Collection Development Adventures in Islamic law sources

Our Qatar University Comparative Law Conference concluded and was a success. The Conference was the first of a kind in the Gulf region and many scholars, especially Canadian scholars, participated. See the review of the conference. 

I attended one day of the conference, and from the discussions and papers presented generated many new acquisition titles for the QU law collection. Great efforts are being undertaken to make Islamic law sources more accessible in translation. I particularly want to recommend the Islamic law bibliography developed by the UK Centre for Legal Education and the Hadith bibliography at the University of Michigan. The mixture of primary and secondary sources in the area is rich.

Mosque at QU

IALL 2012: Toronto, Canada

I completed a week in Toronto at the International Association of Law Libraries Annual Course. I enjoyed rediscovering Canadian legal sources and traditions  My first job as a law librarian assistant was at UBC in Vancouver, Canada, many years ago.

Here are some pictures from IALL 2012:

Town Crier opens IALL 2012

Koreatown Foodies

Yonge Street

The Cup 

Eaton Centre

Fall in Toronto

Birthday at the Souk

Some pictures from my 42nd birthday. Dinner at the Souq. Thanks!

Subject Focus: Comparative Legal Ethics research and resources

One fascinating component of working in legal education in Qatar for me is to observe a country with blended legal systems. Qatar has civil, common, and sharia law depending on the subject and parties involved in a transaction or dispute. For example, a common law based court was created in Qatar for commercial litigation with authority to decide and enforce judgments. New tribunals like the Qatar International Court are bringing lawyers and major law firm offices to the region that collaborate with local bar members, so these ethics issues are becoming more important.  Law schools do not commonly have professional ethics courses in the region and bar associations are not engaged to encode or enforce. Accreditation practice visits identified this need and it is being responded to at QU.

At the recent Qatar Law Forum I met an international lawyer from the UK now based in Doha who described to me the practice of law here and really emphasized the difficulty of collaboration across jurisdictions and legal systems without a common code of legal ethics. For example, is it ok to coach a witness or how do you define a conflict of interest? The answers depend on the origins and professional ethics of the lawyers and any disagreement will probably result in a costly withdrawal from representation and impede successful collaboration.

Library resources at QU in this area are slim. There are two books on UK ethics in the library and no other local resources are collected. Westlaw International and LexisNexis Academic provide common law based material. Identifying this gap in our collection is an opportunity to add to the library’s ability to support interest in comparative legal ethics instruction and research. I am developing resources in this area based on resources at the International Association of Legal Ethics at Stanford,  the International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics and Professionalism,  and conference materials from the International Legal Ethics Conferences.  Journals such as Legal Ethics will be added to the QU law collection over the next year. Fortunately, the International Bar Association has developed many ethical codes that are available in multiple languages.

A week on the job as QU law librarian with a Royal visit

How I spent my week: Teaching dominated the week with five one hour lab sessions of Legal Research and Writing. The classes use primarily Westlaw International to find US cases in tort subjects such as IIED and defamation required for the open memos - very similar to any law school legal writing program.  On Tuesday, Qatari Royalty was touring the new library and we had a spontaneous drop-in by Sheikha Moza in one of my classes. She joined us for a Westlaw session in the new instructional lab for about a minute. I was teaching IIED searches in cases and she seemed entertained. A TV crew was following her and I hope to get a clip. Also, the International Review of Law (IRL) and two law faculty asked for citation checking and sourcing for articles so I am working on this after teaching. We use ALWD here at the College of Law and I am liking this citation style more than I ever thought I would after years of working with ‘Bluebook’ law schools, journals and law reviews. The IRL is close to finalizing the first issue of the new journal so we are anticipating great things. Additionally, law students are asking right now for access to primary materials in English, particularly the Qatari copyright code and treaties relating to domestic violence protection from countries in the region including Jordon, Egypt and Turkey.  I am recommending Eastlaws and UNESCO databases for these research requests. QU law is in the process of drafting model legislation for domestic violence and I am glad to help as I can. Lastly, this weekend I will attend the Qatar Law Forum on the Rule of Law  (May 4-6^th, 2012).  This event is international in scope and law school Deans, Judges, Lawyers, and Government Officials are attendees/presenters. For example, the Prime Minister of Qatar is giving a plenary talk at the conference on Sunday. I look forward to seeing Lord Woolf again and meeting new people.

Practicing librarianship: mail call

Now that we are in the new QU library building I can order many more books than previously. I like personally sorting through the new acquisitions for the law library when I can. Without warning, every once in a while the books and journals ordered for the College of Law appear from the University mail room. The wrappers and envelopes are removed already and the items are placed in a box in no particular order, a practice which can make it a challenge to determine the sender and delivery date for our ILS system.  It is often difficult to predict receipt of items or place claims. There is no system of mail delivery or addresses for buildings in Qatar, except for PO boxes in a central GPO, so there is really no other option than the mail room.  Most of the books I order are from library supplier Dawson in the UK. I have a long list of books to order but place about forty at a time to stagger their arrival so the acquisitions process is not overwhelmed. The average time of arrival of a book from Dawson is six weeks. Very slow. It is worth the wait , however.

Here is the most recent book box and a few example bilingual law journals.

Law Journal from Bahrain (Islamic date of 1432)

Qatar Law Journal

Legal Citations Adventure

In addition to duties as law librarian/lecturer I am also citation editor for the new QU International Review of Law (IRL) to be published online with Bloomsbury. It is brand new and so no editions exist yet but we are successfully working here to find authors and create a process of review.  For example, I just completed a citation Style Guide for authors.  Dr. Jon M. Truby, Assistant Professor of Law, is Editor-in-Chief of the IRL.

The IRL Style Guide is based heavily on the Style Guide of the Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute by Brooke Bowman, Assistant Editor-in-Chief. It was the best style guide model for a legal journal I could find using ALWD as the citation standard. The College of Law at QU adopted ALWD as a whole for instruction and research as much as possible, though Bluebook and OSCOLA are used also.

Here is the problem: I want to have a ready IRL style guide section for national and regional legal citations.

I searched for a local guide to citation for GCC and Qatari Courts, including the QFC, but found nothing useful.  Also searched the Cardiff Index and the Globalex Qatar guide with the same results. My copy of Bieber’s has not arrived yet! I also spoke to Rami Tawfiq, Westlaw representative extraordinaire, and part of the development team for the new Westlaw Gulf . He visited QU College of Law from Dubai today. I asked how this development team is managing legal citations for all the scanned documents from the region so that they are standard enough for the database to be able to identify them? Much of the citation here is being developed ad hoc apparently.

As the laws of the region are scanned or imported into regional databases like Lexis Middle East, Westlaw Gulf, and the forthcoming ICT Qatar legal portal, agreement on standardized legal citation will become important, especially to a law citation editor like myself!   

Legal Skills Prof Blog

Thanks to my friend Jim Levy of Nova Southeastern University School of Law (NSU) for allowing me to guest blog at his wonderful Legal Skills Prof Blog. Jim and I collaborated many times the four years I was a law librarian at NSU and I highly recommend his blog extraordinaire. Cheers Jim!

Here are my three posts:

·         click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2 and here for Part 3

Purpose and Focus

This blog creates a record of one law librarian's adventures and activities as lecturer/law librarian at Qatar University, College of Law. After eight years as an academic law librarian in the United States the opportunity to create a law collection in the Middle East at a College of Law establishing ABA standards was a welcomed departure.

My family and I left our home in Arizona and relocated to the Emirate of Qatar in August 2011. I had just turned forty and was an Associate Dean of the Law Library at the Phoenix School of Law. My wife and I both reacted the same way to the job offer from Dean Okour and could not wait to fly to the Middle East with our two daughters for a three year commitment.