Over the last several months, the Law Library has added multiple new collections of foreign legal gazettes to our website. We are digitizing our physical collections for everyone to access and use these unique items, subject to copyright restrictions. Legal gazettes are the primary law sources of many jurisdictions outside the U.S. and may contain legislation, orders, regulations, statutory instruments, and international agreements. Some include decisions of courts and administrative agencies.
The Law Library legal gazette collection is one of the largest in the world, aiming to collect gazettes from all countries–past, current, and future. We released our collection from Eritrea first, followed by Dubai, Egypt, Morocco, Venezuela, and Paraguay.
Recently, we have published collections from Oceania (New Caledonia and Cook Islands), South America (Suriname), and Africa (Cabo Verde and Niger).
The Cook Islands collection contains 1,733 items and spans the years 1958 to 2020. Maori, English, and Rarotongan languages are represented throughout.
The Suriname collection contains 1,298 items. It spans the years 2005 to 2019 in the Dutch and Flemish languages.
The Cabo Verde collection contains 568 items and includes the recent years 2019 to 2020. This collection uses the official language of Portuguese.
The New Caledonia collection contains 395 items for the recent years of 2019 to 2020. This collection uses French for its official language as an overseas collectivity of France.
The final collection is from Niger in western Africa. This collection contains 253 items and spans the years of 2011 to 2021. The legal gazettes are in French, the official language of Niger.
These legal gazettes contain a wealth of information and gems. We have written before about the engraving of the Pyramid of Niches, the Egyptian Gazette in braille, and QR Codes being added. Gazettes also convey the history of the jurisdiction like the official name change for Mexico City, the history of colonization in South Africa, and the history of Tanzania, including Zanzibar.
The Law Library maintains an online database to help researchers navigate all of our gazette collections and offerings, and this recording of an earlier webinar is available to help you connect with gazettes!
The Digital Resources Division would like to thank our Library-wide team for the continued support in all aspects of this collection, as well as the recent participants of our Remote Legal Gazette Volunteer/Internship program for working on these jurisdictions and more.
We will continue to add new collections and update here regularly.
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