Top of page

Category: Global Law

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

FALQs: Article 370 and the Removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s Special Status

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

The following is a guest post by Tariq Ahmad, a foreign law specialist in the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress. Tariq has previously contributed posts on Islamic Law in Pakistan – Global Legal Collection Highlights, India’s Regulatory Approach to Uber, and FALQ posts on Beef Bans in India and Proposals to Reform Pakistan’s Blasphemy …

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

Developments in the Regulation of Cryptoassets

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

In April 2019, the Law Library’s foreign law specialists completed a new multinational report titled Regulatory Approaches to Cryptoassets. This was our fourth major report on cryptocurrencies and other assets that utilize distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain. We first wrote in 2014 about what forty governments were saying and doing in relation to the emergence of …

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

The Appointment of the New Chief Justice of New Zealand

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

On March 14, 2019, New Zealand‘s new chief justice, The Right Honourable Chief Justice Dame Helen Winkelmann GNZM, was sworn in at the Supreme Court in Wellington. She replaces Dame Sian Elias, who retired on March 13, 2019, from the role to which she was appointed in 1999. Since that time, the Supreme Court of …

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

Parliamentary Petitions Move Online in Australia and New Zealand

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

I recently saw a tweet from the Twitter account of the New Zealand Parliament regarding the launch of an electronic petitions system. I’m not sure if the Australian House of Representatives social media people also read that tweet, but the next day I saw its account had sent a tweet reminding people that a new e-petition platform had …

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

Nauru – 50 Years of Independence

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

Fifty years ago, on January 31, 1968, Nauru became an independent nation. It is the smallest island republic in the world with a land area of just 8.1 square miles (“about 0.1 times the size of Washington, DC“) and a population of around 10,000 people. Prior to independence, from 1947 onward, the island was subject to a …

Ornate red and ivory wall decoration, with plaque and symbols

Disappearance of a Prime Minister

Posted by: Kelly Buchanan

On this day fifty years ago, December 19, 1967, it was announced that the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, was officially presumed dead. Mr. Holt, who had been Prime Minister for 22 months, from January 1966, had disappeared two days earlier while swimming in the ocean at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, in the state of …