Yale Law Library - Foreign and International Blog : Research

Researching Singapore Law

Evelyn Ma — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:00:00 GMT

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.

New Foreign Law E-Resources

Evelyn Ma — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:27:00 GMT

The Law Library has subscriptions to four new e-resources from LexisNexis:

EU Tracker
EU Tracker tracks the implementation of key EU Directives across 20 Member States in 10 practice areas. There are links to consultation papers, draft legislation and the eventual national implementing legislation of member States. It is a unique monitoring and analysis tool for lawyers, PSLs and information managers.

JurisClasseur
This database contains French-language legal information: legislation, regulations and case law. It also gives access to a great volume of secondary legal sources and expert analysis.

LexisNexis China Law Database
The LexisNexis China Law Database (LNCHNL) is an authoritative collection of Chinese laws, regulations, tax information, judicial decisions, and other legal documents, collected from government sources, and translated by LexisNexis China Online (COL) in Beijing.

Quicklaw
Quicklaw is a Canadian electronic legal research database that provides court decisions from all levels, news reports, provincial and federal statutes, journals, and other legal commentary. It also offers a case citator and case digests.

They are accessible on the Yale network and username/password are not required to log in. For a list of legal databases subscribed by the law library see here.

United Nations Treaty Collection

Teresa Miguel — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:49:00 GMT

The new and improved United Nations Treaty Collection database is up and running. In this fabulous open-access database, you can find the complete run of the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS), League of Nations Treaty Series (LoN), Multilateral treaties deposited with the UN, Status of Treaties (MTDSG), Certified True Copies (CTCs) of treaties (pdfs), and Depositary Notifications (CNs). There is a UN legal research guide, cumulative index, and more. The database has been further refined to offer a variety of advanced search features including Popular Name search, Title search, and Participant search.

UNTS is also available in print in the tunnel between L1 and the UES. You can find all of Yale's subscription-based and some open-access international law databases and resources on our Foreign and International Law Resources page.

China-Related Electronic Journals

Evelyn Ma — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:35:00 GMT

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.

UNdata - a New Portal for UN Statistical Data

Evelyn Ma — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:08:00 GMT

The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the statistical arm of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), has launched a new web-based data service UNdata. Instead of clicking through data sets scattered in the websites of different UN agencies, users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN system through a single entry point.

The new portal provides useful features such as Country Profiles, Advanced Search and Glossaries to aid research. Currently, there are 14 databases and 6 glossaries containing over 55 million data points and covering a whole range of statistics relating to Population, Industry, Energy and the Environment, Trade and National Accounts. The UNdata wiki provides links to the sources' homepages and includes information about the methodology by which data sets are collected.