For an overview of the Singapore legal system, other than consulting the Foreign Law Guide and the law library Country-by-Country Guide, these open-source research guides are helpful. See here, here and here.

The primary law of Singapore consists of its Constitution, statutes, subsidiary legislation, and case law.  The law library does not subscribe to the fee-based database on Singapore law, LawNet, yet much of the recent primary law of Singapore is available freely on the web.

Statutes     Singapore Statutes Online includes major constitutional documents and recent statutes but does not include subsidiary legislation. The Singapore Parliament website covers bills from 2002, selective committee reports from 2004, and parliament reports/debates.

Case Law     LawNet, hosted by the Singapore Academy of Law, provides free access to the current three months of decisions and judgments rendered by the Subordinate Courts and the Supreme Court. The Academy website also includes Law Reform Reports.  Singapore Law Reports which cover selective Supreme Court decisions are available in Lexis.  Singapore Academy of Law Annual Review of Singapore cases, basically a discussion of cases selected from the Singapore Law Reports, is available in HeinOnline and in print.

EGov Portal     EGazettes, the electronic version of the Singapore Government Gazette, is published daily and available for free public viewing for 5 days. The government information portal provides links to government departments and selective current legislation.

Current Awareness     Singapore Law Watch, managed also by the Singapore Academy of Law, provides links and RSS feed subscription to legislative updates, recent judgments and commentaries. CommonLII covers selective legislation, judgments and secondary sources including the Singapore Yearbook of International Law.

For the law library print collection, treatises relating to the law of Singapore are shelved in the Lower East Side foreign law collection with the call number KPP.

A gazette is an official government pulication that conveys government business, news, and laws as they are passed to the public.  Most countries have a gazette and many are available free online.  The regularity of publication of gazettes varies by country as do their official names, naturally, as they are published in the vernacular.  For example, the gazette of Peru is called El Peruano; it is in Spanish, publshed daily, and available online.

The gazette of South Korea is the Gwanbo; it is in Korean and also published online.

You can find a complete list of gazettes on our Country-by-Country Guide to Foreign Legal Research.  This portal also has research guides for each country to help you get started researching the law of foreign nations.

The Law Library is testing Westlaw China, a new database with primary and secondary sources on China laws:

http://www.westlawchina.com/login.php

The trial user ID and password can be found in YLS Inside Research Sites under Library Database Passwords. 

Legal periodicals are often a good starting point when you are researching a broad legal topic.  The Law Library has access to three online legal journal databases in Chinese: Chinese Academic Journals (CAJ), Wan Fang's Chinese Online Journals (COJ) and ChinaLawInfo's journal collection.  For those who are interested in researching China law but are not proficient in Chinese, HeinOnline (Law Journal Library and Foreign & International Law Resources Collection), JSTOR and SpringerLink's Frontiers of Law in China include a variety of China-related legal and inter-disciplinary journal titles published in English.  The latter, a collaborative publication by publisher Springer with Renmin University in Beijing consists of English translation of selective law review articles originally published in the vernacular by universities in China. While the quality of the English translation varies, the selection of articles provide an overview of legal issues currently of interest to the Chinese legal community.

For better access, the China Law Research Resources page in Morris (under Research tab) now has a link to a union list of China-Related Electronic Serial Titles included in the three journal databases. The selective list includes the more commonly known journals currently accessible from three A to Z lists in the law library research website (Legal Databases, Yale University Library E-Journals & Newspapers and Other Databases).  They are arranged alphabetically by their Pinyin or English titles in the union list. Information relating to the coverage of each journal title is available as well as direct links to the databases.

Lastly, a recent blog post in Law Librarian Blog includes a useful bibliography of China-related journal articles and treatises published in English and German in 2007compiled by Dr. Knut Benjamin Pissler of Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law.  See here.

India is in the news a lot recently (see NYT: India Orders New Inquiry into 2002 Clashes) and is a very popular country for legal research, partially due to the fact that Indian legal materials are in English.  To help you research Indian statutes, jurisprudence, and doctrine, we have a fabulous print collection on the Lower East Side (Call no. KNS), an electronic guide to Indian legal research guides, and a subscription to Manupatra, the most popular and comprehensive Indian legal database available.  To access Manupatra, you must obtain the username/password  from the old Blackboard site: Communities Tab -- Academic Community -- Library Databases -- enroll...then find the Manupatra folder.  If you have any research questions or suggestions for Indian legal materials, please contact Teresa or the Reference team.

Don't know where to find the criminal code for the Ivory Coast?  Or jurisprudence from the Constitutional Court of South Africa?  Or a case decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights?  Try the F/I Research Resources page.  This page will link you to primary and secondary sources to help you get started on your research.  The Country-by-Country Guide will point you to valuable legal research guides for each country in the world.  You will also find annotated lists of foreign and international databases, both open-access and subscription-based.  For specialized assistance with your research, please do not hesitate to contact Teresa Miguel or any of our reference librarians.