SID Thematic Projects: Legal Infrastructures: Bodies of Indigenous Legal Periodicals

Essential to a viable legal order are on-going exchanges among key actors in which legal developments are reported, discussed and debated.  It is only through such exchanges that law can evolve and become a useful tool in structuring relationships in dynamic societies.  In contemporary societies these exchanges normally, but not exclusively, appear in legal periodicals.  Publications in legal periodicals address evolving legal doctrines and theory, statutory interpretations, court decisions, current laws, proposed laws, procedural matters, etc. 

Because of the centrality of indigenous legal periodicals to the operation of a legal order, it is important for a cross-national rule of law gauge to capture differences in the bodies of legal periodicals available to national legal communities.  The number and type of periodicals as well as their temporal range can provide useful insights into the centrality of law in a nation’s social order.  Online bibliographic services such as WorldCat, Ulrichs and the Library of Congress are valuable sources of information on nation-specific legal periodicals.  To identify legal periodicals for a nation we did a nation-specific search, without temporal restraints, using legal keywords.

Our search process erred on the side of over-inclusion to ensure that all potentially relevant legal serials were captured.  But generating these lists of nation-specific periodicals was only the first step in the process of assessing a nation’s indigenous body of legal periodicals.  Many of the periodical names are provided by the on-line services in native languages and will have to be translated into English.  Once the titles have been translated and reviewed, irrelevant publications will be screened and a typology of legal periodicals will be created.  Quantitative assessments of bodies of indigenous legal periodicals will be made in light of this typology to insure comparability across nations.  In addition the legal associations subproject will be used to check, supplement and evaluate the nation-specific listings of legal publications identified through bibliographic services.

Information available through the on-line bibliographic services includes information about the beginning and ending publication dates, the place of publication, publisher, primary language, type of material, frequency, and some information about content. Information about the content is limited but it often makes it possible to determine the periodical’s focus (general, specialized, academic, practitioner-oriented, etc.) whether or not it has a religious agenda, and if it is associated with the government.  The codebook for this project provides more precise insights into the type of data that will be available for this component of a nation’s legal infrastructure.