For a significant part of the twentieth century, the countries and nations of Eastern Europe were considered as belonging to the “socialist family of laws”. There is no great need to study this particular phase or concept in any detail for the simple reason that in recent years it has become clear that Marx and Trotsky were wrong. It is not capitalism that will be consigned to the dust-bin of history, it is Communism that is being consigned to the trash heap in 1991.

It should now be evident that a lot of wool has been pulled over a lot of eyes on the subject of “socialist law”. For years, scholars and practitioners—believed in the existence of an efficient or at least a workable and functioning collection of legal systems in Eastern Europe. These were all assumed to be based, in some respectable fashion or other, on the precepts of Marx and Engels, applying the Hegelian dialectic to arrive at the desired legal norms of the new society and implementing legislation to achieve this goal. Everyone then understood the Communists view of law as a political instrument which would shift societies to a final workers’ paradise.

Airborne pollution of the marine environment has not received great attention in the literature. This is certainly a reflection of the fact that, for the longest time, this type of pollution was neglected in international efforts to cooperate for the protection of the marine environment. However, the last few years have witnessed considerable activity in this area and some stock-taking is in order.

Common Law systems have always practiced a fairly consistent comparative legal research and scholarship. Initially through the mere exportation of rules and principles from England this was a somewhat centripetal comparative law but it has passed through various modes of radial, circumferential, centrifugal and ultimately polycentric comparisons and cross-fertilizations. Nevertheless, this exercise in comparative law, also in Australia, has remained largely within the boundaries of the Common Law world. It is no longer possible for legal research to be conducted wholly within the boundaries of a single legal system, even that of the enlarged Common Law. Legal researchers need to look beyond the borders of their own jurisdictions. Hardly any legal system today is capable of operating without international interactions requiring a knowledge of foreign legal systems, and many legal problems, or socio-economic problems which law must help to solve, may find useful models elsewhere. In Australia there are needs for reform in fields such as intellectual property, banking or consumer law, and for providing qualified advice including predictions of developments in foreign legal systems to ensure that foreign commerce and trade is fully informed of potential benefits and disadvantages to be found under foreign law. Australia must also be able to take its proper place in fields such as international environmental protection, and to take advantage of potentially beneficial developments in dispute resolution techniques. All of these situations are ones in which, by looking outside their national and even Common Law framework, Australian legal researchers will be better placed to provide concrete benefits to Australian society.

The first feature that catches the eye when the Baltic is compared with other regions of the world is that the Baltic Sea area clearly distinguishes itself by the unusual combination of two elements. On the one hand, it is surrounded by nine countries adhering to different political as well as economic systems. On the other hand, apart from a relatively short segment south and southeast of the island of Bornholm between Denmark and Poland, a maritime boundary has been agreed upon in all other areas, at least if one disregards the trijunction points connecting these different lines. In the overwhelming majority of cases, moreover, a single maritime boundary has been established (continental shelf as well as fishery and economic zone). Some doubt may exist with respect to the German-Danish boundary, but the only real exception to this rule is the most southern stretch of the continental shelf delimitation line between Finland and Sweden (West and South of Bogskar), where the municipal legislation of both countries concerning the outer limits of their respective fishery zones corresponds neither inter se nor with respect to the continental shelf boundary. Negotiations on this topic have been initiated between the parties during the fall of 1989. As of today, these negotiations have not yet resulted in a new bilateral boundary agreement. It should also be noted that in all cases of adjacency the territorial sea has been delimited.

Though environmental protection is an urgent problem today, the notion as such has only emerged as a legal term in the last 30 years. It was, broadly speaking, not earlier than the 1960's that states began to enact increasingly comprehensive national laws for the protection of their internal environment. If national legislation in this field is a relatively new phenomenon, the conclusion of special international agreements for the protection of the environment is an even more recent activity.

Since the December 1968 General Assembly's resolution in which for the first time the United Nations admitted the linkage between environmental protection and human rights and expressed concern that environmental changes could have various (negative) implications for basic human rights, this question has been vividly discussed on many occasions.

No unified or codified Belgian system of law existed before the French Revolution, as each county, principality or region had in effect its own set of laws, and one does therefore before 1795 refer to Flemish, Brabant, Liège, Namur, Waesland, etc. laws, or to specific customary laws of cities, e.g. Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, or of smaller towns, e.g. the customs of Alost, Eekloo, or the Judgements of Damme (for maritime law), to name but a few; these so-called coutumiers were published in both the French and Flemish (Dutch) languages.

When discussing the subject of access to “the secondary literature” in European law, it is desirable to define terms as precisely as possible. I am limiting my observations to those media providing this access on a transnational basis, rather than strictly national bibliographical publications. In actual practice, this is not much of a limitation, since legal bibliography at the national level is only constrained by language, and the subjects treated frequently cross jurisdictional boundaries and concepts. A further, and more applicable, delimiter for “secondary literature” is to journal articles; that is to say, articles and materials appearing in serial publications of varying degrees of frequency; thus, one excludes monographic literature.