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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