The Goodson Blogson

Earlier this week, the White House announced a new 10% tariff on most imports into the United States to begin on Saturday, as well as country-specific additional duties. ( CNN breaks down the countries impacted by specific tariffs.) President Trump cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in declaring a "lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships" a national emergency warranting the unprecedented move. The Congressional Research Service provides historical background on the closest analogue, Richard Nixon’s 1971 emergency tariff, in its recent report . CRS notes that Congress has the power to terminate the national emergency through a joint resolution of disapproval, or to amend the law cited by President Trump to limit its role in imposing tariffs. The tariff announcement provoked the largest one-day decline in the stock market since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Markets have co...

The Goodson Law Library has recently added a campus-wide subscription to the Global-Regulation database. This resource contains more than 4 million laws from 110 countries, with side-by-side machine translations provided for non-English documents. Access this resource via the library's Legal Databases & Links page or the Duke Libraries Catalog . The Database Coverage map provides an illustration of the included jurisdictions; the Americas, Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia have the deepest coverage, with only a limited number of African jurisdictions represented. Additional resources for locating laws of foreign jurisdictions, either in translation or original format, include: Foreign Law Guide : A subscription database, available to current members of the Duke University community. Entries for a particular country will provide an overview of the legal system, details about primary sources of law, and a subject index. Foreign Law Guide includes pointers to online avai...

This weekend, the British legal research database ICLR Online upgraded to ICLR.4. As noted in ICLR's overview of changes , this version of the resource includes new features and functionality, including improved legislation searching and a new option to browse case law by topic. (An add-on feature called Case Genie, incorporating AI into natural language search processing, is not currently available in Duke's campus-wide subscription to this resource.) Now in its tenth year of operation, ICLR Online is the digital research platform for Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, which has published law reports for England and Wales in print since 1865. ICLR Online contains the full text of case law from ICLR reporters in both HTML and PDF format, as well as a number of search options and browsing tool. The new upgrade to ICLR.4 adds integrated access to legislation through the UK's Legislation.gov.uk website. For additional resources related to search...

The Goodson Law Library has subscribed to the Oxford Legal Research Library , a collection of Oxford University Press titles in four collection areas: International Commercial Arbitration, International Commercial Law, Financial and Banking Law, and Private International Law. Each collection can be browsed and searched separately, or across the broader ORLR interface. Titles in these collections include treatises, practice guides, and commentaries, such as Schlechtriem & Schwenzer's Commentary on the UN Convention on the International Sale of Goods (4th ed. 2016), Commentary on the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) 2nd ed., Brexit and Financial Regulation (2020), and Sovereign Defaults Before Domestic Courts (2018). See the full title list . For help with accessing the Oxford Legal Research Library or other research resources, be sure to Ask a Librarian .

The Goodson Law Library has recently subscribed to SCC Online , a database containing legal materials from India as well as dozens of other foreign and international jurisdictions. Access SCC Online via the Duke Libraries Catalog or Legal Databases & Links . First-time users will need to register with a username in order to access materials; this username will allow future access while connected to Duke's IP range. No password is required for IP login. SCC Online 's collection is strongest for Indian law, including current and historical case law, statutes and regulations, constitutional documents, and parliamentary bills. The "Browse Judgments by Courts" tab includes case law from dozens of additional jurisdictions for varying time periods, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and numerous African nations (including Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). International court materials are also included, such as the Internatio...

The Goodson Law Library has subscribed to e-book versions of the Elgar Advanced Introductions to Law . This series balances accessible introductions to a particular topic with expert commentary. Currently, the Elgar Advanced Introductions online library includes 15 e-book titles, with dozens of additional titles to be added over the next two years. Subjects skew heavily toward comparative and international law topics, and recent publications in the online library include: Mark Tushnet, Advanced Introduction to Comparative Constitutional Law ( also available in print ) Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Advanced Introduction to International Tax Law ( also available in print ) Jaakko Husa, Advanced Introduction to Law and Globalisation The Duke University Libraries have additional Elgar Advanced Introduction titles in print, both at the Law Library and across campus. You can locate the e-book series link as well as available print titles in the Duke Libraries Catalog with a search for ...

Did your New Year's resolution list for 2019 include learning a new language, or traveling to a foreign country? The Duke University community has access to a number of online tools that can help you build proficiency in a new (or rusty) foreign language. Mango Languages includes courses for 70 world languages and more than a dozen English as a Second Language/English Language Learner courses. To set up an account, visit Mango Languages while on the Duke network in order to authenticate as a valid subscriber. After your username and password has been created, you can access the site or mobile app without authenticating through Duke first. Note: Mango is available through the NC Live consortium, which offers access to more than a hundred subscription databases through a user's "home" public or academic library (meaning that North Carolina residents without a current Duke NetID may also be able to access the site through their public or academic library at https:/...

Duke Law has now purchased access to a broad range of Japanese-language legal material through the Lexis AS ONE database. This resource is available to the Duke Law community and to visitors working on-campus within the University IP range by using the link on the Foreign & Int’l tab of the Legal Databases and Links page. Lexis AS ONE is the flagship product of Lexis in Japan. Core primary law materials date from as early as 1947, but the real breadth of coverage for most sources begins around 2010. The database handles all levels of government, from a collection of treaties and international documents to the full range of relevant municipal law, including some sub-federal sources. Access to case law is exceptionally deep, with options to search for opinions stretching back to the Meiji Era (1868). The popular reporter Hanrei Times , as well as a number of topical reporters, are also included. In addition to the primary law material, Lexis AS ONE includes some serials providin...

Do you have questions about the law of our neighbors to the north? The library's guide to Canadian Legal Research might help you find the answers. The Goodson Law Library offers a variety of print and online sources for locating information about Canadian law, including the specialized database LexisNexis Quicklaw (available to the Law School community) to the multinational research database vLex Global (available campus-wide). The guide also links to excellent free online resources like CanLII and The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide . The book series "Essentials of Canadian Law" is one effective starting place. Titles are available in print within the Goodson Law Library , but the full text of thirteen current titles in the series (including constitutional law, criminal law, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) can also be found online in vLex by following the path Browse > North America > Canada > Books and Journals . The research guide a...

What are other nations doing to combat the financing of terrorist organizations? How do the United States' laws on family medical leave compare to the United Kingdom? What are the differences and similarities in corporation laws around the world? The Goodson Law Library's research guide to Foreign & Comparative Law has just been updated with a number of sources to help you find the answer to these and other comparative law questions. In particular, the new HeinOnline database Multinational Sources Compared: A Subject and Jurisdiction Index is a great starting place to locate treatises and other publications which compare multiple countries' domestic practices on a particular topic. The database can be searched by keyword, browsed by subject, or browsed by country to see available publications. For example, a subject search or browse for "Terrorism Finance" will identify three books comparing anti-money laundering law and practice in dozens of countries,...

The Duke community now has access to two online research services for Chinese legal materials. In addition to en.pkulaw.cn (formerly known as Law Info China), the Goodson Law Library has just subscribed to Westlaw China . Both databases are available to the Duke University community, with a NetID and password required for off-campus access. The Legal Databases & Links page provides quick access to both services. Both Westlaw China and en.pkulaw.cn offer bilingual access to Chinese statutes, regulations, case law, legal news, and journal articles, but each service has unique strengths and collections. A comparison chart prepared by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library highlights these differences: Westlaw China and en.pkulaw.cn each include the full text of laws and regulations since 1949. However, Westlaw China's case law is only available in Chinese for full text, with headnote descriptions in English. Westlaw China contains more English-language journals and tre...

Need a quick overview of a country's law and practice on a particular topic? We've previously written about the helpfulness of Foreign Law Guide and GlobaLex as starting places to locate legal information from non-U.S. countries. A secondary source set which is frequently cited in those resources is the International Encyclopaedia of Laws (IEL) . IEL volumes are published for 25 topics, including Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Intellectual Property, Commercial and Economic Law, Sports Law, Competition (antitrust), and Environmental Law. Formerly available at Duke as looseleaf print publications (which are no longer updated at the Goodson Law Library), the series is maintained electronically for the Duke community and on-site visitors via the International Encyclopaedia of Laws database. (Individual IEL titles will also be directly linked in the Duke Libraries Catalog with a keyword search for the appropriate topic. For example, a catalog search for internat...

Thanks to robust free access through government websites, as well as subscription resources with primary law, most American legal researchers can locate a U.S. state or federal court opinion or statute with ease. But what about finding primary legal materials from other countries? Online access can vary widely, and language barriers can also make searching difficult. Whenever you're tasked with tracking down legal materials from outside the U.S., keep these three helpful starting places in mind. The Bluebook , Table 2: Foreign Jurisdictions . While selective in the number of countries it covers, the legal citation manual The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (20th ed. 2015) has increased its attention to non-U.S. jurisdictions in recent editions. The Bluebook table for a particular country (listed alphabetically by country name in Table 2) highlights preferred sources and citation formats for most primary legal materials, and includes titles, dates, and URLs where availab...

Last night, the Times of London's Twitter account noted the passing of its longtime "Weird Cases" columnist, Gary Slapper : All @thetimes very sad to learn of the untimely death of our columnist @garyslapper . A huge loss - a lover of law's curiosities & people. — Times Law (@TimesLaw) December 5, 2016 Slapper's name should be familiar to many legal researchers, as the author of several leading textbooks on the law of England: The English Legal System and How the Law Works . As the legal news website Legal Cheek noted today , he was also a prolific humorist, in his Times column and on social media. In addition to several editions of Slapper's seminal textbooks, the Goodson Law Library collection also contains Slapper's collection of Weird Cases: Comic and Bizarre Cases from Courtrooms Around the World . To see which of his works are available in the Goodson Law Library collection, try a search of the Duke University Libraries catalog for the...

Pop quiz: which book in the library contains an organization chart for the U.S. Coast Guard, lists of current congressional committees and their membership, and contact information for the National Pasta Association ? You'll probably never need all three of those things at once, but you should know that you can find them all in the Washington Information Directory , whose 2016-2017 edition has just landed in the Reference Collection on level 3. Published since 1975, the Washington Information Directory compiles contact information and descriptive summaries about governmental and non-governmental organizations in and around the nation's capital. Organized by topics (such as Law and Justice) and subtopics (such as Criminal Law, or Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties), each subsection includes lists of government agencies and non-governmental organizations, along with a brief description of their missions and public contact information. The directory is an interesting way t...

Yesterday, voters in the United Kingdom narrowly opted to leave the European Union , an unprecedented political move which set world markets on edge and prompted the immediate resignation announcement of Prime Minister David Cameron , who will step down in the fall. The contentious "Brexit" referendum's vote was split 51.9% to 48.1% across the UK, with a record-high 71.8% turnout. The BBC's information page contains interactive maps and breakdowns by geography and age groups. What happens now? At the moment, the referendum results are not legally binding until the UK invokes Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon . As Time notes , the UK Parliament could nullify the referendum if asked, although Cameron has stated that the choice of the voters will be honored. Because citizens of Scotland voted largely in favor of remaining, there is also a possibility that the Scottish independence movement will be revived in an effort to keep Scotland in the EU. It's estima...

For more than a century, law students around the world have learned about the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company , a British corporation which advertised its nasal spray as a surefire preventive measure against influenza. The makers of Carbolic Smoke Ball even advertised a £100 reward (approximately $10,000 in today's dollars) to consumers who used it as directed but contracted the flu. When one disappointed user, Louisa Elizabeth Carlill, became ill, she attempted to claim the reward, with assistance from her solicitor husband. In response, the company first accused her of using the product incorrectly, then denied that their advertised reward constituted a "contract" with the user. Mrs. Carlill prevailed at both trial and appeal, and the rest is contract law history. Carbolic Smoke Ball advertisement, circa 1892. Outside of contract law casebooks, where can you read the full text of Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. , [1893] 1 QB 256? As it turns out, the list of answe...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia heard a challenge to the Canadian province's anti-cyberbullying law , which was passed in 2013 following the suicide of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons. Parsons, a victim of sexual assault, had been harassed for several months by students at her school after a photo of the attack was circulated online. In response to her tragic death, Nova Scotia lawmakers enacted the Cyber-safety Act , which prohibits "electronic communication […] that is intended or ought reasonably [to] be expected to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other damage or harm to another person’s health, emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation." Under the Act, victims of cyberbullying may be entitled to civil damage awards from their harassers, or from the parents of minor children who engage in online harassment. Robert Snell, who was accused of cyberbullying by a former business partner, has challenged a protective order issued against hi...

The Goodson Law Library has just added the new World Treaty Library to its HeinOnline subscription. Members of the Duke University community can access the new library from the HeinOnline Welcome screen . This library includes digital versions of many important treaty indexes and compilations, including the League of Nations Treaty Series (L.N.T.S.), the United Nations Treaty Series (U.N.T.S.), and the Kavass (KAV) treaty collection. Of particular interest to historical treaty researchers is Wiktor's Multilateral Treaty Calendar, 1648-1995 , which extends the library's historical reach to the mid-17th century. In all, Hein estimates that more than 180,000 treaty records are available through this library. Long-time treaty researchers will likely appreciate the convenience of a single source for searching and accessing the text of historical treaties. (For example, one foreign & international law librarian described the collection as "a truly monumental library...

Today, the Library of Congress opened its long-awaited exhibition Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor , a 10-week celebration of the foundational charter of liberties which has informed the democratic rule of law in both England and the United States. At the heart of the exhibit is one of only four surviving copies of the 1215 document, on loan from England's Lincoln Cathedral . (As noted in a historical document from the Goodson Law Library's collection , also digitized on HathiTrust , the Lincoln Cathedral previously loaned their copy to the Library of Congress for an exhibition in the late 1930s.) Today's Washington Post succinctly summarizes the history of this "Great Charter" . In an attempt to subdue a rebellion among his feudal barons, King John agreed to the terms of the document, which ensured the rights of land-owning subjects and limited the power of the Crown. Forty-one copies were made and distributed to each baron; the document on display at the Library o...