INTRODUCTION
For the last seven years, foreign and international law training courses for law librarians have been held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) under the auspices of BIALL. They have been collaborations between the Foreign and International Law Librarians at IALS, the Squire Law Library at the University of Cambridge and the Bodleian Law Library at the University of Oxford, with the additional participation of librarians from the University of Cardiff and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
THE ORIGINAL IDEA
The original idea for a foreign and international law training event came from David Gee, Deputy Librarian at IALS. A new role of Foreign and International Law (FIL) Librarian had recently been created at the Institute and in 2007 I had been appointed to the post, the first incumbent; Oxford had introduced the role of Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian (FCIL) a few years earlier, while Cambridge had had a FIL Librarian since 1997. Of course all three libraries, because they have large foreign law and public international law holdings, had always had staff with experience and specialist knowledge of these collections, but it was a new development for dedicated FIL or FCIL posts to be created. With the establishment of these roles, the Squire, the Bodleian Law Library and IALS were looking to the example of the United States, where foreign and international law librarianship has a higher profile. The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has long had a Special Interest Section for Foreign, Comparative and International Law, with hundreds of members, and the AALL Directory listed seventy-eight Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian posts in 2012 (Roy Balleste et al, Law Librarianship in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed., Scarecrow Press, 2014, p.179). In the US, foreign and international law specialists are found not only in academic libraries, but also in government libraries, law firm libraries and even some large public libraries – those, such as LA Law Library, that serve practitioners and academics as well as the general public.
David Gee thought that it would be valuable for me to get together with Lesley Dingle, the Squire's FIL Librarian, and Elizabeth Wells, the Bodleian Law Library's FCIL Librarian, to develop a course in which we could pass on our professional knowledge and at the same time raise awareness of the foreign and international law collections held at our respective libraries. He asked me to organise the event in collaboration with my Oxbridge counterparts. The three of us met for the first time at the Bodleian Law Library to plan the programme - a meeting which also gave rise to very useful discussions of our libraries' FIL collections and related matters. Following the meeting, the next step was to approach the BIALL Professional Development Committee to see if they would like to include our event in their seminar programme; they were happy to do so and put us in touch with BIALL representative Hannah Milford.
THE COURSES
Four BIALL-IALS Foreign and International Law courses have now taken place, all held at IALS. Delegates have come from law firms, the Inns of Court, academic libraries, government departments and independent consultancies, from Dublin, Edinburgh, London and elsewhere. In 2011 Elizabeth was co-organiser of the course, with Mark Haines from BIALL, and in 2015 I was co-organiser again, with BIALL's Robert Turner; Robert also compèred the last two courses, with great aplomb and humour. Each course has been fully booked and the February 2015 one was so popular that we soon had a waiting list of fifteen people and decided to repeat the event in November. The interest in the course from across the legal information profession demonstrates the importance of foreign law and public international law for global law firms, comparative academic research and other sectors.
Practical session, BIALL-IALS FIL course, November 2015 Photograph by Lindsey Caffin, IALS.
THE COURSE PROGRAMME
The course programme features a combination of presentations and practical online searching exercises for the delegates. Lesley Dingle's public international law (PIL) presentation covers customary international law, treaties, judicial decisions and the teachings of publicists (leading PIL experts), as well as other sources. My US law talk covers the US legal system and primary sources for both federal and state law. We have twice included a survey of sources for foreign and comparative law research, delivered by Elizabeth Wells, introducing the different types of legal system around the world and highlighting multi-jurisdictional sources (the first time, this talk was delivered by Sarah Spells from SOAS Library, though prepared by Elizabeth). For the first course, in 2009, we also took the opportunity to invite Peter Clinch, then Senior Subject Librarian for Law at the University of Cardiff, to present the newly-launched FLARE Index to Treaties (<http://193.62.18.232/dbtw-wpd/textbase/treatysearch.htm>) and the FLAG foreign law database (<http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/flag/flag.htm>). Following the 2009 course, Lesley's public international law paper and my own on sources of law in the United States were published in Legal Information Management ((2009) 9 LIM 273 and 267).
THE 2015 PROGRAMME
In 2015 we varied the programme: Elizabeth gave a presentation about sources of law for European and Latin American jurisdictions and we introduced a session on sources of African and Asian law by Bob Burns, the Law Librarian at SOAS. Both these talks taught me quite a lot, particularly about Latin American law and the existence of several African and Asian online resources which I had not come across previously. Lesley and I gave updated versions of our public international law and US law talks respectively. As before, there were practical exercises on each topic for course delegates to work through in the IALS computer training room, with the speakers on hand to answer any questions that might arise.
Hester Swift in the IALS training room Photograph © Lloyd Sturdy (www.lloydsturdy.com).
FLARE
Our foreign and international law training initiative complements the FLARE (Foreign Law Research) collaboration, which is also concerned with publicising UK libraries' foreign law collections, among its other aims. The FLARE group consists of five UK libraries with substantial foreign law collections: the British Library, SOAS Library, the Bodleian Law Library, the Squire Law Library and IALS Library. (See Peter Clinch and Hester Swift, ‘Opening up the UK's Foreign and International Law Collections: the FLARE Initiative, the FLAG Foreign Law Guide and the FLARE Index to Treaties’ (2009) 9 LIM 262.)
WORKING TOGETHER AND THE NEXT COURSE
Although we are training other librarians, all the speakers involved in the FIL courses agree that we learn a lot from each other as well. It is of immense value for us to have worked together and got to know each other; we now consult each other regularly on foreign and international law librarianship matters. The course will appear again in the BIALL training calendar in the next couple of years and suggestions for areas to include in the programme would be welcome. I look forward to continuing the collaboration and hope that legal information professionals will continue to find the courses useful.
