UMN Foreign, Comparative & International Law Librarian Mary Rumsey recently published an article in the Syracuse Journal of International Law & Commerce, entitled “Gauging the Impact of Online Legal Information on International Law: Two Tests.�
Spring, 2008 35 Syracuse J. Int'l L. & Com. 201
This article is currently available electronically through LexisNexis Academic.
From the Introduction:
This article examines two strands of legal work - decisions of human rights tribunals and legal scholarship - to test whether online legal information has affected them. I hypothesize that the availability of electronic sources has resulted in increased citations to documents from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in human rights jurisprudence1 and in increased citations to journals (vis-a-vis books) in scholarly articles on international law.First, I will briefly summarize the advent of legal and human rights information on the Internet. Second, I will provide a citation analysis of two forms of human rights jurisprudence: United Nations Human Rights Committee "Views" and European Court of Human Rights decisions. Third, I will compare citations of scholarly literature over time in the American Journal of International Law. Last, I will briefly discuss the possible implications of my surveys.
