The Institute's Radzinowicz Library has one of the world's largest collections relating to crime, criminal justice and related topics, including a wide selection of periodicals, pamphlets and publications of historical as well as contemporary interest. The Institute offers a number of different courses, including a nine-month taught course in Criminology for the M.Phil. The Research Centre for International Law was established within the Faculty of Law in 1985. It exists to promote international law by a combination of individual and group research, whether undertaken privately by scholars or funded externally, and by the publication of monographs and collections of primary materials, including the International Law Reports. The Centre attracts a steady stream of visiting scholars from all over the world, mainly from universities and government departments.
Visitors come for periods ranging from several weeks to two years.
The Centre has its own premises in Cranmer Road, close to the University Library and Law Faculty. It arranges a full programme of meetings, including weekly lunches and evening sessions, drawing upon speakers from abroad as well as from Cambridge and other British universities. All postgraduate law students are welcome at its meetings. The core of CELS' activities is, for the moment, the constitutional order which, since the 1950s, has been evolving on the basis of the European Community Treaties, and legal ties between that new polity and the other countries of Europe, and the wider world. The interests of the Centre also embrace the national jurisdictions of the different European countries, including those of the former Eastern Bloc, and their relationship with the common law.