Researching foreign law frequently requires accessing and interpreting statutes enacted in non-U.S. jurisdictions, whose language may not be English.
As with many other research questions, IUCAT is an excellent place to start. We have a significant collection of foreign law in print, and a simple search for your jurisdiction in IUCAT may well find you results. To expand your research beyond IU resources, consider using WorldCat, or even Google Books.
Finding authoritative English-language translations of statutes (or at least an English-language summary) if you or your audience do not have access to the language of the target jurisdiction may sometimes be challenging, and it may not always be possible to locate the most up-to-date version of a foreign statute in English.
The single most important source is a subscription database, the Foreign Law Guide, which permits searches by country and subject. Suppose you needed the Greek bankruptcy code. You would look up Greece, then click on the topic Bankruptcy and Insolvency, to retrieve the following information:
Note that this entry provides both the citation to the official publication of the statute as well as a citation to a source in which an English-language version may be found (together with a summary of the statute). If you look up Revue Hellenique de Droit International in IUCAT, you will find that it is available in PDF in HeinOnline, so you could go there to get a PDF version of the bankruptcy code.
Alternatively, you could search for the statute you need in a full-text periodical database, such as HeinOnline, Lexis, or Westlaw. If the statute is likely to be published in a non-law journal, you might search JSTOR as well. In HeinOnline, it might be valuable to search both the standard Law Journal Library, and the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals.
The following is an Advanced Search in HeinOnline:
This search retrieves the same article cited in the Foreign Law Guide:
One good free source of law is Legal Information Institutes, which are non-profit groups designed to make primary law freely available. Many jurisdictions either have their own LII, or are part of a larger LII. The largest LII is WorldLII, which aggregates information from LIIs across the world.
Be warned that since LIIs are non-profit, you may find link rot. The WayBack Machine, which archives the internet, may allow you to use a broken link, although the law may be dated.
Constitutions may be the most consistently findable sources of foreign law in English. There are several databases with excellent constitutional coverage.
One is the non-profit Constitute Project. While the Constitute Project may be a little less up to date than other sources, it has a clean, user friendly interface that makes constitutions particularly easy to search and compare.
Databases that IU purchases include Oxford's Constitutions of the World, which includes the text of national and regional/state constitutions from around the world, as well as in depth explanatory text, and HeinOnline's World Constitutions Illustrated, which includes current and historical constitutions of many jurisdictions, and editorially chosen scholarly works related to those constitutions.
There are a number of sources that allow you to search for law on a particular topic across jurisdictions. One of the best is HeinOnline's Multinational Sources Compared, which identifies scholarly and practitioner works that compare law across jurisdictions.
There are also comparative sources that concentrate on particular topics, such as Comparative Environmental Law and Regulation (K3595.4 .C65 1996); International Copyright Law and Practice (Lexis); and Commercial Laws of Europe (KJC2044.3 .C65). Many of these sources will be cited in the Foreign Law Guide.
The Law Library subscribes to some databases that specialize in particular jurisdictions. If you are interested in Chinese law, for example, Chinalawinfo (pkulaw.com) is an excellent resource. Similarly, for Indian law, Manupatra is a fantastic resource. vLex is a good database for several jurisdictions, but in particular the law of the United Kingdom.
There are several web sites that provide access to country research guides. Some will be mentioned in the Foreign Law Guide, under the Research Guidance catagory. Maybe the most thorough collection of foreign legal guides is NYU's GlobaLex. GlobaLex is free, constantly updated, and a trustworthy source for information and links. Research guides often include information about where you can find English-language translations of primary sources.
There are also other research guides on comparative legal research. These include Globalex's Comparative Law research guide; Duke University's Foreign & Comparative Law research guide; Georgetown University's Foreign and Comparative Law Research Guide.
