Foreign Legal Systems - Basic Research Resources

This guide emphasizes places to start a search for: information about foreign legal systems; for scholarly analysis other countries' approaches to specific legal issues or topics; and for the text of foreign laws or cases.

This guide is not meant to cover comprehensively all the ways to find non-U.S. law. Instead, this guide presents web sites and other resources researchers can use to expand their research about a country and its laws.

The advice here is geared to research in a mid-sized U.S. law library. For in-depth research, and especially for the text of foreign laws or cases in the original language, a visit to a large U.S. law library — the U.C. Berkeley Law Library, the Stanford Law Library, the Los Angeles County Public Law Library, or perhaps even the Library of Congress — may be in order.

These online and print sources are excellent places to start a foreign law research project.