New Resource on HeinOnline

HeinOnline has added a new legal research platform 'World Constitutions Illustrated'.  It draws together constitutional documents, books, articles, and websites into a central database.  The initial release includes the current constitution for 193 different countries and HeinOnline will be working towards identifying and acquiring the source documents for every historical constitution for every country!

Every country record includes the current constitution in its original language (accompanied by at least one English translation) as well as links to commentaries, book chapters, scholarly articles and online sources.

New legislation site for UK

OPSI (Office of Public Sector Information) and the Statute Law Database have now been replaced with a new website called legislation.gov.uk.  This new site combines two very useful sources of legislation into one easy search engine. It is run by the National Archives on behalf of the HM Government. OPSI provided legislation as originally enacted whilst the Statute Law Database gave the legislation as amended, in future the one site will offer both.  legislation.gov.uk‘s default is the legislation as amended, but it offers  an option to look at it in its original form.

(Mis)perceptions of crime in Australia

Public concern about crime victimisation is one of a range of factors that policymakers take into account when creating new criminal offences, setting penalties and allocating resources for policing and prosecution. The level of public concern about rising crime can also determine the extent to which people engage in certain daily activities, sometimes restricting behaviour unnecessarily. However, there can be a disjunction between how people perceive the risk of crime victimisation and the actual level of victimisation that occurs in the community. Recently, for example, concern with some crime types has increased, despite an actual decline in crime rates for the offences in question. This study reinforces earlier research into perceptions of crime; that there are substantial misperceptions of crime among the general public, both in terms of the number of incidents and in perceptions of trends in crime. This paper uses statistical modelling based on data taken from the 2007 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to examine the relationship between gender, age, education and sources of information on crime in the Australian context.http://www.aic.gov.au/en/publications/current%20series/tandi/381-400/tandi396.aspx

High Court Drops Catchwords!

The High Court of Australia is no longer applying catchwords to judgments. See article in The Australian 9th July 2010.

Supreme Court of Tasmania Wireless Internet Access (Wi-Fi)

The Supreme Court has arranged for limited wireless internet access to be trialed in Hobart. The service will allow court users free access to browse the internet including access to web e-mail. The trial will run for 6 months. Fore more information, click here

ASIL Insight Vol. 14 Issue 17

ECJ Holds that West Bank Products are Outside Scope of the EU-Israel Association Agreement

ASIL Insight Vol. 14 Issue 16 (June 22, 2010)

States Parties Approve New Crimes for International Criminal Court