Latest News

IALS Global Law Library is very pleased to announce that we will be extending our normal opening hours in the period from Monday 9th January to Friday 15th June 2012 . We will open longer on weekdays and additionally on Sundays:

Monday to Friday:  9.00am to 11.00pm
(current IALS Library card or SAScard holders only after 7.45pm )
Saturday:                  10.00am to 5.30pm
Sunday:                    12.30pm to 6.30pm
(current IALS Library card or SAScard holders only )

At Easter the Library will be open to readers from 10.00am to 5.30pm on Thursday 5th April, and then close for Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. The Library will re-open from 10.00am to 5.30pm on Tuesday 10th April 2012.

We will be closed on the Bank Holiday on Monday 7th May, but will open from 12.30pm to 6.30pm on the two Bank Holidays on Monday 4th June and Tuesday 5th June 2012.

At other times, IALS Library generally operates the same opening hours during academic vacations as during term:

Monday to Friday:    9.00am to 8.00pm
Saturday:                   10.00am to 5.30pm

The Library will close to readers at 5:00pm on Friday 14th September 2012 for essential annual stock moving and refurbishment work and will re-open at 9:00am on Monday 1st October 2012. The Document Supply Service for subscribers will continue to operate as normal during this period.

Amicus Curiae, the official journal of both the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies, is now available online from issue 46 (2003) to the pre-current issue at http://journals.sas.ac.uk/amicus

As a result of a recent successful JISC-funded project to create an Open Journals publishing system in the School of Advanced Study linked to the School's e-repository SAS-Space , the Institute is pleased to make its journal, Amicus Curiae available online. For more detail about the project see: Amicus Online presentation PDF .

We will be continuing work to add issues 1-45 to the online version in the coming months.

Professor Kern Alexander, Senior Research Fellow at IALS, has been appointed Specialist Adviser and Counsel to the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on the Draft Financial Services Bill .  The Select Committee will meet and hold hearings during September and October.  This appointment runs from September 2011 until early January 2012.

Just published:

IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management edited by Jules Winterton and Prof. Richard Danner. More details ...

IALL - International Association of Law Libraries

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) - in the shape of 'IALS Information Projects' and through the development of IALS Digital Collections - has just become a member of the worldwide Free Access to Law Movement (FALM). FALM is a loose alliance of over 30 institutes and organisations which subscribe to the Declaration on Free Access to Law and collaborate in the free provision of legal information and on global policy issues. The Declaration appears at http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/ which also lists the member organisations based in countries and regions such as Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Pacific Islands, Philippines, Southern Africa, Uganda, and the USA.

Professor Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales and a co-founder of the Australasian Legal Information Institute, the first of its kind, will be a visiting fellow at IALS during the Summer 2011 as inaugural CommonLII Fellow working to develop the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute, http://www.commonlii.org/.

Professor Avrom Sherr, Woolf Professor of Legal Education and Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, has an important new role as a member of the Review Research Team in the major Review of Legal Education and Training ("Review 2020") announced by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) , the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and the Institute of Legal Executives Professional Standards (IPS).

The Library catalogue at ials.sas.ac.uk/catalogue.htm and catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk will be unavailable from 17:30 on Saturday, 15th January 2011 for an estimated two hours. This planned downtime is to allow for an upgrade to our system software. We are sorry that some online services will be unavailable during the upgrade.

During this upgrade the catalogue will be completely unavailable. This means you will not be able to:

• Renew loans online or by phone
• Search the catalogue or reserve items on loan to other readers
• Access e-resources (e-journals and databases) authenticated via the catalogue

If you have IALS Library books that are due back on Saturday 15th January 2011, please return or renew them by 17:15 on that day. Thank you.

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies website, Study Online VLE, SAS-Space E-resository and the ULRLS Archives and Manuscripts catalogue will remain available during this time. General information about IALS Library holdings will continue to be available during the upgrade on COPAC and the InforM25 Union List of Serials.

We aim to have all online services, including access to e-journals and databases, back up and running later in the evening of 15th January.

Legislative Drafters is a forum for the international drafting community established by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, available online at http://legislativedrafters.blogspot.com/.

The forum was begun as a collaborative exercise between Daniel Greenberg, who proposed the idea, Helen Xanthaki and Constantin Stefanou.

Daniel Greenberg was Parliamentary Counsel (UK) from 1991 to 2010 and is now Parliamentary Counsel in the Parliamentary Team at Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP in London, editor of Craies on Legislation, Stroud's Judicial Dictionary and Jowitt's Dictionary of English Law, as well as the General Editor of Annotated Statutes, Westlaw UK. Daniel is an associate research fellow of the IALS.

The purpose of the forum is simply to serve as a method of communication for drafters in any jurisdiction around the world, to share ideas, problems and solutions. Anyone can start a thread or leave a comment on an existing thread. The hope is that drafters will feel able to use the forum to seek ideas from their colleagues around the world on technical issues or any legal issue that has a specific association with legislative drafting. It would also be an ideal repository for short articles which contain thoughts or research that are worth sharing with colleagues internationally but which may not be suitable for inclusion in a journal: it is hoped that from time to time some of these articles will be extracted from the forum and included in a dedicated online journal which will provide a corporate memory for the site. Particularly in its early formative stages, all drafters are warmly invited to become involved in the forum and to help to shape it in a way that will enhance its usefulness to them in the future.