InSITE
A Current Awareness Service of
Cornell Law Library

ISSN 1521-9046

ARCHIVE

Vol. 16, no. 10
January 24, 2011
InSITE highlights selected law-related World Wide Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database.

The law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. These information can be accessed as following:

    1. Current Issue
    2. Archived Issues
    3. Searchable Database
    4. RSS Feeds RSS FEED of the Current Issue Editions [What is RSS?]
    5. E-mail subscription: send the following request to lyris@cornell.edu:
      join INSITE-L 'your name'
      where your name(include the quotation marks) is the name you want to be available to the list's administrator. You must send this message from the e-mail address where you want to receive the e-list's messages
    6. In print format for the Cornell Law School community

African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights
    URL: http://www.african-court.org/
    The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights adjudicates human rights disputes for its member nations and interprets the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The court is a relatively new institution, established by the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2004. Judges were elected in 2006. Thus far the court has ruled in one case, the Matter of Michelot Yogogombaye versus the Republic of Senegal, in 2009, which is available on the website. Because the court does not yet have a rich body of rulings to research, for now the website is most interesting for documenting the process of establishing a new international court. For example, the Activities Reports of the Court for 2006 and 2007, in the court’s Documents section (not the Basic Documents section), describe the challenges facing the court as it clarifies its jurisdiction, establishes a budget, identifies a location for its permanent seat, negotiates an agreement with Tanzania to host the permanent seat, drafts court rules, and cooperates with partner organizations such as the German Cooperation Agency (GTZ) for support and expertise. Also accessible on the site are profiles of current and past judges, instructions and a template for making an application to the court, FAQs, links to other human rights documents and organizations, news, and information about employment and internship opportunities. Librarians may be interested in reviewing the court library’s policies and technical information, which are also provided. The website is available in all four of the court’s official languages: English, French, Arabic, and Portuguese.
    [Author: I. Haight]
Current Law Journal Content: an Index to Legal Periodicals
    URL: http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/
    Current Law Journal Content (CLJC) is a free online service of the Washington and Lee Law School. It provides indexing information for 1,572 journals, most of which are current, world-wide academic English language law journals. The scope of the database extends back to the year 2005, but there is currently a project underway to extend coverage back to the year 2000, and the project will soon be complete for U.S. general law reviews. The database may be accessed by selecting a date range to view, by searching for words in article citations including author, title, abstract, and journal name fields (no full text searching is available), or by browsing the table of contents of a selected journal. Detailed search instructions are provided on the website, including the proper use of expanders, connectors, and fields. Results may be sorted by score, which is determined by a combination of impact-factor and total cites. Corresponding full text retrieval directives are also provided for outside databases, such as Lexis, Westlaw, bepress, SSRN, and others. Users may choose to keep links provided to an openURL server at Washington and Lee Law School and a link to the OCLC resolver registry, or they may remove both, or substitute other openURL-compliant links. Several additional user preferences are available and, once established, preferences may be saved by creating a user profile. Both regular and private IDs are available for profiles, making it possible for a regular ID to be distributed for use among a group, while the individual holding the private ID can maintain control of the established preferences. CLJC is quite technologically sophisticated for a journal index, and its website offers instructions regarding how to display CLJC as a column in a webpage, how to create a link to a specific journal’s table of contents, and how to view tables of contents via a feedreader. RSS feed subscriptions are available for the contents of all, selected, or individual journals, or for word search results. As their well-established database continues to grow, CJLC invites others to contribute to the project by sharing electronic tables of contents with them. Needed journals are marked with an asterisk on the website, together with instructions on how to contribute.
    [Author: A. Emerson]
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
    URL: http://www.globalr2p.org/
    Founded in 2008, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCRP) seeks to capitalize on the United Nations’ 2005 World Summit agreement addressing “the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” According to GCRP, governments at the 2005 summit recognized the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as a new international norm. This responsibility is an obligation states have “toward their populations and toward all populations at risk of genocide and other large-scale atrocities.” The norm stipulates that states have primary responsibility to protect their populations from atrocities, but when they fail to do so the burden shifts to the international community. The responsibility is preventative and states have both diplomatic and coercive measures available to them. The website provides information about the Centre and its activities, while also educating visitors about specific countries in crisis or potential crisis. Three sections of the site are of particular interest: Advocacy and Publications, Populations in Focus, and the Resource Centre. The Advocacy and Publications section offers statements, briefs, op/eds, letters, and other documents prepared by GCRP and others. These documents discuss harms and threats of harm in specific countries and are typically addressed to UN member states. The Populations in Focus page provides details of peoples at risk of atrocities in nine countries, including Kenya, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. The Resource Centre is a growing archive of R2P documents from the UN and NGOs and includes reports, resolutions, and government statements. The archive is keyword-searchable, or may be browsed by document type, country statements, population in focus, or organization.
    [Author: M. Morrison]


InSITE contributors: A. Emerson, I. Haight, M. Morrison, J. Pajerek (editor)
© 2011 Cornell Law Library

The contents of this publication and any recommendations therein are the opinions of the authors and do not reflect the views of Cornell University.