WIPO Hosts Highlevel IP Forum for LDCs

(This doesn't address Civil Law but my other interest, IP)

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) presented a high-level forum on December 12, 2007 with the intent of exploring possibilities to enhancing capacity in the field of intellectual property (IP) as a strategic policy approach to utilizing the IP system for alleviating poverty and promoting wealth creation in least developed countries (LDCs). The forum provided an opportunity for ministers, senior policy-makers and Geneva-based diplomats from LDCs to exchange views and gain insights regarding IP capacity building measures for the use and management of the IP system... It also focused on exploring practical solutions to questions about how the IP system can be developed to serve as a policy tool for economic growth in LDCs.

Ministers from a number of LDCs held a special plenary session on the theme: “Building IP Capacity and a Knowledge Base for Wealth Creation, Social and Cultural Development”. The plenary session was followed by a series of presentations by international experts on a range of topics, including the use of the patent system for technology development and transfer; strengthening business identifiers to facilitate the commercialization of products and services generated by LDCs; the role of copyright and related rights and collective management societies as a contributor of economic growth; recent international developments in the area of IP and traditional knowledge, genetic resources and expressions of folklore; the role of higher education and research and development institutions in LDCs as catalysts of national innovation; and building capacity in all relevant areas of IP in accordance with national development plans. The program is available at: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/wipo_ip_ldc_ge_07/wipo_ip_ldc_ge_07_inf_1_prov_3.doc

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Books 1 & 2 of the BGB

The German Ministry of Justice has reposted books 1 & 2 of the BGB in English to their site after almost a year from the withdrawl of the English translation. You can find the new translation of books 1 & 2 here.

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Legal Conference Blog

The Gallagher Law Library at the UW School of Law is sponsoring a blog tracking legal conferences throughout the world. This blog is an excellent place to keep track of upcoming conferences. Please, take a look at it: http://depts.washington.edu/lawref/confblog/

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Digitized Civil Law Materials

These are three collections of digitized legal and civil law original resources available on the web.

The Junta de Andalucia ,through their Cultural Chamber, has a virtual library (biblioteca virtual not the librería virtual, which is the virtual bookstore) with a collection of digitized original legal materials going back to the XVI cent.

The Universidad de Sevilla through their main library has a collection of digitized original materials which contains a several legal and civil law sources.

Finally, the Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Sevilla has the PixeLegis project which is dedicated to digitizing legal and civil law materials from the XIX cent.

These three different projects for digitized materials make access to original resources easier for the researcher. Enjoy your search!

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Lois Françaises en Anglais

Here's a great resource for French law in English. French-Law Net, http://french-law.net/, is edited by Nicolas Jondet, a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in copyright law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. This blog "provides news updates in English on recent developments in French Law, focusing on Intellectual Property, Technology and Medical Law."

With thanks to Mary Whisner, the official goddess of Reference, who tipped me off to this great resource. Check out her blogs at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/06780343632178750011

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Cornell Law School Collaborates with French Cour de Cassation

Cornell Law School is establishing a Center for Documentation on American Law at the French Cour de Cassation in Paris. The Cornell Law Library is shipping 13,000 volumes to the French Court, and offering electronic research assistance. The Center will be dedicated before an audience of the world's leading jurists at a groundbreaking international judicial conference set to take place in Paris July 17, 2007...
The venture, which has been supported by the Court's First President, Guy Canivet, (who was subsequently promoted to the Conseil Constitutionnel), will enable the French judiciary to better familiarize themselves with American law and will lead to enhanced dialogue between judges and academics of the two countries. Read the original annoucement of this venture at the Cornell Law School's webpage here.

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PBwiki Ad Free to Educators

This is not really Civil Law related, but PBwiki, http://www.pbwiki.com, is the tool that I use for the Civil Law Dictionary Project and the LSU Reference Manual. This is a very useful tool for legal reference, incredibly easy to use and set up and cleaner now that they have removed the ads from educational wikis. If you would like to know how to use this tool, please, feel free to contact me.

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Second Worldwide Congress on Mixed Jurisdictions

The Second Worldwide Congress on Mixed Jurisdictions, will take place on June 27-30, 2007, at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. The conference is titled The Boundaries of Unity: Mixed Systems in Action and it will consist of a series of meetings and lectures on the different aspects of Mixed Jurisdictions.

The program for the conference (and registration information) is availabe at the World Society of Mixed Jurisdictions Jurists page of the University of Edinburgh's site: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/conferences/wsmjj/

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Louisiana Civil Code Translated to Cantonese

Chinese legal scholar Lou Aihua has completed a translation of the Louisiana Civil Code to Cantonese. This translation will soon be available in print and the LSU Law Library will acquire a copy for its collection. If you are interested in this translation, you may contact the translator directly at aihua905warm@gmail.com.

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GLIN Available Through WorldLII

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) of the United States Law Library of Congress is now searchable through the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII). GLIN is a public database of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations. GLIN members contribute the official full texts of published documents to the database in their original language. Each document is accompanied by a summary in English.

GLIN Abstracts contains databases from 40 countries: Angola, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Kuwait, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Tunisia, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Approximately half of the almost 140,000 abstracts in GLIN provide links to the full texts of the legislation, court decisions and other abstracted documents.

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The Catala Working Group on the Reform of French Law of Obligations

The Catala Working Group is a group of scholars sponsored by the Association Henri Capitant and headed by Professor Emiritus Pierre Catala which has undertaken the reform of Title III of Book III of the French Civil Code (Of Contracts and Conventional Obligations in General). This working group of approximately 34 law professors produced a revision of the law of obligations (articles 1101 to 1386 of the Civl Code) and prescription (articles 2234 to 2281 of the Civil Code) which has been officially presented to the French government. The original text of the revisions, in French, is available here, as well as the translations in English (by LSU’s Professor Alain Levasseur), Spanish (by Chancellor Fernando Hinestrosa), Italian and German (by Professor Hans. J. Sonnenberger).

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The Big German Book (BGB) - in English

A while back, the German Ministry of Justice put out an official translation in English of the German Civil Code based on the version promulgated on 02 Jan. 2002. They pulled this translation from the net shortly after publishing due to flaws in the translation (click here for the Ministry's translation page). I thought it was gone forever but I was able to find that the University of Edinburgh School of Law has a copy of the translation posted here. While it is not an "official" translation it can at least help researchers unfamiliar with German.

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ALEX - The Austrian Law Digitization Project

ALEX is the Austrian National Library's ongoing project of digitization of Austrian legal materials. This project's database consists of pdf files of historical Austrian legal materials in some cases going as far back as the XVIII century. Since these are scans of the original documents, all the materials are in German and there are not any translations contained in the database. However, this will be a great resource to any researcher working in Austrian law.

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Foreign Law Translations - France, Germany, Israel & Austria

The University of Texas at Austin School of Law has a site at the Institute of Trasnational Law dedicated to provide translations of French, German, Israeli, and Austrian materials. The French and German sites are subdivided into legislation and decision areas while the Israeli and Austrian sites only hold decisions... While the German site has many dead links, it still provides acces to translated sections of the German Civil Code, the official site for which was recently pulled because of translation problems. For a more comprehensive collection of translated German materials, check the German Law Archive. This Archive was started by the University of Oxford and it is presently on its own domain, iuscomp.org, which also hosts the Oxford University Comparative Law Forum and the website of the Institute of European and Comparative Law of the University of Oxford.

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Civil Law Dictionary Wiki

I have begun a Civil Law Dictonary Wiki Project in which I hope to include Civil Law/Common Law glossaries listing and defining those Civil Law terms unfamiliar to Common Law practitioners. This wiki is intended to be a collaborative project in which anyone can contribute. It is indented to be a work in progress to which users can add material or edit the entries already there. If you would like to participate, please, contact me at vicenc.feliu@law.lsu.edu for access to the project.

Thanks in advance for your collaboration.

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Jurispedia

JurisPedia is an encyclopaedic project of academic initiative devoted to worldwide law, legal and political sciences. Jurispedia was developed on the initiative of the Équipe de Recherche Informatique et Droit (Faculty of Law of the University of Montpellier I), the Faculty of law of the Can Tho University, the Faculty of law of the Groningen University, the team of JURIS (Université du Québec À Montreal), and the Institute for Law and Informatics (Saarland University)... The project is open for cooperation with other partners and is based on a Wikipedia format with contributions from users. It contains access points for many items of interest for FCIL researchers.

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The Supreme Court, Justinian, and Antonin Scalia

My dear friend and colleague Prof. Paul Baier, George M. Armstrong, Jr. Professor of Law, has published an article that will appear in Issue 2 of Volume 67 of the Louisiana Law Review entitled The Supreme Court, Justinian, and Antonin Scalia: Twenty Years in Retrospect… In this article he gives a wonderful and colorful brief history of the development of the Civil Law from the times of the great Roman jurists that is a must read for Civilians everywhere. Enjoy it here first at www.law.lsu.edu/globals/pdfs/misc/BaierJustinianAndScaliaArticle.pdf

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Next Civil Law Workshop - Legal Status of Embryos

The Center of Civil Law Studies will be presenting the next lecture on the series "Revisiting the Distinction between Persons and Things"... on Tuesday, March 20th, 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. at the LSU Law Center's Tucker Room. The topic of the lecture will be "Human Embryo, Animal Embryo, Chimerical Embryo: What Legal Status?" and it will be presented by Dr. Laurence Brunet and Dr. Sonia Desmoulin, Centre de Recherche en Droit des Sciences et de Techniques, Univeristé Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

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Civil Law Workshop: Heirs of the Body

Professor Gruning, Loyola University School of Law (New Orleans), presented some interesting questions on the current state of the Civil Law in relation to the legal status of the body as goods or things... According to Prof. Gruning, Civil Law does not state what rights a person has on his own living body; what rights does that same person have on his own body after his death; what are the rights of person's heir on the body; and what are the rights of others of that person's choosing on the body. Presently, the law prohibits trafficking on organs, tissue, bone fragments, and in some instances blood. Yet in certain cases the law also acts as if there were some property interests of the person on his body but fails to identify what those interests are. Prof. Gruning suggests a that the Civil Law could handle a private law principle in which the person has a property interest in his body yet where trafficking on body parts would be prohibited by placing body parts out of commerce.

The workshop was excellent and the discussion after the presentation was informative and spirited. There were different approaches to solutions for Prof. Gruning's questions but it was clear that this is an issue clearly solvable by the mechanisms present in the Civil Law.

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Civil Law Resources for Spain and Latin America

The Universitat de Girona has a Civil Law page on their website with access to Catalan Civil Legislation and Spanish Civil Legislation in Catalan and Spanish. The site also features a Pàgina Jurídica that has a collection of Latin American law resources.

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Announcement from the Anglo-American Legal Tradition Project

The O’Quinn Law Library at the University of Houston Law Center is proud to announce the inauguration of the extraordinary new website, the Anglo-American Legal Tradition – AALT.

The AALT is the result of over fifteen years of negotiation with the National Archives of the United Kingdom by Robert C. Palmer, Cullen Professor of History and Law at the University of Houston... The license with the National Archives permits the free, non-commercial, public display and use of the images captured by Professor Palmer’s ongoing project to acquire images of the main categories of court records over almost four centuries (c.1272 – 1650); at this point, some 450,000 images have been acquired. Access to these documents was previously possible only through use of the original documents at the National Archives itself.

The AALT will be a great boon to the far-flung scholars of Anglo-American legal history. In order to facilitate use of these ancient documents Professor Palmer has supplied guides to paleography and overviews of English legal history, as well as links to other websites of interest to legal historians. The AALT will continue to add images from the National Archives, as well as collections of historical documents from other court systems in the Anglo-American legal world. If others wish to contribute to the general endeavor at other archives and lack only the resources to run a website, the intention of this website is to be available to host such materials, as long as they are legally oriented and meet the general standards for image quality and public availability. The AALT site has the financial resources to continue as a public resource and to grow as materials are offered.

Please visit the AALT website at http://aalt.law.uh.edu/ and join us in welcoming this valuable resource.

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Heirs of the Body: Cadavers, Claims, and Kin

The LSU Center for Civil Law Studies, under the direction of Professor Olivier Moréteau, will sponsor a Civil Law Workshop on revisiting the distinction between persons and things. Professor David Gruning, Loyola University School of Law will speak on the "Heirs of the Body: Cadavers, Claims, and Kin." The workshop will take place at the LSU Law Center's Tucker Room on Thursday, 08 Feb 2007, from 4:30 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. I plant to attend and report on the developments.

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Civil Codes of the World on the Web

The Association Henri Capitant Louisiana Chapter, under the direction of Professor Alain Levasseur, began an effort to collect the Civil Codes available on the web with the intention of supporting the Association’s primary goal of preserving and fostering the civilian heritage. Working in conjunction with Prof. Levasseur, I created a Civil Code Pathfinder for all the Civil Code sites available on the web... For countries where English is not the official language, and where English translations are available, the links to the English translations of the codes are provided. We make no representation as to the accuracy or validity of these translations. If you know of other Civil Codes sites not included in the pathfinder or if you find any dead links while using it, please contact me at vicenc.feliu@law.lsu.edu. Thanks for your help and I hope this collection can be of use to all.

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Department of Defense Releases New Manual for Military Commissions

On January 18, the Department of Defense released a new Manual for Military Commissions. This new manual describes the procedures to be used on detainee trials under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. See the Jurist article. (Yes, I know this is not Civil Law, but it applies to my other interests so I posted it anyway.)

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The Association Henri Capitant Publishes Answer to World Bank Report

In 2005 the World Bank published a report titled Doing Business – Removing Obstacles to Growth in which it heavily criticized the Civil Law tradition, and the French legal tradition in particular, as one of the primary reasons for underdevelopment in some Third World Countries... Last month, the Association Henri Capitant published the second volume of its response to the World Bank, available in French at this link. You can also read my translation of Professor Alain Levasseur’s, the President of the Association Henri Capitant Louisiana Chapter and Hermann Moyse, Sr. Professor of Law at LSU Law, answer to the World Bank in this link.

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Welcome to the Yellow Shoe Civil Law Blog!

I've been working with the LSU Center for Civil Law Studies for almost a year and a half and I just recently got into blogging. I had the idea of creating a blog where I could post developments and things of interest happening specifically in the Civil Law and about foreign and international law issues in general. This blog is the result of that idea, I hope that it is of use or at least enjoyable.

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