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Foreign Law Research

Foreign Law is the law of any non-U.S. jurisdication. This Guide presents a starting place for your foreign law research in the UCONN Law Library. The materials selected are predominantly electronic except when the best source is available only in print.

Introduction

Doing Foreign Legal Research requires us to find legal materials in a jurisdiction that is usually new to us.  The additional complication of this type of work is that we have to learn about this legal system and how it publishes materials as we are looking for legal answers.  Because of the uncertainty of the research environment it is especially important to start with resources that help ground us and explain the legal system we are researching and where we can likely find answers.  Research Guides, Gateway Sources, and/or Secondary Sources all serve to do so and are the best place to start.

Tools of the Trade

Foreign language legal dictionaries can be very useful when searching our secondary source material.  If we know what a legal concept is called in a foreign language, that is a very unique term that can help anchor our searching.  Looking in our catalog for "legal dictionary" and the language you are interested return results like the following: