Conducting international and foreign legal research is not the same as researching American law. International and foreign legal materials come from a variety of sources. Many of these sources do not publish or distribute information in a coherent, well organized fashion. There is not always an English translation. Catalogs Catalogs are individual Web sites that classify information into various organizational schemes.
Many common schemes are by document type, subject, or source.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, these catalogs provide not only the Web address but also a descriptive annotation. There is so much information on the Internet that you may need to use search engines to locate relevant information. For a good comparison of the major search engines, see Update to Search Engines Compared . Use the same factors you use when evaluating American law sources on the Internet. For more information on how to evaluate an international or foreign law web site, see Update to Evaluating Foreign and International Legal Databases on the Internet .