Foreign Law Guide

FOREIGN LAW GUIDE

Periodical Indexes and Research Guides

This is the part of foreign legal research where the money is. The scholarship that explains what a gazette actually did, and the indexes built so you can find that scholarship, are largely sold, and the index whose own publisher calls it the only available multilingual legal journal index publishes no price at all.

Say that plainly rather than working around it. The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals says it covers the law of most jurisdictions in thirty languages and reaches back to 1960 in print. Anyone who needs the whole of a literature is looking for a library that subscribes, and the honest advice is to go and find one rather than to assume this page can point at a substitute for it.

The list below sorts into three states, not two, and the middle one is easy to miss. Some of it is open. Some of it is sold. And some of it is free up to a cap, where an account costing nothing but an email address buys a fixed allowance of reading in each thirty day period, which for a reader with one question is not a lesser version of access but the whole of what they needed. A page that recognises only free and paywalled will file a capped service under paywalled and quietly deny its reader the answer.

WHERE THE ARTICLES ARE

  • Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, HeinOnline (opens an external site) Paywalled, and the publisher calls it the preeminent multilingual index in this field. Produced by the American Association of Law Libraries, compiled and edited at Berkeley Law Library and published in conjunction with AALL and HeinOnline. States more than 800 legal journals worldwide, coverage of most jurisdictions in 30 languages, more than 430,000 index records, the entire print index back to 1960 and full searching from 1985 forward. No price appears anywhere in the response: the site menu describes packages priced by institution, the index section itself speaks of faculty or staff at their subscribing institution, and the route it offers instead is a request for a quote or a trial.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (opens an external site) Describes itself as a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, committed to keeping its services as open as possible and its data openly available, and says an accepted journal is displayed on its website freely accessible to everyone. Its Data menu offers an API, a journal CSV, an OAI-PMH feed and a public data dump, so the index is published as data as well as searched on the site.
  • CORE (opens an external site) Calls itself a not-for-profit community-governed open scholarly infrastructure serving the global network of repositories and journals, and says it provides both metadata and full text access through its APIs and datasets. Its search box is labelled 452M papers from around the world, which is the figure the service puts on itself and is where that number here comes from. It answered an anonymous request from two different clients on the day this was written.
  • Persée (opens an external site) French, and it puts its own access plainly: accès libre et gratuit to complete collections of scholarly publications, naming journals, books, conference proceedings, serials and primary sources. The home page does not say whether legal titles are among them, so neither does this entry; the way to find out is to search it.
  • Dialnet (opens an external site) Spanish language, served from a unirioja.es address, with the Fundación Dialnet in the copyright line. Its own navigation names journals, theses and congresses, and its search box searches documents. Registration exists and Dialnet Plus is described by the site as the advanced version, offering the tools needed to optimise searches and work with the holdings, which is a statement about tooling rather than about content.
  • JSTOR, registering for free reading (opens an external site) Free up to a cap, and this is the JSTOR page that states the cap. A personal account is a free account, anyone with an email address may register for one, and it reads up to 100 articles every 30 days online for free, alongside the read-online content participating publishers open to any registered account. What applies once the cap is reached is not stated on that page. What is stated is JPASS, which the page describes as something you purchase and then manage through the same personal account, and an institution's subscription, which an affiliated account can connect to for matching access remotely.

Each of those annotations is what the service says about itself, quoted or close to it, and that is deliberate rather than lazy. What a repository holds and who may read it are the two things a reader needs and the two things easiest to get wrong from memory, and the only account of either that can be checked afterwards is the publisher's own. Where a service says nothing about price or registration, this page says nothing either, which is why some of these entries are shorter than a reader might expect.

Most people do not need comprehensive coverage. They need three or four good articles on a narrow question, and for that these work, though they work differently from an index. An index searches descriptions of articles. A repository searches the articles themselves, or whatever version of them the author was permitted to deposit, so the recall is worse and the reading is immediate. Search two or three rather than one. Nothing DOAJ, CORE, Persée or Dialnet says about itself in the pages read here describes its coverage of law, so which of them holds the article you want is not predictable from their own descriptions.

Which version you have matters more than it sounds. Repositories hold submitted manuscripts, accepted manuscripts and final published versions alongside each other, and the pagination a footnote needs usually exists only in the last of the three. The record page normally says which one you are looking at. Where it does not, cite what you actually read and say so.

Language is the constraint people underestimate. A serious literature on the law of a civil law jurisdiction is mostly written in that jurisdiction's language and is mostly not indexed by English language services at all. Two of the entries above are the way into that, by different routes, and the page each of them served here is written in its own language rather than in English. Their annotations say what each one claims to hold; one is French and one is Spanish. Knowing which is which saves a search that was never going to return the article.

Then there is a second kind of resource entirely. A research guide is somebody's account of where a jurisdiction publishes its law, and reading two independent accounts of the same country is the cheapest quality check available anywhere in this work. Where they agree, the arrangement is probably stable. Where they disagree, one of them is out of date, and the way to settle it is to open the publisher's own page and look. That check is the method behind the country research hub, whose jurisdiction pages are written from the publishers themselves rather than from the secondary literature, and are meant to be one of the two accounts rather than both of them. Read them against the guides below, and where the two disagree, open the publisher's page and settle it there.

GUIDES OTHER PEOPLE HAVE WRITTEN

  • GlobaLex, New York University School of Law (opens an external site) Describes itself as an open-access electronic legal publication dedicated to international, comparative and foreign law research, founded in 2005 and supported by the Hauser Global Law School Program and the Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies at New York University School of Law. Its front page carries a dated issue heading and closes with a last updated line, so how current it is can be read off it rather than taken on trust.
  • Guide to Law Online: Nations of the World (opens an external site) A Library of Congress research guide, and one of two Guide to Law Online entries in the subject list it sits in, the other covering U.S. states and territories. The response carries that subject list and no list of country guides at all. Why they are missing from the fetched bytes is not something this guide establishes, only that they are.
  • LLRX (opens an external site) Calls itself the free web journal on law, technology, knowledge discovery and research for librarians, lawyers, researchers, academics and journalists, founded in 1996 and published monthly by a solo, independent, self funded owner, editor, publisher, researcher and writer, named on the page as Sabrina I. Pacifici. Comparative and foreign law is one category in its own subject list, alongside more than two hundred others, which is the measure of how much of it is about foreign law.
  • International Association of Law Libraries (opens an external site) Describes itself as a global non-profit organization founded in 1959, with members from all continents representing academic, corporate and governmental legal collections. Its navigation carries an AGM Papers entry, its annual course past and forthcoming, and a journal, whose terms the page fetched here does not state.

SOURCES

  1. Directory of Open Access Journals, home page. Directory of Open Access Journals. https://doaj.org/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  2. CORE, the aggregator of open access research papers, home page. CORE. https://core.ac.uk/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  3. Persée, portail de publications scientifiques. Persée. https://www.persee.fr/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  4. Dialnet, portal de difusion de la produccion cientifica hispana, home page. Fundacion Dialnet. https://dialnet.unirioja.es. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  5. How to Register and Get Free Access to Content, JSTOR Support. JSTOR. https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/115004760028-How-to-Register-Get-Free-Access-to-Content. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  6. GlobaLex, foreign and international law research. New York University School of Law. https://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  7. Guide to Law Online: Nations of the World, Research Guides at Library of Congress. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/nations-world. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  8. LLRX, law and technology resources for legal professionals. Sabrina I. Pacifici. https://www.llrx.com/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  9. International Association of Law Libraries, home page. International Association of Law Libraries. https://iall.org/. Accessed 2026-08-31.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 10 sources cited on this page.