LEGAL RESEARCH BASICS - EXERCISES



LEGAL RESEARCH EXERCISES ON THE ICJ AND OTHER IGOs

1. From the ICJ website () find the July 22, 2010 Advisory Opinion of the ICJ regarding whether the Declaration of Independence of Kosovo adopted on February 17, 2008 violated international law. What was the ICJ’s Opinion? Was the Opinion unanimous or split? If split, what was the vote?

The majority opinion of the ICJ was that it did not violate international law. The vote on this issue was split 10-4.

Path to find it: From the ICJ home page, click on the relevant link (22/07/2010), which is the third link under the “Latest Decisions” heading. First, read the table of contents, which should indicate to you that the information you seek is likely to be found at the end of the document under the heading “General Conclusion.” Scroll down to that portion and read it.

2. From the ICJ website () determine the most recent contentious case regarding which the ICJ issued a Judgment. What is the case and what is the date of the Judgment?

Ahmadou Sadio Diallo (Republic of Guinea v. Democratic Republic of the Congo), Judgment dated November 30, 2010.

Path to find it: From the ICJ home page, click on the “Cases” link, and, from there, the “Contentious cases” link. The default setting (automatically-generated format) for this page is “List of cases by date of introduction.” In order to find the most recent case in which the ICJ issued a Judgment, you should change the setting by clicking on the tab at the top of the page which reads “See by date of culmination.” Next, you can skip over all of the cases under the heading “Pending Cases” since a Judgment has not yet been issued in them. The first case under the heading “2010” is the one in which the most recent Judgment has been issued.

3. Using the Repertoire of Practice for the UN Security Council (), identify the states that were recommended for admission to the UN between January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2003:

Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Swiss Confederation, Tuvalu

Path to find it: After clicking on the website link in the question above, scroll down to what is essentially the “table of contents” on the home page, describing the contents of each chapter. Notice: “Chapter VII: Practice Relative to Recommendations to the General Assembly Regarding Membership in the United Nations.” Now click on the “7” link next to “2000-2003.” The answer is in there.

4. (a) Which countries are the current members of the European Free Trade

Association (EFTA)?

Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland

(b) Which members of EFTA are also members of the European Union?

none

(c) Which members of EFTA are also members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

Iceland, Norway

(d) All members of EFTA are also members of the Council of Europe. Which of the EFTA members was the last one to join the Council of Europe?

Liechtenstein

(e) All members of EFTA are also members of the United Nations. Which of the EFTA members was the last one to join the United Nations?

Switzerland

(f) Which members of EFTA are also members of the Hague Conference on Private International Law?

Iceland, Norway, Switzerland

Path to find it: For each of the above 4(a)-(f), a good search strategy is to Google (or variations thereof). Such a search is likely to turn up a link to a web page of the relevant IGO that contains the information that you need to answer the question: NOTE: In the Google search results, decide upon the answers based upon information that you found from links to reliable sources such as the home pages of the IGOs themselves, not merely from unreliable sources such as Wikipedia, blogs, etc.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download