When researching international and foreign law, there are some basic sources that you will use frequently and should get to know. Basic tools or background sources provide a variety of necessary information before or in connection with in-depth research. This short guide highlights international and foreign legal sources but is by no means a complete list of essential tools.
Examine these sources and determine which are most useful for your research.
Research guides are good places to start your research. These guides identify relevant sources and websites as well as explain how to research a specific topic or organization. To locate more guides, search Google using the research topic and "research guide." Limit to non-profit- and university-produced guides by directing Google to search only for site:.edu or site:.org
Example: Brazil law research guide site:.edu or site:.org
| Berkeley Research Guides | Best Guides on the Web |
| Foreign Law Guide (also listed among Top 10 Databases and Databases A-Z) | Georgetown Foreign & Comparative Law Research Guide |
| International Business Litigation and Arbitration | Globalex - Collection of research guides on international, comparative, and foreign law |
| International Organizations | Yale Country-by-Country Guide to Foreign Law |
| Refugee and Asylum Law | Guide to Law Online: The Law Library of Congress's guide to the law of jurisdictions outside the U.S. |
Indexes allow searching by subject headings and related terminology; you don't have to guess what keywords will be effective, and you can easily find synonyms, or cross references, and sometimes also broader or narrower search terms, especially in electronic indexes that supply a "thesaurus" or list of equivalent terms.
The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) is unique among indexes as the only multilingual index that tracks journal articles written in 26 languages. It also indexes journal articles in four different languages, French, German, English, and Spanish. Practice your foreign language skills and read about a legal issue from a foreign law expert's perspective.
Video Introduction to IFLP:
Multinational Sources Compared: A Subject and Jurisdiction Index (2021) indexes books and articles from around the globe by subject and jurisdiction. Find it in print at the Reference Desk, or in Hein Online.
Bibliographies provide lists of useful secondary sources, usually articles and books, but they do not provide much in the way of research methodology. Some bibliographies also point to primary sources. These tools are generally topic specific but can be quite broad in the approach to a subject.
You will also find bibliographies in encyclopedias, books, articles and online. To locate bibliographies on the web, try searching using the subject and the word "bibliographies" or "bibliography." For example, the "international humanitarian law" bibliography retrieves the ICRC's International Law Bibliography.
This list is a collection of print and electronic sources.
Charting the Legal Systems of the Western Pacific Islands: A Legal Research Guide (2017).
Finding English Law: Quick Access to Key Titles (2017).
International Legal Research in a Nutshell (2d ed., 2017).
The Legal Patrimony of Haiti: An Annotated Bibliography (2016).
MICT Bibliography on ICTR and ICTY (2016).
Pension Reform in Chile - An Annotated Bibliography, 44 Int'l J. Legal Info. 116 (2016)
Research Guide to Chinese Copyright Law (2016).
Research Guide to Mexican Law, 36 LRSQ 18 (2016).
Right to Be Forgotten: A Legal Research Guide (2018).
Sharia (Islamic law) in the Contemporary World: A Legal Research Guide (2019).