Research Guides: A Basic Guide to International Environmental Legal Research: National Law -- Foreign Nations

World Legal Systems

Legal systems differ from country to country and many operate very differently from the United States' legal system. Categories of legal systems include:

Common Law (Example: United States)
Civil Law (Example: Germany)
Religious Law (Example: Saudi Arabia)
Customary Law (Example: Andorra)

A country may operate hybrid systems as well (Example: China).

JuriGlobe: World Legal Systems Includes classifications of countries according to legal systems and international linguistic areas. Also provides general bibliography on comparative and foreign law.
International Legal Systems - An Introduction (PDF) This publication is by the United States Department of Justice. National Security Division. Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terrorism. It provides an overview of several types of legal systems.

Constitutions

World Constitutions Illustrated on HeinOnline The HeinOnline World Constitutions Illustrated has as its goal to contain the current constitution of every country in the world in its original language. For countries where multiple original-language versions exist, they’ll provide each one. Also included is at least one English translation. They also link you to scholarly articles and commentary, and provide a bibliography of select constitutional books available elsewhere.
University of Bern’s International Constitutional Law Project The International Constitutional Law Project provides English translations of and other textual material related to constitutional documents. It cross-references those documents for quick comparison of constitutional provisions.
Constitute Project Constitute includes the currently-in-force constitution for nearly every independent state in the world, as well as some draft and historical texts. Constitute was developed by the authors of the Comparative Constitutions Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Foreign Law Sources -- Environmental

ECOLEX This website developed by the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Conservation Union provides a wonderful portal to searching for bibliographic information of treaties by sub-topic of international environmental law, as well as national legislation, court decisions, and literature.
FAOLEX FAOLEX is a comprehensive and up-to-date legislative and policy database, one of the world's largest electronic collection of national laws, regulations and policies on food, agriculture and natural resources management. Users of FAOLEX have direct access to the abstracts and indexing information about each text, as well as to the full text of the legislation and policies contained in the database.
Sustainable Development and International Law (University of Denver Sturm College of Law Library) This guide provides comprehensive links to legislation and legal databases for international sustainable development research. Some links may be subscription based.

Foreign Law Resources -- General

Foreign law is the domestic law of non-U.S. countries. Below are some selected resources for finding foreign law.

Foreign Law Guide (Marcie Hoffman, Gen. Ed.) The Foreign Law Guide cites to major codes and collections of case law from over 190 jurisdictions.
WorldLII (World Legal Information Institute) Contains over 1,500 databases of case-law, legislation, treaties, law reform reports, law journals, and other materials from over 100 jurisdictions.
Globalex GlobaLex is published by the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU School of Law. They publish well-regarded international, foreign, and comparative law research guides and articles. The guides and articles published are written by scholars well known in their respective fields.
Cornell’s Legal Information Institute: WorldLaw The LII collection of world legal materials gathers, country by country, continent by continent, the Internet-accessible sources of the constitutions, statutes, judicial opinions, and related legal material from around the globe (excluding the U.S. material held in the LII's other collections). It also holds resources and document collections of International law.
Library of Congress Guide to Law Online: Nations This list provides links to many of the different law resources available online from every country in the world.
Government Gazettes Online (University of Michigan) Through an A-Z list of governments of the world, researchers can locate the laws released in the official gazettes of nations of the world by title or those published online through direct links to official gazette websites.
Foreign Law by Jurisdiction (NYU Law) This research guide lists essential print and online sources for researching foreign law. Note that some of the material linked to in the Guide is subscription based so access to those materials may be limited.
Foreign Law Resources--In Depth (University of Iowa Law Library) This guide provides both electronic and print resources for sovereign jurisdictions and dependencies of countries other than the United States. Note that some of the material linked to in the Guide is subscription based so access to those materials may be limited.

English Translations of Foreign Law

If you want an English translation of foreign laws, codes, statutes, decrees or similar material first look in the following places:

Foreign Law Guide (Marcie Hoffman, Gen. Ed.) The Foreign Law Guide cites to major codes and collections of case law from over 190 jurisdictions.
Lyonette Louis Jacques, How to Find Cases in English Translation, Revisited (Jan. 23, 2015) Generally, it’s difficult to find English versions of cases, but this article covers some standard tools for locating them by country and topic, as well as general strategies to use.
Mary Rumsey, Basic Guide to Researching Foreign Law (Rev. 2016) This guide describes basic strategies for finding the laws of countries other than the U.S, primarily in English. The emphasis is on codes and laws rather than cases. The guide will also help you find secondary materials that describe other countries' laws. It includes links to websites and to other guides.

Additional things to check:

Look to see if the law has been separately published by searching your library catalog, WorldCat, or other union or mega-library catalogs for the title in English or by searching in the original language and limiting to language = English;
Search a full-text law journal database (because the articles within have to include sources of the text/citations) – so HeinOnline, Lexis, Westlaw, Google Scholar, Digital Law Commons; and if appropriate, JSTOR and other non-law databases
Check Google Books to see if it’s been cited in a footnote or reprinted as an appendix;
If these attempts fail, consider legal research guides for that country in book or article format, contacting people resources (folks who write the research guides like the GlobaLex ones, Ask-A-Law-Librarian services at your nearest library, area studies bibliographers – especially if you don’t know the language, etc.; look at your local resources.