Law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and news sources are all good places to find information on a foreign country's law. They can also assist you in identifying and locating primary law that is relevant to your research. The information provided on this page will help you to locate articles using legal databases, general databases, and the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals.
When researching the law of a foreign country, it can be helpful to look at articles from disciplines other than law. This is especially true if you are searching for articles that have been published outside of the U.S. You should also never limit yourself to U.S. law reviews when you are researching a foreign country. You want to learn about more than just the U.S. perspective, and your research will benefit from journal articles and news articles published in your country of interest, or even a third country that might offer another perspective.
The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, or IFLP, is a tool to help you identify articles from foreign law journals and other periodicals. It is available through HeinOnline and uses the same search syntax as other HeinOnline databases.
It is important to note that this source is an index and not a full-text database. Your search results will consist primarily of bibliographic records. Where the full text of an article is available in HeinOnline, a link will be provided. However, even if the text is not available, you can use the information in the bibliographic record to locate the article in print, in another online database, on the internet, or through interlibrary loan. For resources available only in print, the IFLP will often be the only way for you to identify the article title, journal title, author name, and other information that you need to retrieve the material.
To see what an IFLP record looks like, please view the video in the box to the right of this text. Additional video tutorials for the IFLP are available on YouTube using the link below.
In addition to the databases listed here and on the Law Center Library's website, LSU law students have access to any of the databases available through the main campus libraries. These databases can be searched alphabetically or by subject at the following link.