The following is a guest post by Michael Mellifera, a digital collection specialist in the Digital Resources Division at the Law Library of Congress.
This fall, the Law Library of Congress added three new foreign legal gazette collections to our website, namely for Grenada, Italy, and Saskatchewan, Canada. This recap continues our quarterly series from summer 2023, spring 2023, fall 2022, and winter 2023.
The new collection of the Government Gazette of Grenada includes 359 gazette issues in English spanning 2015-2021. The gazette includes main issues as well as extraordinary issues, which are supplementary editions to the main gazette that can be published any day of the week. All PDFs in the Grenada collection are full-text searchable so users can search across the collection to connect with issues of research interest to them, such as searching for the term Carriacou Police (a policing service in the Northern District area of Grenada) in the website’s search box.
The Grenada government gazette promulgates legislation and covers a broad range of legal topics related to government action and regulation, including for example parliamentary election results, civil procedure rules, trademark registrations, and more. For users searching for specific government notices in gazette issues, we suggest searching by citation or using a person or organization’s name, occupation, date, or the short or long title of the act.
The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Italian Republic includes 1,062 issues in Italian, spanning 2019-2023. The Italian gazette collection contains main issues, supplements, and monthly indexes called indici mensili. After over a century of this gazette being published under varying titles including Gazzetta Piemontese, Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno, and Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, the newspaper would officially become the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana in 1946, after Italy’s historical institutional referendum on June 2, 1946, to transition from the Kingdom of Italy’s constitutional monarchy into a parliamentary republic.
All PDFs in the collection are full-text searchable so users can search for terms in the native Italian language, such as Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale (Giustizia Amministrativa), which refer to the regional administrative court bodies that judge appeals lodged by citizens and organizations against Public Administration acts.
Finally, the new collection of The Saskatchewan Gazette includes 150 issues in English, spanning 2019-2022. This gazette collection includes government notices, orders in council, and private notices required to be published by statute. Like the previous gazettes mentioned, all PPDFs are full-text searchable, so users can search for the term Assiniboia for example, which is a Canadian town in Saskatchewan whose name originates from the Assiniboine First Nations people.
Saskatchewan is a subnational jurisdiction in the country of Canada, and gazettes are released at both the federal and provincial levels. Today, Canada is made up of 10 provinces and three territories in total. The Law Library has plans to release issues from additional Canadian provinces in the future, subject to copyright restrictions.
Freely available gazettes from around the world in the Foreign Legal Gazette Collection include:
Northern Africa and Western Asia: Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Dubai.
Western and Central Africa: Gabon, Cabo Verde, and Burkina Faso.
Eastern and Southern Africa: Eritrea, Kenya, Niger, and Botswana.
Oceania: New Caledonia and Cook Islands.
Southeastern Asia: Philippines.
Europe: Italy.
South and Central America: Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela, Paraguay, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Grenada, and the Dominican Republic.
North America: the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and the Mexican states of Coahuila de Zaragoza, Jalisco, and Colima.
Current total: 25 jurisdictions
The Law Library’s online database and webinar recording are great tools to help navigate our gazette holdings. The Digital Resources Division is grateful to all of our partners in this project, including our colleagues in the Collections Services Division, the Digital Collections Management and Services Division, and former and recent participants of our Remote Legal Gazette Volunteer/Internship program for working on these legal jurisdictions and more.
We will continue to add new foreign legal gazettes as the Law Library digitizes its physical collections, subject to copyright restrictions. Subscribe to the blog below to stay updated when we have more releases!
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