Sources of Public International Law

It has been suggested that the General Principles of Law are to be invoked to fill gaps that occur when treaties and custom fail to cover an area of law.  Doing the work of researching principles is a comparative exercise, seeing how differing legal systems answer legal questions, hoping to find something common to them all and transcendent to any one tradition.  The skill then is in choosing the right jurisdictions and learning how to do research there.

There are a handful of free websites that offer varying information about the background of a country's legal system and where you can find their legal documents:

The following database is one the library subscribes to and offers more robust and updated information about other countries around the world:

While less explanatory than a gateway source, research guides can point you to the best resources within a library to help you understand a foreign country's legal system.  Often times you can search Google for the name of the country you are interested in & "legal research guide" and you will find results from law libraries.  If from a library other than ours, you would need to take the additional step of seeing if our catalog contains the same material, otherwise you would need to submit an ILL.

Sometimes when researching a particular issue in a foreign country all we have available to us are articles written by experts who have done the research and and hopefully any necessary translation on our behalf.  The best place for one stop searching (although we always recommend looking multiple places) is HeinOnline's Law Journal Library.  It has a robust collection of foreign and international law journals you won't find elsewhere:

Indexes are a great tool for finding articles related to subject matter.  HeinOnline has the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals which indexes over 500 journals and yearbooks: