Foreign Law Guide

Finding the law of another country almost always comes down to two questions: where does that country publish its official gazette, and which version of the text in front of you actually carried legal force on the date that matters. A textbook will tell you what a code says today. It will rarely tell you whether the printed page or the electronic copy controls where the two differ, or whether the page on a ministry website was updated since the date you actually need. That gap between knowing the rule and knowing which copy of it to trust is what this guide is organized around.

The answer is never the same twice. Italy's Gazzetta Ufficiale states plainly that the printed edition prevails where its own electronic copy differs from it. France's Journal officiel dropped paper entirely and has been exclusively electronic since 1 January 2016. Two adjoining civil law systems, and two opposite rules for the same question. Neither is guessable without checking the country itself.

What follows is organized around how a research question actually starts: with a country already in mind, or with a question that runs across every country at once.

Start With a Country

There are 20 country records built and reviewed so far, each covering the legal family, the official gazette, the constitution in force, and the language the law is actually written in. Every one was built the same way, primary source first and narrative second. A fact that no source could settle is stated as unsettled rather than guessed at.

Countries by name Every jurisdiction covered so far, arranged for browsing rather than searching.
Country index, A to Z The full alphabetical list, for when you already know the name you are looking for.

Start With a Question

Some research questions cut across every country at once: what a constitution says rather than a statute, how one legal system compares with another, or what an abbreviation buried in a footnote actually stands for. These four hubs gather the tools for exactly that kind of question, and every entry on them says what the tool actually covers rather than only naming it.

Constitutions in force Where to find the current text of a national constitution and confirm that it is current.
Comparative law Tools and collections for setting one jurisdiction's rules beside another's.
Abbreviations and dictionaries Decoding the abbreviated citations that fill the footnotes of foreign legal writing.
Periodical indexes Indexes and research guides for the journal literature on foreign and comparative law.

About This Guide

Foreign Law Guide is an independent publication. It costs nothing to read, asks for no account, and exists as a separate work from any other guide that happens to share its name in print or online: no relationship connects the two beyond the coincidence of what they are called. Nothing here was carried over from an earlier version of anything.

Every page here is built against a primary source: an official gazette, a court's own site, or the text a national legislature itself publishes, checked against that source before anything is written. The date under each entry marks when that check was last made, so a reader can judge how current a page is rather than take it on faith. A record with no date attached to it is a record nobody has checked recently.