Updated International Law Research Guides From GlobaLex

GlobaLex, the electronic collection created by the Hauser Global Law School Program at the New York University School of Law, recently updated some of its research guides:

• Sustainable Development Law (SDL) Research Guide: "Historically, sustainable development law has often focused on environmental issues in developed countries. Indeed, sustainable development was recognized long before the 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on the Human Environment (culminating in the Stockholm Declaration). Scholars, citizens, and government officials have debated the tension between the Earth’s natural resources and the needs of both current and future generations. More recently, the field of Sustainable Development Law (SDL) has shifted to an integration of international economic, social, and environmental law. Human rights advocates hope that this more integrated approach will allow SDL to respond more nimbly to chronic, complex issues like poverty (...) This guide will provide an extended introduction to the topic in an effort to aid legal researchers, but it is not intended to be comprehensive. Researchers will likely find the interdisciplinary nature of this field to be challenging. SDL can be found in traditional primary law, as well as soft law. As this field evolves, policy and scholarly work will continue to move the discussion and legal developments forward."
• Research Guide on Global Health Law: "Included are a wide array of resources, ranging from primary 'hard' international law instruments, to databases that contain domestic health-related legislation. Also included are suggestions for researching the relationships between global health law and international human rights, trade, and intellectual property. In terms of format, the guide emphasizes electronic sources, but some print monographs are also mentioned. All of the listed resources are available in English, although several are multilingual. The aggregate purpose of the guide is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for researching the highly complex and dynamic field of global health law."
• Contemporary Land Grabbing, Research, and Bibliography: "Contemporary land grabbing often involves large-scale land acquisitions by foreign and/or nonindigenous investors. These acquisitions, in turn, cause issues such as land alienation from local communities, human rights violations, and loss of livelihoods and culture (...) Research is made more difficult by the complex reasons and motivations behind contemporary land grabbing, the number of stakeholders involved, the interdisciplinary nature of research, the many different types of legal sources to search (for example, international treaties, custom, jurisprudence, soft law, and domestic statutes and customary law), lack of empirical evidence, and scattered resources in many different places. The research is a mixture of international and domestic legal research and legal and non-legal research. In this research guide, I first investigate the definitions of contemporary land grabbing and land alienation. Next, I delineate various mechanisms and international principles that can be useful for protecting the rights of indigenous and local people relating to land from the attack of state and nonstate actors. Finally, I selectively review several books and articles that provide excellent starting points for contemporary land grabbing research."