift towards digital in reference interactions highlighted the need for electronic and digital resources to go with them; indeed, it would be difficult to have a virtual reference experience without the availability of virtual reference materials.
Generation Two also faced the challenge of preserving electronic resources that were never available in print. Electronic resources can be broadly defined as digitally created resources that are only accessible through a computer, whether in a web-based format, on a CD, or on other physical media inserted into a CD.Footnote 467 At the time, the recommendation was still to evaluate these resources in the same way as a law library’s more traditional resources, including considering the need for historical or archived versions.Footnote 468 When thinking about specialized electronic resources, that need may increase—an issue we see reflected in the specialized database struggles that Generation Three librarians have faced more often.
Generation Three’s Collection Maintenance and Preservation
The transition to Generation Three seems to be marked by the turn of the 21st century and an explosion of electronic resources with more and more specialization. In a March 10, 2016, column, Lyonette Louis-Jacques highlighted the drastic increase in the number of free and commercial FCIL databases, all made available within the previous year.Footnote 469 In the same column, where Louis-Jacques lauded the availability of seemingly everything online, she also pointed out that several databases became extinct. Most of those databases were highly specialized, noting that the World Health Organization’s International Digest of Health Legislation had an error message stating that the service was down, which hadn’t been changed in years.Footnote 470 Another specialized resource, the Refugee Case-Law database, hosted at the University of Michigan, also disappeared. And while Louis-Jacques highlighted other more general sources of knowledge and information, these database disappearances seemed to create a real lack of immediate information in those specialized areas. As electronic resources continue to dominate FCIL and all areas of legal research, so too do the worry and reality that these resources might disappear. The preservation of digital collections also has a financial burden.Footnote 471
The discussion of the usefulness of print versus electronic resources persists into Generation Three as well. Lindsey Carpino pointed out in “Strategies for Building a Relevant, Balanced & Budget-Friendly Collection” that management and end users are both invested in the collection as a whole.Footnote 472 A main constraint of libraries everywhere is that budgets favor print collections since they are perpetual, owned outright, and generally less expensive. For Generation Three librarians, a tension arises between the consumer’s wants and the library’s needs, and while this generation has been anticipating a shift to wholly digital research and collections for some time, it appears to still be a way off.Footnote 473 There is also the added consideration of publishing companies and how they may change the focus on and access to electronic resources.
Finally, this section has avoided the AI question for now, but another consideration for Generation Three is to address how AI-generated content, which changes every time it’s accessed, will shift what is considered important for collection development, maintenance, and preservation purposes. And yet, print sources still matter. As FCIL librarians of Generation Three and beyond, our focus will have to be on collection maintenance and preservation for both print and electronic resources in an increasingly digital era.
Core Skill: Private International Law
Overview of Research in International Arbitration
Today’s FCIL researcher will encounter not just public international law questions but also private, often in connection with issues surrounding cross-border disputes. Though some such matters are resolved via litigation, arbitration is a popular means of resolving cross-border disputes, particularly business disagreements, given its reputation as a “fair, neutral, expert and efficient means of resolving difficult and contentious transnational problems.”Footnote 474 Whereas research in litigation might involve the substantive law of relevant jurisdictions and the procedural rules of the relevant court, international arbitral proceedings may be governed by a variety of authorities—some familiar to experienced legal researchers—but some unique, including international conventions, domestic laws, agreements between the parties, arbitral rules, and prior arbitral awards or decisions.Footnote 475 As such, researchers may need to consult a variety of sources simply to identify the authorities governing the dispute, often starting with secondary sources, then moving (potentially) to treaties, foreign legal materials, and arbitral institution materials. Practical tasks requiring research in the arbitral context might include identifying common language in arbitration agreements, understanding arbitral procedures, preparing challenges to a chosen arbitrator, or preparing arguments defending or challenging recognition or enforcement of an award.Footnote 476
International Arbitration Research by Generation
Generation One
Reflecting their reliance on print materials, Generation One was concerned not just with accessing arbitral materials but also with classification. In 1963, Ludwick A. Teclaff, in Classification of Arbitration Materials—From a Law Librarian’s Viewpoint, discussed an existing 1952 subject classification scheme for arbitration, covering labor, compulsory, commercial, political, and a catch-all “general” category, and he advocated adding a new scheme for international arbitration, distinct from both the existing domestic scheme and the classification scheme for international law.Footnote 477 “[A]rbitration is, in a way, more comprehensive than international law because it includes both national and international aspects and because the geographical and comparative elements are more prominent.”Footnote 478 Teclaff proposed a primarily jurisdictional classification scheme for international arbitration, with an exception for international commercial arbitration. In Teclaff’s proposed scheme, Schedule A included “general comparative” materials, Schedule AB, “international arbitration,” and Schedules AC–AH were assigned to particular jurisdictions or regions.Footnote 479 Though today’s researcher would add a number of institutions and topics to the subdivisions Teclaff offered, most of the subdivisions that he proposed, including conventions, procedures, cases, awards, statutes, yearbooks, practitioners, and far more, fairly classify these legal sources in the same area today.
Generation One further identified challenges and trends that persist today in researching international arbitration. In International Business Transactions: A Guide to Research Sources, Igor Kavass introduced a section highlighting important secondary sources covering international arbitration, noting that “[r]esearch literature on this highly practical subject is good and plentiful. […] There is only one flaw in this otherwise perfect state of research capability: texts of awards do not get published, and it is very hard to get hold of them for use in academic research or practical arbitration work.”Footnote 480 Though the general works cited by Kavass are now out of print, Kavass characterized the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA) yearbook as being “extremely valuable,”Footnote 481 particularly its national reports, and it remains an important source for relevant legislation, case law, published awards, and more, and is accessible to modern researchers in the “cool tool” featured in this section—Kluwer Arbitration—which not only publishes the yearbook in electronic format but also leverages its contents in a jurisdictional comparison tool.
Generation Two
Generation Two’s bibliographies and commentary reflect the growing literature and resources available to researchers of international arbitration. In 1996, Victor Essien, in the Bibliographic Guide to Doing Business in Foreign Countries, cited fifty-seven non-jurisdiction-specific resources discussing cross-border dispute resolution, and in his section concerning dispute resolution, nearly all of those resources focused on arbitration.Footnote 482 He stated that with respect to investment disputes specifically, arbitration was by then “overwhelmingly” the preferred mode of dispute resolution.Footnote 483 His bibliography previewed sources still valuable in the time of Generation Three. Essien cited Gary B. Born’s International Commercial Arbitration in the United States: Commentary and Materials,Footnote 484 and Born subsequently authored several authoritative treatises offering coverage beyond North America. Though in its second edition when Essien cited it,Footnote 485 Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter’s international commercial arbitration treatise is now in its seventh edition. Source materials cited from such arbitral institutions as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), then compiled in print publications,Footnote 486 are now freely available on that institution’s website.Footnote 487
In the first edition of Marci Hoffman and Mary Rumsey’s coursebook on international and foreign legal research, published in 2007, Hoffman and Rumsey devoted just a handful of pages to arbitration in a subsection of a survey chapter concerning “international topics.”Footnote 488 With respect to electronic resources, they stated that, at the time, the commercial database Kluwer Arbitration was one of the best available databases for researchers interested in international arbitration—but that few institutions subscribed.Footnote 489 In the coursebook’s second edition, published just five years later in 2012,Footnote 490 Hoffman and Rumsey noted greater adoptionFootnote 491 and expanded their discussion of international arbitration to a full chapter.Footnote 492 Their discussion reinforced the concerns expressed earlier by Generation One:
For researchers, the most frustrating aspect of arbitration is that awards and proceedings are usually confidential. In contrast to the transparency of litigation, documents relating to arbitration are not routinely published electronically or in paper. Because some arbitration awards do get published, however, you can’t assume these decisions are always unavailable. Unfortunately, researching this area of law can also be time-consuming and frustrating because there is no centralized source for obtaining all of the legal authorities needed.Footnote 493
Hoffman and Rumsey covered major arbitral institutions and types of legal authorities,Footnote 494 key print publications and free web-content collections,Footnote 495 and several online research guides available at the time (online research guides being Generation Two’s innovation).Footnote 496 The authors’ awards and decisions subsection discussed many electronic resources, with about one-third of the discussed resources now defunct, but a majority still accessible and updated.Footnote 497 In this expanded chapter, Hoffman and Rumsey provided more detail concerning coverage and features of Kluwer Arbitration, including available publications, database content filters, and the embedded New York Convention Decisions tool.Footnote 498
Generation Three
Although Generation Three can conduct international arbitration research using solely electronic resources, the challenge for this generation, as conveyed in this article, lies in identifying the best “cool tools” for research, including identifying and determining relevant costs and the value of available content and features.
Arbitration “Cool Tools”
While other sections of this article largely explored resources maintained by nonprofit entities, such as governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental agencies and organizations, or other academic or nonprofit initiatives, many of the tools available for arbitral researchers are commercial. Some publishers of today’s international arbitration resources offer subscriptions to a single publication or a relatively small bundle of specialty content. For example, the Global Arbitration Review, which launched in 2006,Footnote 499 provides access to news, surveys, rankings, an arbitrator directory, and a selection of primary-source documents discussed in its news content (all via subscriptions to its site), without licensing content to larger vendors.
Another targeted, stand-alone resource covering international arbitration today is the IAReporter (Investment Arbitration Reporter). Founded in 2008,Footnote 500 the IAReporter provides news and analysis from a team of editors and reporters and data pertaining specifically to investor-State claims and dispute resolution.Footnote 501 Through its core product content, the IAReporter platform offers certain features prevalent in larger research databases and common to Generation Three tools as well. For example, the IAReporter’s “Topic Tool” indexes many reports by legal topic in a manner that is both searchable and browsable in a topic tree.
Another notable bespoke resource focuses not on law but statistics—Dispute Resolution Data. Dispute Resolution Data sources data from a number of major international and regional arbitral institutions, including the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR).Footnote 502 Just as litigation analytics are a valuable “cool tool” for Generation Three law librarians, with all major legal research vendors offering a tool that analyzes data from US court dockets, orders, and opinions, so might demand increase for a tool offering similar capabilities for international arbitral proceedings despite their often-confidential nature.Footnote 503
Several major publishers and US legal researchers also offer some coverage of international arbitration in their broader databases or product offerings. Oxford University Press (OUP) offers subscribers access to certain Oxford titles pertinent to international arbitration in its Investment Claims service.Footnote 504 WestlawFootnote 505 and LexisFootnote 506 both offer a selection of awards published by major institutions, rules, and a few relevant secondary sources. However, for users seeking deeper coverage of international arbitration, Kluwer Arbitration, introduced in 2001Footnote 507 and familiar to Generation Two librarians, is a leading resource, offering both primary and secondary materials and newer features as discussed in greater depth below. Jus Mundi, launched during the time of Generation Three in 2019, is currently emerging as a Kluwer Arbitration competitor.Footnote 508
5.3.1 Kluwer Arbitration
As is true of other Wolters Kluwer electronic databases such as VitalLaw (previously known as Cheetah), Kluwer Arbitration is the digital source, sometimes the sole digital source, of titles in Wolters Kluwer’s extensive international arbitration collection. The platform offers nearly 500 treatises, guides, handbooks, yearbooks, and journals, including an electronic version of Gary Born’s 4,000-page treatise, International Commercial Arbitration. Footnote 509 Though known for these secondary materials, Kluwer Arbitration includes many primary resources as well, offering more than 7,500 awards and decisions, bilateral investment treaties organized by jurisdiction, multilateral treaties, procedural rules, and domestic laws sourced from the ICCA International Handbook on Commercial Arbitration. Some of this content is available from other free sources online, but some available awards are not readily available online or are only published in secondary sources (e.g., award decisions published in yearbooks). The database offers keyword search functionality, which supports a handful of Boolean operators and a variety of search filters. Users can download or print individual documents or chapters, but not full works.
For some potential subscribers, the platform’s breadth of content may offer adequate justification to adopt the core version of the platform—“Kluwer Arbitration–Classic.” In recent years, Wolters Kluwer has leveraged this content to develop and market enhanced features akin to those offered in large legal research platforms. In 2022, the publisher announced its “Practice Plus” platform extension, which allows users to identify arbitrators based on various criteria and identify relationships among various arbitral participants.Footnote 510 In 2024, the content added to the “Practice Plus” extension remained available to users of “Kluwer Arbitration–Enhanced.”Footnote 511
Some features of Kluwer’s enhanced platform provide users with the ability to readily compare laws and rules governing arbitration across multiple jurisdictions or institutions. The “Quick Answers” tool offers answers to dozens of topics in several categories, allowing users to select their jurisdiction(s) of interest and reference content provided by experts on the laws of those jurisdictions. The “ICCA Compare Jurisdictions Tool” functions similarly, leveraging the content published in the national reports in the ICCA International Handbook and allowing users to locate relevant information more expeditiously than would be possible if utilizing the publication’s multivolume print version. Another enhancement is the “New York Convention Tool,”Footnote 512 which applies filters to court decisions included on the platform, allowing users to quickly identify case law applying the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards.Footnote 513 The tool’s directory of arbitrators, practitioners, and experts currently hosts nearly 19,000 profiles, and users can filter profiles by an individual’s role, nationality, language, sector, institutional affiliations, and more. The tool adds a “Relationship Indicator,” allowing users to quickly determine, for example, whether a particular attorney or law firm has represented (or been adverse to) a particular party or entity, reflecting some of the functionality available in today’s litigation analytics tools.Footnote 514
The market will dictate whether these features add sufficient value to justify an added subscription cost tier. Topical and jurisdictional filters, for example, function in the manner of a print index or digest. Arbitral relationships can be ascertained by simple word searches, as can decisions citing particular convention articles or language.
Jus Mundi
Like Kluwer Arbitration, Jus Mundi offers both primary and secondary materials pertinent to international arbitration. The platform currently provides the texts of tens of thousands of treaties, awards, decisions, and arbitral rules, with a keyword search feature supporting some Boolean operators. Users can narrow results using a variety of filters, and the tool allows users to configure alerts and organize research into folders. Jus Mundi’s “Wiki Notes” feature provides practice notes from a team of editors, with hyperlinked citations to platform and external content and options to create conceptual searches from those notes. The secondary source library initially appears extensive, with content from many notable titles appearing in search results, though users with a standard subscription will quickly notice that content from several major publishers, including Brill and OUP, is excluded from that subscription, requiring users to purchase “add-ons” to access those titles in full (excerpts are available to all users in the search results).
Jus Mundi’s “Jus Connect” tool provides profiler and analytics services, which offer profiles of individual arbitral actors as well as institutions. Its conflict checker identifies relationships between profiled individuals and other individuals, law firms, and/or States. AI Premium subscribers can access the vendor’s “Jus AI Assistant,” which purports to provide document analysis, drafting, and translation capabilities. At present, competitor Kluwer Arbitration does not offer an AI assistant or enhancement, though its current “AI Hub” offers content relevant to the use of AI in arbitral work, such as rules and opinions concerning AI use.
Observations Regarding Arbitration “Cool Tools”
In reviewing the tools available to international arbitration researchers in Generation Three, we noted several patterns and challenges. The confidential nature of many arbitral proceedings is a cross-generational difficulty, and to the extent that arbitral awards are made public by institutions or in the context of litigation, they are often available for free online or in other legal documents. As of this writing, Kluwer Arbitration and Jus Mundi appear to offer approximately the same number of awards and decisions on their platforms. Although Jus Mundi markets an exclusive partnership with the ICC, Kluwer also publishes thousands of ICC awards, while Jus Mundi’s distinction is publishing those awards on the web for free to non-subscribers, at least for the time being.Footnote 515 Given that non-confidential content is often published by associated arbitral institutions online, commercial publishers and vendors offering arbitral publications and products must identify ways in which to add value. Offering quality secondary sources, as Wolters Kluwer does, is one approach, and that content has likely provided Kluwer with an advantage over potential competitors in this content area. Users relying on that electronic library, however, face the concerns inherent in relying on any online library, such as platform reliability and offline access. Kluwer, for example, allows users to download individual documents or sections of a secondary source but not the work in full.
Wolters Kluwer’s addition of further-enhanced platform features suggests a desire to further differentiate its product from competitors (or the alternatives of relying on print materials or the web) and attract and retain subscribers. This enhanced subscription tier, however, demonstrates that just as major legal research vendors increasingly segment content, requiring users to subscribe to a secondary product or tier to access all of that vendor’s material, so too are vendors of FCIL “cool tools” adopting this approach. Users of Jus Mundi will likewise note that the tool offers an “essentials” subscription, subscriptions adding AI enhancements, and not one but four add-on content libraries. Users of the “essentials” subscription will frequently encounter content in their search results that is housed in those libraries and, as such, is out of plan.Footnote 516
Despite this segmentation of content, there is, just as with US legal research content, also overlap amongst vendor offerings, rendering resource evaluation a challenge for potential subscribers. Some OUP titles, for example, are available in Oxford’s own platforms but also in Jus Mundi (via the OUP Library add-on) and Kluwer Arbitration. Redfern and Hunter on International Arbitration, published by OUP, is unsurprisingly available to Oxford content subscribers but is also available in Kluwer and Jus Mundi to users who subscribe to the Oxford add-on, and it is also available in Westlaw. However, another Oxford title, the Oxford Handbook of International Trade Law, is available in Jus Mundi’s OUP library and Oxford Investment Claims but not in Kluwer Arbitration.
As “cool tools” for international arbitral research proliferate in number and scope, the above-noted challenges will no doubt persist. Generation Three’s FCIL librarians are, fortunately, deeply familiar with these challenges, as they routinely evaluate resources to identify their scope of coverage and assess the value of sometimes-costly enhancements.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, we have shown that many of the “cool tools” utilized today by the third generation of FCIL librarians are indeed similar to those used in the prior two, building on the wealth of knowledge those librarians contributed to the field. Not only do some tools share similarities, but also the process by which these tools are consulted and utilized, which remains a key component of any FCIL librarian’s training.
Other tools, however, are new resources that integrate AI. While we see a trend towards the commercialization of tools and a greater emphasis placed on their generative AI aspects, we remain concerned about the quality of these tools and the overall ability to preserve born-digital information. Although AI offers an opportunity to increase access to justice for all, it cannot be relied upon entirely as a replacement for the specialized knowledge of trained FCIL librarians or the traditional tools that maintain their unique value in the field.
This third generation of FCIL librarians will continue to utilize “cool tools” from all generations to ensure the highest quality of research outcomes for our users, but acknowledgment of the expertise demonstrated in the selection and curation of these tools must be made by our employers, professional associations, and vendors. More work must be done to highlight and evaluate tools such as those discussed in this article and, alongside that, the ideal process for using them. More advocacy is necessary to help ensure tomorrow’s tools are productive for our needs and to respect the knowledge generated across three generations of FCIL librarians. And more training is necessary to help ensure that this third generation of FCIL librarians can continue to educate our colleagues, some of whom will be the first members of Generation Four.
Open access
