Are you an information professional at a law firm or government agency supporting the work of multilingual attorneys in transnational legal practice? Are you an academic law librarian seeking to better serve the needs of foreign-trained, non-native English-speaking LLM and other advanced degree students?
The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP), the world’s only multilingual legal journal index, can help you assist patrons who seek credible foreign-language secondary law sources. Established as a print resource by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) in 1960, IFLP has since migrated to HeinOnline’s electronic research platform and is available as an affordable, cost-effective add-on to your HeinOnline subscription.
Start a 30-day free trial to HeinOnline’s Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals database, then watch the recorded webinar below on Maximizing the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals in All Law Libraries, presented by the IFLP Editorial Team to learn how to use the resource.
About the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
Unparalleled Breadth of Coverage
As the name implies, the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals focuses primarily on law journals published outside of the United States. In fact, you may be surprised at just how broad the resource’s coverage is. The Index includes more than 394,000 records of articles and book reviews published in more than 700 of the world’s leading law journals. More than 77,000 of these articles are available in full text in HeinOnline.
Articles from almost four dozen international, regional, jurisdiction-specific, and subject-specific legal yearbooks are also included. In addition, IFLP analyzes the contents of approximately 50 individually published collections of essays, festschriften, mélanges, and congress reports each year.
Approximately half of the articles indexed are published in languages other than English. In total, 26 languages are represented, making IFLP the only truly multilingual index to legal scholarship worldwide.
Diversity of Subject Matter—Not Limited to Academic Research
Equally impressive is the diversity of subjects covered by the IFLP. They include public international law, private international law, comparative law, civil law, common law, the law of foreign jurisdictions, and even U.S. law analyzed from a non-American perspective.
The Index isn’t just for academic research. Many of the articles indexed in IFLP focus on various aspects of international economic law, including bankruptcy, competition law, international commercial arbitration, investor-state dispute settlement, international trade, regulatory compliance, and other topics that will be of interest to legal practitioners representing multinational enterprises whose operations cross jurisdictional lines.
Bear in mind that many of the English language journals covered by the Index publish articles that focus on non-English-speaking jurisdictions, making the law of those jurisdictions more accessible to students and practitioners whose primary language is English.
Key Features of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
Multilingual Subject-Coded Material
Each article indexed in IFLP is assigned one or more subject headings in English, French, German, and Spanish, thereby making it possible to search or browse by subject in these languages for articles published in the same or any other language. To view the alphabetical list of subject headings in each of the four languages, click on the “Subjects” tab in the center of the IFLP database landing page.
Subject headings with the most entries include bankruptcy, civil law, constitutional law, international law, and international trade.
Multilingual Keyword and Field Searching
The database’s search interface also supports keyword searching and field searching in multiple languages.
Post-search filters enable users to refine search results by date, language of publication, subject, country, and geographic region.
Integration with MyHein
Users may save search results and queries to their MyHein account and set up email alerts to notify them when new records that meet their search criteria are added to the Index. To organize various saved items, attach a descriptive tag to the query or alert.
Editorial Process Relies on Human Indexer
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is produced at the Law Library of the University of California at Berkeley on behalf of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), which owns the copyright. The IFLP’s Editorial Board relies on a team of multilingual human indexers—not machines—to analyze articles and assign subject headings. It also draws upon the resources of the Berkeley Law Library’s international and foreign law collection, the largest and most comprehensive in the western United States.
The IFLP Advisory Board, comprised of specialist FCIL librarians, evaluates prospective journals for inclusion in the Index. It’s also worth noting that IFLP subscriptions constitute AALL’s third largest source of revenue. By subscribing to the Index, you are helping to support the work of AALL and ensure its long-term financial viability.
Learn More about This Resource
Want to learn more about the Index and how it can help you meet the needs of practitioners, faculty members, and students who are researching foreign, international, and comparative law topics? Watch the recorded webinar below on Maximizing the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals in All Law Libraries, presented by the IFLP Editorial Team.
Marci Hoffman (Editor-in-Chief of IFLP) and members of the IFLP Advisory Board will explain how to effectively search and browse this essential legal resource, while also answering any questions you may have about the Index.
Maximizing the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals in All Law Libraries
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