The Global Legal Research Center of the Law Library of Congress recently completed a major report titled Firearms- Control Legislation and Policy (February 2013). The study examines the different legal approaches taken by eighteen countries and the European Union with regard to various activities involving firearms. The countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, …
Mark your calendars! In celebration of Law Day 2013, the Law Library of Congress will host “The Movement in America for Civil and Human Rights.” This program is part of the Law Library’s annual celebration of Law Day, a national day to celebrate the rule of law and its contributions to the freedoms that Americans …
This Easter Sunday, March 31, marks the 521st anniversary of the issuance of the Alhambra Decree. To some, that name means nothing. Perhaps it is better known by its other name: The Edict of Expulsion. It was in the city of Granada, in the spring of 1492 that the Catholic Monarchs, Isabelle of Castile …
For the next entry in our Beginner’s Guide series, I will touch upon patent law, an area of law that, despite its seeming need for specialization and technical knowledge, holds a large amount of interest for the public at large. The Law Library of Congress receives many questions regarding patent law, particularly with regard to …
The following is a guest post by Cynthia Jordan, Senior Writer-Editor at the Law Library of Congress. Orin S. Kerr, Law Library Scholar-in-Residence for the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation Program on Demography, Technology, and Criminal Justice at the Library of Congress, has had a couple of busy weeks. On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, he …
Last April, I mentioned the work of the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group (GLDWG) to provide recommendations for governments on which RDF vocabulary terms to use for common concept areas. The GLDWG has announced Last Call working drafts of three vocabularies: • Organization Ontology (ORG): describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at …
Last December, I set out to discover my law library colleagues’ favorite cases. Some responded with humorous cases and some with landmark cases that forever changed the face of law. I was unable to talk to everyone in December, so this month I resumed my efforts to discover my colleagues’ favorite cases. Shameema Rahman, Senior …
We are proud to introduce our newly designed resources and services handout. The handout provides streamlined resources and services information in a crisp layout. You will find contact information for help with U.S., foreign and comparative law research in addition to URLs and descriptions of our various online offerings. The PDF version includes embedded links for quick …
The following is a guest post by Shameema Rahman, Senior Legal Research Specialist in our Public Services Division. Shameema is a frequent contributor to In Custodia Legis; her most recent post was entitled Presidential Signing Statements. At the reference desk, we are frequently asked to estimate the number of federal laws in force. However, trying to tally this …
Nearly everyone who sees the item that appears in today’s pic of the week post makes the same observation: “Law students never change.” Here is a fourteenth century manuscript of Justinian’s Institutes, the introductory textbook for the Roman Law in the form in which it was used in the Middle Ages. In the image below …