LibGuides: Foreign Law Research: Books

Find Books on your Topic at UC Law SF

UC Law SF Library offers extensive resources for Chinese law research, including print & e-books. If you do not see the books that you need, you can borrow books from other institutions via interlibrary loans.

UC Law SF Catalog
To find books online or in print, use the UC Law SF Library catalog. You can also use this resource to search for journals or articles.

Searching UC Law SF Catalog

You should try a few different strategies for searching the library catalog:

If you need a code and you have the name of the code, try using part, or all of the name in a keyword search and a title search.

Sample Catalog Search: Keyword French Civil Code

For research on smaller and more obscure countries, or for a region, try a keyword search and a title search with the name of the country or region and the word "law" will bring up secondary materials analyzing the relevant law. e.g. Latin American Law. Be aware that some countries have changed their names; you should search under both names.

Sample Catalog Search: Title Search Latin American Law

You can also try a subject search using the broad area of law followed by the country name e.g., criminal law Canada. Available subject headings include administrative law, civil law, civil procedure, commercial law, contracts, criminal law, criminal procedure, labor laws and legislation, real property, securities, and taxation law and legislation. Some narrower topics are included; e.g., antitrust law Middle East. (Not every country will have materials indexed under every subject heading.)

Sample Catalog Search: Subject contains exact phrase Civil procedure AND Subject contains Canada

If you need something not covered by the subject headings above, try a keyword search: e.g., Australia privacy. You may want to repeat the keyword search with variants of the name-e.g., copyright law China, Chinese copyright law.

Sample Catalog Search: Any field contains Australia privacy OR Any field contains Australian privacy

If you are looking for a print guide on legal research in a particular country, try a subject search like:

Legal research -- Australia

Research guides and bibliographies may be contained in journal articles or in a chapter of a more general book.

Guide to International Legal Research The Guide to International Legal Research is an authoritative and comprehensive reference tool for law students and practitioners. Authored annually by The George Washington International Law Review, the Guide is designed to assist both novices and professionals with their international legal research. Following an introduction by Professor Christopher J. Borgen, the Guide is organized into two parts. In the first part, chapters are divided by regions. Each chapter contains an overview of the geopolitical climate in each region and lists government resources, legal resources, media resources, and resources by topic. Where appropriate, these sources are subdivided by country. Many of the chapters discuss general multi-national organizations as well as international trade organizations and agreements that are specific to the region. The Guide also provides an overview of what each source covers and how it can be most effective. The second part of the Guide covers substantive areas of international law, including general international law, public health law, space law, human rights law, intellectual property, international trade, international business transactions, environmental law, labor law, and international security law. Much like the regional sections, the substantive chapters begin with a section on international governance followed by a section on secondary sources pertinent to that subject area.

This guide includes information on foreign legal research.

You can use these same search techniques to search for books in:

WorldCat
Locate books and articles available in libraries around the world. You can use the same subject headings from the searches shown above. Use the blue button in the item record to place an interlibrary loan request for the item.

Or run key word searches in the full text of books in:

SHAFR Guide Online: An Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Foreign Relations since 1600 This link opens in a new window
The SHAFR Guide Online is an online annotated bibliography covering the entire span of U.S. foreign relations from the 1600s through 2016, and all geographical areas of the world. Entries include every type of historical source; collections of government documents, biographies, monographs, book chapters, journal articles, web sites, and much more. The SHAFR Guide Online is a useful research tool for historians of U.S. foreign relations.

Sample search in SHAFR: "Native American" OR "American Indian" OR "Federal Indian"
You may need to log into the database first before this link will work for you outside of the library.
Multinational Sources Compared: A Subject and Jurisdiction Index
A finding aid designed to direct researchers to sources that compare multiple jurisdictions on focused subjects. These print and electronic sources contain full-text legislation, statutory citation, or other references to foreign primary law.

Google Books This link opens in a new window
Search a wide variety of books. You may have an option to view the contents of the book, but often online access is very limited.

If you find a book that you want to read, but it is not in our library, you can place an Interlibrary Loan. See:

Interlibrary Loan Services

Berkeley Law Library allows visitors to use their resources in the library

Berkeley Law Library Visitors Policy
For public patrons and other visitors, there are public computing terminals located throughout the Library which can be used to browse LawCat(opens in a new tab) and access other library databases and online legal research materials. There is a 15-minute limit for these computers when others are waiting.
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These public terminals do not offer any word processing capabilities, and you must have a CalNet ID in order to do any general, non-research web-browsing on these machines. None of the campus libraries offer word processing capabilities to public patrons, but the Berkeley Public Library offers some computers with word processing capabilities(opens in a new tab).

If your research requires you to save digital content (journal articles or other documents) that you have accessed at a public terminal, you may save the file(s) to a USB key that you have brought from home or print them to the library’s printers using the Cal1Card guest card system(opens in a new tab), where you can purchase a guest card for a fee and use this card’s funds to print out your documents.
About the Foreign, Comparative & International Collection at Berkeley Law Library
The UC Berkeley Law Library is considered to be one of the finest collections of foreign and international legal materials in the country.