4 - American Association of Law Libraries



NOTE TO READERS: At the beginning of every semester I go through the most recent Economist and pick out a few articles that mention either an international or foreign legal issue and ask students to see if they can find the actual document/case/etc referred to in the article. I generally give them about 20 minutes in class, but this year since I had to miss the first class I gave it as a take-home assignment that was not graded.

From my perspective, this exercise shows students how relevant FCIL research is and how hard it can be if you don’t know the right tools—which of course I will teach them throughout the semester. Sometimes even I can’t find the document (see Q1) which I believe helps them understand that foreign law can be especially difficult to find. The purpose of this exercise is to just get them thinking about how their current research skills might not match up to the demands of FCIL research, and also hopefully will give them a relevant point of reference for the different topics we will be discussing throughout the semester.

ALR-FCIL Diagnostic Assignment

1. From the article “Doing things the Putin Way”, The Economist January 1, 2011

“NOBODY expected Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former controlling shareholders of the Yukos oil company, to be acquitted, just as nobody believed they were guilty of stealing oil and laundering the proceeds. But there was some hope, however irrational, that Viktor Danilkin, the judge presiding over their trial, might find the courage to resist political pressure and deliver justice.

It was not to be. On December 27th, after a 22-month trial, Mr Danilkin rose to read his verdict: “The court has established that as part of an organised-crime group…” The word “Guilty” immediately spread among the journalists and supporters barred from the court. It sounded like a verdict on the system that had put Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev in prison in 2003 and that had orchestrated a second trial to keep them there.”

• Can you locate a copy of this verdict? How would you cite it?

o Most of you started by Googling, which is not always a bad idea when the document you are looking for is recent and very newsworthy—you would be surprised the number of blogs/news sites/court sites that post such cases

o However, the reason I chose this hypo is to demonstrate that there are a number of things you need to consider before searching for foreign legal materials, those being:

▪ What is the structure of the jurisdiction that you are searching in? In this example, if you read up on Russia’s legal system you would find that Russian cases have no precedential value and are therefore rarely reported in print—the verdict in this case was actually read out in court and was only reported in the press by people who were in the courtroom

▪ Can you read the document in its original language? Even if the verdict was available in print, it would be in Russian—could you read it, or would you have to pay to have it officially translated?

o ANSWER: There most likely is not a copy of this verdict available through the resources you have access to at this time. This will happen more often than you probably would prefer when researching foreign law. You will need to consult a research guide on Russian Law to determine what your options are for obtaining an official copy. However, there may be some people who gain access to these documents and post them on blogs and other interested websites.

2. From the article “A coup against the constitution”, The Economist January 1, 2011:

“IN AN election for the National Assembly last September, Venezuelan voters sent a clear message to Hugo Chávez, their autocratic elected president. Slightly more of them voted for opposition candidates than for the ruling party and its allies. Thanks to the government’s manipulation of the electoral rules, the opposition’s votes only translated into 67 seats, whereas the chavistas ended up with 98. But even that was not secure enough for Mr Chávez.

He has used the final three months of the outgoing assembly, in which he has an overwhelming majority, to render irrelevant the incoming legislature, due to be sworn in on January 5th. The centrepiece of this effort is an enabling law which grants the government the power to rule by decree for the next 18 months.”

• Locate the text of this law. What is its official name? Is the copy you found authentic? How would you cite it?

o The problem with this hypo is that you can’t just Google “Enabling Law”—Venezuela is a Spanish-speaking jurisdiction, so the official name of the law would be in Spanish. That is always an important first step when searching for foreign laws

o To locate an authentic, official copy, you need to know where your jurisdiction’s laws are published. To do that, you need background info on the jurisdiction which you can find through a number of research guides which we will discuss later in the semester.

o Once you determine that Venezuelan laws are published in the Gaceta Official, you need to figure out how you can access this—many jurisdictions are now going digital but there are still many which only publish them in print which means you have to figure out where you can get a hold of a paper copy

o Also, like the example above, if and when you do obtain an official copy, you have to be able to either translate it yourself or have it officially translated if you wish to use it as a true legal document

o ANSWER: Ley que Autoriza Al Presidente De La República Para Dictar Decretos Con Rango, Valor Y Fuerza De Ley En Las Materias Que Se Delegan, Gaceta Oficial de la Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela Nbr. 6.009, 17 December 2010. One of your classmates located it on the National Assembly’s website, or you could have searched their Official Gazette’s site, or used a research database like vLex to locate it (even though we don’t subscribe to Venezuelan materials, it still lets you search the database and locate a citation which you can then pull up on the Official Gazette’s website: )

3. From the article “Will they go quietly?”, The Economist January 1, 2011:

“A bigger surprise was the International Criminal Court’s decision to go after Francis Muthaura, Kenya’s most senior civil servant. As secretary to the cabinet, the mellifluous Mr Muthaura may well be the closest adviser to President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. Mr Muthaura is a Meru, a group closely related to the Kikuyu. Mr Kibaki will find it hard now to remain aloof from the process. Publicly, he has spoken of Kenya’s support for the ICC. But his aides are scheming with Mr Ruto, hitherto their sworn enemy, to remove Kenya’s signature from the Rome treaty that set up the court in the first place.”

• Locate a copy of the ICC’s summons against Muthaura; what article did it get filed under?

o The purpose of this question was to demonstrate how easy it is to locate authentic legal documents from international organizations online. Simply going to the ICC’s website will yield not only the official copy of the Summons but also all of the related filings in this case. One of the things I hope you will take away from this class is that most of FCIL information can be easily found for free without using Lexis, Westlaw or any other database.

• Can you locate an authentic copy of the “Rome treaty” mentioned here? How would you cite it?

o It is super easy to Google “Rome treaty” and locate a copy of it that looks pretty authentic, but how would you cite it? Bluebook requires that you cite to the UNTS or another official source

o Another problem, especially for international treaties, is they often have very similar titles—for example, if you did not know this treaty was related to the ICC, you might have looked at the Treaty of Rome, which has nothing to do with the ICC (it established the EU in 1957) and then you’d look rather silly.

o Although it seems onerous, going through the proper steps when locating official treaties will help prevent such problems and make citing easier.

o ANSWER: Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998, 2187 UNTS 3 (entered into force July 1, 2002).

4. From “Faith in Courts”, The Economist January 8, 2011:

“St John’s Shaughnessy is the largest of four conservative parishes in British Columbia that have quit Canada’s mainstream Anglican (Episcopalian) church in protest against the blessing of same-sex unions. They want to take their churches and their other property with them; their bishop is resisting. In the latest twist in a long battle, in November, British Columbia’s court of appeal ruled in favour of the bishop. Parish conservatives want to appeal.”

• Locate an authentic copy of this case. What is its official name? How would you cite it?

o This is a good example of how easy it is to find other countries’ cases online for free. We will learn about why this is in our unit on UK and Commonwealth legal research, but for now I’m glad to see that many of you were able to use databases like Canlii to easily locate the case using key terms

o One recurring theme throughout the semester will “triangulation”—that is, using the data you have available to find a document. For example, in this hypo we didn’t have the name or cite for the case, but we did know what month it was decided in, what the subject matter is, and which jurisdiction it was tried in. That was enough for most of you to construct a smart search that yielded a manageable amount of results.

o ANSWER: Bentley v. Anglican Synod of the Diocese of New Westminster, 2010 BCCA 506 (November 15, 2010).

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