James5

When it comes to international criminal law jurisprudence, there hasn’t really been an easy starting point for legal research. Each of the Tribunals have their own websites where they list decisions, but these are often difficult to search and the links themselves can also be unreliable.

For my own use, I created an ICL search engine that used Google to search all of the different Tribunals at once – but this would only be effective while the sites kept their current structure.

Thankfully, the ICC this week re-launched their Legal Tools website, providing a new and better place to do ICL research.

Legal Tools is a comprehensive resource of international criminal case law, and relevant international and domestic material. It contains judgments from all the major international Tribunals, going back to Nuremberg and Tokyo; relevant international legal instruments and decisions; and relevant legislation and cases from domestic jurisdictions. Also, it doesn’t require registration, you just agree with the terms and conditions and you have full access to either search or browse the database.

Of course it isn’t perfect. At times it feels a bit clunky, it certainly isn’t at a Google-level of sophistication. The results are often limited by the format of the source database – which can sometimes mean non-text PDFs. And some sources can’t be clicked through to due to copyrights issues.

But it does look like it will be a fantastic resource. The advanced search particularly looks to be a very powerful tool for specific searches of international criminal law. It’d be nice if the results were more friendly to Google, so that you could run a typical Google search over the database – but hopefully that’s something for the future, this could be a great addition to Google Scholar.

Transparency and accessibility of the law is crucial to the legitimacy and efficiency of the Tribunals. Access is currently at an barely usable level, and things definitely could be better. The ICC Legal Tools is a significant step in the right direction and it’ll be interesting to see where things go from here. We’ve seen increasing demands for domestic transparency in governments, let’s hope this also is reflected on the international level soon.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The EC’s Global Environment Monitoring in collaboration with the World Bank have produced this amazing map of travel times between cities around the globe. I found it fascinating to look at to see where wilderness still remains and to imagine what impact this must have on the ability of trade to take place. Notice how bright and integrated Europe, India and the USA is, versus the splotchy connections across Africa.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last semester I once again was extremely grateful for having Devonthink to help me out with a research paper.

For those that don’t know Devonthink is a personal database you keep on your Mac. You throw your pdfs, documents, links, e-mails into it and leverage it’s powerful AI and search technologies to help with research and writing. It looks a bit clunky, and kills my Powerbook’s CPU, but is an invaluable program if you do any amount of research.

I had a public policy research paper that required me to investigate the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, and determine whether policy networks were at work in relation to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (they were but weakly).

There was a Senate Select Committee and Joint Standing Committee report on the FTA, the submissions of which would have been an absolute gold mine for researching the positions of various players and their connections. The problem? There were over 700 separate submissions, some of which were just scans of letters.

Thankfully, I had Devonthink to help me out.

First, Devonthink allows you to take a URL and it will automatically find and download all the links on that page.

So I fed it the Committee site that had links to all the submissions. Devonthink then went to work downloading over 700 pdfs for me.

Second, Devonthink Pro Office has built in OCR software, so despite the best efforts of Parliament to make their documents unsearchable, after running the OCR I had a massive searchable database of submissions.

Third, I used Devonthink’s search function to limit my enquiry to only those submissions that mention the PBS. This cut back the number of pdfs to only around 200 – down from 700! Quite a time saver.

Finally, I also used the search function to see if any of the players were mentioning each other in their submissions. Allowing me to establish if there were any links between the different groups.

All of this cut down on the amount of time I had to waste trawling through submissions manually, giving me more time to actually think about and write the paper. I ended up getting a good mark thanks to being able to quickly find all the relevant documents and linkages between them.

Now if only I could figure out a good referencing program (that actually saved time not made more work!) my student life would be made a easier.

Popularity: 14% [?]

It’s that time of semester again, essays due, exams coming. Here’s a quick hint to make your research a smidgen easier (if you’re at the University of Melbourne that is).

While we all love SuperSearch and being able to search all the big databases at once, store our finds for later use, etc. Sometimes it is just a bit easier to use Google Scholar to get those hard to find sources and keep all your research sorted.

The hard part is clicking through the Google Scholar search results and needing a subscription to view the articles. Of course we have a subscription through UniMelb, but Google Scholar doesn’t know that. The good news is that the uni uses EzProxy which means it’s actually pretty easy to construct URLs to link you into the subscription services.

You just add http://ezproxy.lib.unimelb.edu.au/login?url= to the start of the URL you get from Google Scholar and if the uni has a subscription to the Journal/Database you can login and connect to the source.

To make things easier, I made a ‘bookmarklet’ that you can add to your bookmark toolbar in your browser. You just click it and it automatically adds the URL to the start of the page you are on. To use it just drag the link below to your toolbar, or add it to your bookmarks, then just click it when you need it.

UniMelb EzProxy Bookmarklet

I probably haven’t explained this very well, so if you need more info ask in the comments.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Three must read Blattman posts and comments for anyone considering a “one month stint in Africa”. First, so you want to go to a post war zone, then development tourism, and finally development tourism, revisited.

Popularity: 7% [?]