Currently available data on legislative research and analytical services are skimpy and contradictory, largely because of incomplete definitions about what constitutes “research” in a parliamentary setting and also because of the many actors that may be engaged in the enterprise.

This paper represents a preliminary step in ascertaining more accurately the extent and location of research services operating in legislatures. It is drawn from a survey designed to obtain broader coverage of research units that may be based outside the parliamentary library, and offers brief vignettes describing several research services to illustrate the variety of such activities and settings.

It is often said that the effective working of a representative democracy depends on the availability of adequate information and the capacity for its independent evaluation. Such access, it is argued is a major contributor to restoring the significance of the Parliament. Similarly there is a commonly held view that access to justice depends on the laws of the Parliament and the courts being freely available to everyone.

The law in Australia is derived from legislation passed in Australian parliaments, at Federal and State level, together with the English Common law tradition and the Australian Common Law which developed from the English Common Law.

This paper outlines a methodology for handling a research issue in French law and identifies the various sources of that law. Our point of departure is that we are entering a civil law system. Therefore, this paper first briefly addresses the general features of the French law system. It then reviews the printed research tools and finally lists the main legal databases and Internet sites.

Ever since Joseph Schacht, whose book An Introduction to Islamic Law is on the short list of books on Middle East law, said that Islamic law is the epitome of Islamic thought, in other words, you can't understand Islam without understanding Islamic law, Middle Eastern studies and their journals invariably include classical Islamic law in their coverage of the subject with little attention given to modern legislation. This is particularly obvious in the bibliography of periodical literature which disregards the increasing number of studies on the modern law of the Middle East appearing in law journals. Even entries described as positive law, a category recently added to John and Marianne Makdisi's eminently useful compilation on Islamic law, comes no closer to giving a realistic picture of the applicable law. To illustrate what I mean, titles under positive law dealing with insurance, banking, and interest, concentrate on Islamic law's position on these subject-matters at a time when modern legislation in most Arab states has completely discarded that position.

The Israeli legal system belongs to the Western legal culture which is based on the rule of law and takes secular, liberal and rational approach that puts the individual at the center. The Israeli legal system has been classified as a “mixed jurisdiction” in that it has traits of both common law as well as civil law systems.

The basis of the current and future Russian legal system has been determined in the Constitution of 1993, which proclaims Russia to be a democratic federal law-based state with a republican form of government. Like the basic laws of the majority of the other post-communist states, the constitution balances description with prescription. It is a transformational document, which accepts reality while aspiring to something greater. Therefore, discussing the laws of Russia and of the other former Soviet republics (all of which during the last five years adopted new Constitutions), we have to take into account the realities of political life, which may explain many existing difficulties with the implementation of all these laws.