Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
URL: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html

The subtitle of this web site, published by the U.S. Library of Congress, is "U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1873." Conceived as a preservation project, this web site contains both the scanned images and full text of nine separate government documents spanning the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the First through Twelfth Federal Congresses. Visitors to the site can search the full text of the House Journal, the Senate Journal, the Senate Executive Journal, Journals of the Continental Congress, Elliot's Debates, Farrand's Records, and Maclay's Journal, which span the dates 1774-1873. The Annals of Congress and Statutes at Large are not searched full-text, but instead accessed via annotations and the titles’ indexes. This site has several effective but not overwhelming pages of user’s guides and help screens to guide visitors through using the simple search engine. The site itself is beautiful and easy to navigate. Even visitors who have no interest in searching the text of government documents will be fascinated by the scanned images of some of the most important documents in our nation’s history.

 

European Roma Rights Center
URL: http://errc.org/

"Roma" or "Rom" is the name used by Gypsies for themselves. The European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) is an international organization, based in Hungary, which monitors the legal and socio-economic position of European Rom communities, publicizing instances of abuse and forced migration, and providing advocacy and legal defense in cases of discrimination, hate speech, and violence. It also offers scholarships to Romani law students. The user can download issues of the newsletter "Roma Rights," detailed reports on the situation of the Rom in Central and Eastern European countries (some also available in the national language), or advocacy letters and press releases from the past three years. The site is searchable by keyword (although Central European diacritics must be input to be retrieved), and there are links to the websites of human rights and news organizations. The selection "Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers (a Gypsy-like minority in Ireland) on the Internet" offers links to various websites dealing with human rights and Rom culture.

 

International ADR
URL: http://www.internationaladr.com/

International ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) has as its stated objective the provision of "comprehensive information on the principal aspects of international commercial arbitration and mediation." The Web site brings together the texts of commercial arbitration treaties, national arbitration laws, judicial decisions and arbitral awards, and model clauses for inclusion in contracts. Information pertaining to institutions and rules, arbitrators, upcoming conferences, events and seminars, and a bibliography of recent articles and books are also provided. A country index and Boolean-capable search engine facilitate the location of specific kinds of information on the site. The site is well-organized and easy to navigate, but some of the links to external sites were not functioning at the time this review was written.

 

Lord Chancellor's Department
URL: http://www.open.gov.uk/lcd/lcdhome.htm

This is the official site of the Lord Chancellor's Deparment in the United Kingdom. The home page has a phalanx of buttons with self-explanatory titles to lead to parts of the site that hold information on court administration, legal clinic information, FOIA, a promise of a statutory database, reports of the department, press releases and much more. It should serve as a good starting point for research on the British court system and court personnel. Frequently updated and well designed.

 

Religious Freedom Page
URL: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~jkh8x/relfree/home.html

The Religious Freedom Page is written and maintained by University of Virginia professor of sociology Jeffrey K. Hadden. The page has an explicit purpose to promote the author's belief that "religion is the final line of defense against every form of tyranny" and that "religious freedom is the first liberty." The site, although incomplete, is well-designed and well-maintained, with an intuitive user interface, nice graphic layout and an easily navigable table of contents. The Religious Freedom Page has a limited number of links to U.S. constitutional material, but has annotations of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, divided into categories such as "Government Intervention" and "The Free Exercise of Religion." The site links to outside web pages that may contain the full text of the decisions. Although the page states that its intent is to be international in scope, almost all of the substantive material available on it is U.S. The Religious Freedom Page also examines the status of religious freedom for every nation in the world, using information from such sources as the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1998, U.S. Department of State and the World Factbook (1996).

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

InSITE contributors: A. Carson, J. Luke, J. Pajerek, D. Smith, B. Whittington.

©1999 Cornell Law Library