French Government Adds Major Enhancements to Its Legifrance Site

As of last week, the French government's Legifrance website has been updated with many new features. A good knowledge of French is required.

The site continues to offer access to legislation and jurisprudence from France, the European Union and various international bodies. But it is has become much more powerful.

Among the new features of interest to legal researchers:

• when looking up a section of a law, regulation, or Code, the new navigation system now provides access to the full hyperlinked table of contents alongside the section of the document so one can see how a section fits into the overall scheme and jump from one part of the text to another
  
• one can find what a section of a legal Code looked like at a point-in-time in the past as well as consult what it will look like in the future (thanks to information about delayed coming-into-force provisions)
  
• a thematic search tool for legislation and regulations
• very detailed advanced search templates for finding caselaw from the French constitutional, administrative and judicial court systems

For a backgrounder on the legal system in France, I would recommend the December 2007 research guide entitled Researching French Law by Stéphane Cottin and Jérôme Rabenou who both work for the Conseil constitutionnel (France's Constitutional Council).