Assignments
All assignments are due in print in class on the due date.
Assignment #1
Tribunal Investigation
Answer these six questions about the international tribunal of your choice:
1. Where can you find its decisions? (List all print and electronic sources you can identify).
2. Describe the way its procedural rules are organized. Are they divided into sections according to stages of procedure? Are they in alphabetical order? Explain this in a few sentences as if you were telling someone how to most efficiently begin to search through the rules.
3. What international agreements generally apply to or authorize its work? You should be able to ascertain this by looking through the “about us” section of the tribunal’s Web site. Otherwise, look to see if their documents section includes the authorizing agreements. Just tell the names of the agreements; don’t include copies or links.
4. What are two of its publications that sound interesting to you? In one or two sentences, describe these and why they interest you.
5. State one fact about the tribunal’s library. If this tribunal does not have a library, ANALYZE the choice of links to other resources that you can access from its Web page.
6. Summarize the topic in the tribunal’s latest news release.
Some Tribunals that might interest you: (You do not have to use one of these for the assignment. You may choose any tribunal that handles transnational disputes.)
International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
European Court of Human Rights
WIPO Domain Name Dispute Resolution Service
World Trade Organization
European Court of Justice
Inter-American Court of Human Rights
Permanent Court of Arbitration
International Court of Justice
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Assignment #2
News Report
The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice in mining a news story for information.
Tasks:
1. Select any story from Diplomacy Monitor. http://www.diplomacymonitor.com It doesn’t have to be this week’s news, but don’t pull something from more than a year ago. Attach the news story to the page you turn in for your grade.
2. Name and provide hyperlinks for any documents (speeches, treaties, court decisions…) that are referenced in the news story.
3. There may be laws that are inherent to the story, but which are not specifically referenced in it. Describe those laws. I don’t expect you to try to locate them, just tell what kinds of laws you would be inclined to look for and explain what kinds of points or limits you would be interested in locating within those laws.
4. What questions does this article raise in your imagination and how would you seek to answer those questions? (These might be questions about history or anthropology or politics or anything at all; they do not have to be about law.)
5. Write three questions that might occur to someone five years in the future which can be answered by reading this news story.
Assignment #3
Strategic Navigation of an International Organization:
How to Find and Use Information Relevant to Creation of Legal Documents, Legislation, and Cases
Write a 1 to 2 page guide titled “How to Find and Use Information from ____(name of IGO or NGO) for Legal Projects”. You can choose any international organization for this assignment; it doesn’t have to be big or world-wide. There are lots of regional IGO’s and small specialized NGO’s. http://www.law.pitt.edu/library/international/organizations
Below are the components that you must include in your guide. Additional interesting and useful information is also welcome. As usual, I expect you to show investigative skill and curiosity— two of the necessary components of effective research.
Summarize, in your own words, how this organization’s information can be useful to legal researchers. To do this, you will need to imagine contexts that might lead a legal researcher to this organization. Also in this summary, identify and explain the organization’s primary connection with law, for example: Is it a lawmaking body? Does it monitor treaty compliance? Does it enforce a treaty? You will not get credit for copying and/or pasting information from the site. You have to explain in your own words.
List three information products that are available from this organization. For each information product in this list: tell how to navigate to the information product, convey how the information product is organized, describe the content of the information product, and suggest a way that someone working on a law project could benefit from that information product.
Assignment #4
Finding Foreign Law
Using the Top Ten Tips for Finding Foreign Law, investigate the law of PATENTS or INDUSTRIAL DESIGNS or INVENTIONS (most countries use one of these three terms for the same type of intellectual property) in the country of your choice BUT NOT the United States or any country in which you have completed a law degree or practiced law. [Reminder: You are welcome to select a topic other than patent law.]
HOW TO DO IT:
Test all of the sources on the Top Ten page and tell about the information you find: whether it is primary law or legal commentary, whether it shows full coverage of the law or only parts of it, what government entity or other professional makes it available, whether there is a search engine or other good features on it if it is an electronic resource, whether there is anything especially interesting that you learn from that source. If you find nothing about your country’s patent laws in a particular resource, tell why.
Notes:
- You do not need to sign-up for a listserv. Instead, write on the assignment sheet the message that you would post to a listserv. In this message, you should tell as much as you know about the specific documents you seek and you should summarize where you have already looked.
- Rather than contacting embassies and libraries, you should write on the assignment sheet the names, job titles, and addresses (street or e-mail) of whomever you would contact at those places.
- I do not want you to tell me the legal content of what you find. Do not restate the law or copy and paste it.
SAMPLE ANSWER (using tip #2):
2. To find caselaw, see if Global Courts links to a country’s highest court. WORLDLII also links to many foreign courts’ pages.
Global Courts linked to supreme court where I could only search site by party name or docket number not by topic murder.
WORLDLII Foreign Courts linked to constitutional court, supreme court and two provincial courts. One provincial court (Mainville) had a search engine. Found eight patent cases listed, but not full-text opinions.
Assignment #5
Evaluating the Europa Web Site
Spend at least half an hour working your way around Europa, the European Union’s official Website at http://www.europa.eu.int. Then, write a descriptive review of it in which you convey your own analytical opinions of the following:
- the scope and depth of the information on the site
Some of the material is geared to policy makers and some is for the public and even non-Europeans; show examples of sources intended for specific audiences. Don’t tell me that there’s a lot of information here. Instead, look at the fullness of the content within sample publications or subject areas and think about what kinds of questions it can answer. - the arrangement of the information on the site
Are cross references in reasonable locations? Do your eyes know where to go? Do the categories and sub-categories make sense to you? What do you think about the way it looks? - ease of navigation
In your various test searches, rather than using a search box try clicking on links to conduct your entire search and write about that experience. Can you tell when you’re shifting between EU components? Can you tell where your search came from and where it is going or do you get lost on a path that you didn’t intend to take? - the ways various features on the site work
What do its separate search engines find? Try some of its different databases and tell how easy or hard they are and what kinds of resources they lead to. Notice and tell about other - how the different EU components operate their Web sites
Pay attention to which component is responsible for each page you visit: the public affairs office, a directorate general, the publications office, a court, etc…. Of the various pages you looked at, whose were clearest, most confusing, most informative, etc… - AND the functionality of one of its legal resources (EUR-LEX, OEIL, PRE-LEX, Curia, or ScadPlus.)
Be sure to give examples of the various searches you conducted or features you noticed and used on the site.
