The following is a guest post by Nicole Atwill, Senior Foreign Law Specialist at the Law Library of Congress. In February 2011, the French government launched the Year of Overseas Territories (Année des outre-mer) with a conference on the future of coral reefs. The Year of Overseas Territories highlights the historic place and contemporary role …
The following is a guest post by Steve Clarke, Senior Foreign Law Specialist at the Law Library of Congress. Ireland employs a very complicated single transferable voting system to elect the 166 members of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas. Under this system, in which voters rank their choices, between three and five …
The following is a guest post by Francisco Macías, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Law Library of Congress. As a Mexican-born American, I’m always looking for occasions to celebrate. I guess this festive nature is simply dyed-in-the-wool (or dyed-in-the-cotton, if you’re Southern-raised, as I am). With that in mind, I wanted to write a …
The following is a guest post by George Sadek, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Law Library of Congress. On January 25, all across Egypt, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to demand the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak responded to these demands by firing his cabinet and appointing a new …
The following is a guest post by Steve Clarke, Senior Foreign Law Specialist. In Custodia Legis wasn’t around last year when our fellow Library of Congress blogs, Inside Adams and In the Muse, discussed advertising and music surrounding the big game. So I thought this year we should follow the trend and write about one …
The following is a guest post by Mark Strattner, Chief of our Collection Services Division. February 2, 2011 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of the move of the Law Library from the Thomas Jefferson Building to its present location in the James Madison Memorial Building. On Monday February 2, 1981, the Collection Management …
The following is a guest post by Nicole Atwill, Senior Foreign Law Specialist. My husband was recently lamenting the loss of the second of his original law partners to a judicial appointment, this time to the Supreme Court of Virginia. When I mentioned that such a scenario would be extremely rare in France, the conversation …
The following is a guest post by Shameema Rahman, Legal Reference Specialist in our Public Services Division. Have you found yourself needing to research a jurisdiction that you know next to nothing about? Because I studied law in Bangladesh, I will use that country as an example to provide some tips on how you could …
The following is a guest post by Dr. Meredith Shedd-Driskel, Law Curator. With the rise of feudalism in medieval France, the country had evolved into two judicial territories. The provincial parliaments in northern France, acting as sovereign judicial bodies independent of each other and claiming independence from the king, applied droit coutumier, or legal principles …
The following is a guest post by Nicole Atwill, Senior Foreign Law Specialist. The Black Code tells us a very long story that started in Versailles, at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, in March 1685 and ended in Paris in April 1848 under Arago, at the beginning of the ephemeral Second Republic. …