Thursday, July 28, 2022

Global-Regulation Database Now Available

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 availability, in both free and subscription resources. Notes about English translations (either official or through unofficial secondary sources) are also often included.
  • GlobaLex: A free website maintained by NYU Law's Hauser Global Law School Program, GlobaLex’s Foreign Law Research section provides detailed guides to researching the law of most countries, including some not featured in Foreign Law Guide (such as North Korea and South Sudan).
  • Worldwide Tax and Commercial Laws (via Checkpoint > International): includes translations of business and tax laws from around the world.

For help using Global-Regulation or these other databases, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Thursday, July 7, 2022

Bloomberg Law Docket Access Update

Last week, Bloomberg Law announced a change to its academic subscription docket usage caps. Effective July 2022, the system will reset educational account users' docket "billing" for the year on July 1, rather than January 1, to more closely track the academic calendar.

As many Law School community members already know, Bloomberg Law provides subscribers with robust access to federal and state court dockets and filings. Individual users can request the full text of documents that are available for electronic retrieval, and track/update pending case dockets as well. Although this service comes at a cost to commercial subscribers, Bloomberg subsidizes these costs for academic users: up to $1,500 per person each year or up to an institutional cap (equivalent to 30% of the annual subscription cost paid by the institution, which varies depending on size). (Note: Academic subscribers are not eligible to request items that require courier service to retrieve.)

More information is available at Bloomberg's Policy on Academic Use of Dockets. Users who exceed their annual allotment will be restricted from incurring additional docket charges (for retrieval or updating/tracking) until the next annual reset. Bloomberg pledges to provide 30 days' notice before suspending docket retrieval access (except in the case of data scraping or other automated download methods, which can result in immediate suspension under the terms of service). Users can always review their current docket "charges" in the top right corner of Bloomberg Law, under My Accounts > My Docket Billing.

What happens if your docket access is someday restricted, either due to your personal or Duke's institutional usage cap? Once retrieved, an individual document becomes freely available in the system (labeled "View" rather than "Request" on the docket), and subsequent readers incur no charges for accessing those materials. Current members of the Duke Law community can also access many court filings and docket materials through Westlaw (Filings tab for a particular case) and Lexis (CourtLink). CourtListener's Advanced RECAP Archive Search includes federal court documents provided by users of the RECAP browser extension

For additional options in researching federal and state dockets, check out our research guide to Court Records and Briefs or Ask a Librarian.