ABSTRACT
Where does one find the foreign investment laws of Botswana? What about the copyright law of the Netherlands, the corporation laws of Japan, or an English translation of the Egyptian Civil Code? In 1991, Wallace Baker, the founder of the Paris office of the law firm Baker & McKenzie, remarked that ‘foreign law has become the daily bread of lawyers everywhere who formerly had totally domestic practices’ (Germain 1991, xii). Since then, the need to access foreign law has increased exponentially. The importance of improving global access to foreign law via the Internet was highlighted at a 2008 international Meeting of Experts on Global Co-operation on the Provision of Online Legal Information on National Laws, organized by the Hague Conference on Private International Law.1 (I attended this meeting at the invitation of its Secretary-General Hans van Loon.) This chapter evaluates the current state of progress in online access to the content of foreign law, provides a world snapshot, and discusses such digital law issues as authentication and preservation for long-term access.
