UNH Franklin Pierce Law School Law Library: International Legal Research: Getting Started

International Law

Books on International Law

The Cambridge Companion to International Law by James Crawford (Editor); Martti Koskenniemi (Editor)
Call Number: Main Stacks KZ3410 .C35 2012
ISBN: 9780521190886
Publication Date: 2012-01-26

Check out the UNH Franklin Pierce Law Library's Library Search for more books and ebooks on this topic. These survey texts will provide you with an overview of the basic premises of international law.

UNH Law - International Law Databases

Only current UNH Law students, faculty and staff may access these databases remotely.

Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Law This link opens in a new window
The Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Law is an excellent starting point for research on topics pertaining to international law and the UN. It provides peer-reviewed, brief, authoritative overviews of complex topics, with a bibliography for further investigation.
HeinOnline: U.S. Treaties and Agreements Library This link opens in a new window
The Treaties and Agreements Library contains ALL of the U.S. treaties, whether currently in force, expired, or not yet officially published. This library is the world's largest and most complete online collection of U.S. treaties and agreements. It includes such prominent collections as the United States Treaties and Other International Agreements set ("The Blue Set"), as well as famous sets from Bevans, Miller, Malloy and others.

Learning more about the World

If you are researching to learn more about a country in general, its government, or its domestic laws it's good to get an overview. Try these sources:

CIA World Factbook - is a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency with almanac-style information about the countries of the world. It provides country profiles alphabetically by country. Note that while it may describe the style of government, population, economic indicators, etc. there are no sources cited. This is true for any legal details - there are no citations listed. Great for an overview and a place to start but not for in-depth legal research

JuriGlobe - A great resource for identifying a country's legal system. This is important when researching another country's domestic law (foreign legal research). If the country is a civil law country - you can expect to find that codes are significant sources of law, if a country is a common law country then case law will be very important. "Introductory Remarks" discusses how the authors categorized the different world legal systems - they describe that "[f]ive categories were selected for the creation of this Website on World Legal Systems: Civil law, Common law, Customary law, Muslim law, and Mixed law systems, the latter referring not to a single system but to a combination of systems."

The Foreign Law Guide (Brill - UNH Only)- provides you with more detail on a country's legal systems, political history, the structure of government and specific information (with citations) on common topics of law.

Introductory Research Guides

Websites

Globalex
Produced by Hauser Global Law School Program of New York University, Globalex includes high quality legal research guides on various international subjects as well as timely articles on international law topics and venues.

Law Library Resource Xchange –LLRX.com

This site includes a number of research guides on international law posted by law librarians as well as a search function.
Academic Law Library Research Guides on International Law
Academic law libraries with strong international collections often provide international law research guides on their web sites designed to aid beginning researchers. These guides are frequently geared to the library’s own collection. Examples: Columbia, Duke, Harvard, UC Berkeley and Yale. Try doing a Google Search to locate some good ones.