International Legal Collections at U.S. Academic Law School Libraries
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slissrj Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Acknowledgements This article originated as a final research project for Professor Jean Bedord's fall semester 2011 graduate course, Information and Society (LIBR 200-05). I would like to thank Prof. Bedord for her suggestions, insights, and criticism. I am also grateful to the other students in the course for sharing their own research and thoughts via on-line discussion boards over the course of the semester.
Building a Chinese Law Collection in the Academic Law Library
Abstract Chinese law collections are now all but required in many American law schools.Tom Kimbrough provides a collection development plan for those libraries seeking to add Chinese legal materials to their collections.
Designing Law Curricula for a Transnational Industrial and Science-Based Civilization.
The challenges to planning and designing programs oflegal education that are, at once, professionally relevant and intellectually enriching come from a number of coinciding world revolutions. These revolutions render ineffective or obsolete many of the institutions and practices of our inherited systems of governance and the political-philosophical conceptions on which they rest. Their result, the reality with which our graduates will contend, will be so different from the reality we know that our usual historical and comparative techniques of scouring past and CUlTent practices in our own and other advanced systems for alternatives may provide little guidance. Since the end of the Second World War, the great imperial trading systems have largely yielded to an inclusive world system marked by progressive reductions in tariffs, subsidies, and other nontariffbarriers-techniques long used to manage domestic political economies. At the same time, there has been a progressive narrowing ofareas that governments had immunized from this global system. The ascendance of capitalism virtually everywhere and the eclipse of anticapitalist economic and moral theories have reinforced the internationalizing economic trends. These trends have increased the need for competitive capacity of virtually every entity and have set off, within states, rapid and disjunctive social changes, which are driven, as well, by other intersecting trends. The resulting spread of a single, inclusive industrial and science-based civilization has, of course, generated and diffused new technologies and opportunities, but it has also put great stress on traditional moral and religious doctrines and on those for whom these ideas are central struts of their existence. As more and more of the planet has become part of a single market, skills have diffused at a differential pace, often creating population explosions, thanks to the introduction of relatively rudimentary medical technology without the transplantation of comparable economic developments that would have permitted larger populations to self-sustain and that also would have led