By Lara Hatwell The relationship between Northern Ireland and Europe has dominated the headlines since the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement was signed in 2020. This has largely been a result of the Democratic Unionist Party, the (then) largest party’s opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, and its subsequent refusal to elect a speaker, leaving the Stormont Assembly unable to form. Northern Ireland as a whole voted to remain in the EU, with the DUP the only major party to advocate Leave. The Parliament Buildings at Stormont © 2024 Northern Ireland Assembly Commission For the entirety of its ..read more

By Wanne Mendonck and Katharine Matthews   If you have visited the Law Library over the last week you may have come across our new display Letters of the Law, which will introduce you to the wide range of material we have in the Law Library collection; after all, and as this display will hopefully show, the law really does touch most areas of life. By zooming in on a number of relevant topics for the time of year, the display will try to guide you through the daunting variety of Law Library holdings. It will highlight how our class-mark system works, and look at some locations within the ..read more

Christmas tree at the Law Bod   Michaelmas Term has just flown by  and so to our readers who are heading away from Oxford this week, have a great Christmas break.  For those of you who are staying in Oxford, we are open until 5pm on the 22nd December, although our opening hours will be changing on Monday 4th December to  Monday – Friday 09.00 – 19.00, Saturday 10.00 – 16.00, closed on Sunday.  If you need to know the opening times of any of the Bodleian Libraries, check on the library homepage, you can get that information from this page https://www.bodlei ..read more

The Bodleian Law Library is participating in this year’s Oxford “Open Doors” weekend on Friday and Saturday, 8-9 September 2023.  (The Open Doors events continue on Sunday, though the Law Library is not participating on that day.)  The purpose of the weekend is to enable a wider public to see interesting and important buildings, including many that are not normally open to visitors, and to learn about the activities that take place within them. Most readers of this blog will be aware that we are one of the largest law libraries in the United Kingdom, but some may not realize that the ..read more

By Ronald Richenburg As the first coronation in over 70 years draws near, thoughts of history, tradition, ceremony, national pride, and contract law will fill many minds (the last of these perhaps to a slightly lesser degree than the others!).  At least since 2003, the various paperback editions of Treitel on Contract have used interesting paintings from museum collections as cover images.  In the current edition (15th ed. by Edwin Peel, 2020) the painting shows the coronation of Edward VII on 9 August 1902.  The precise date is of significance because the coronation was or ..read more

After many years with the same ‘look’, Lexis Library has updated its interface to a new and more streamlined version – Lexis+ UK.   From Wednesday 14th September, when you go onto Lexis, this new platform will be ‘live’ and the old version will no longer be available. Like with most new platforms,  the best way to learn is to go on and have a look around.  However to help with the basics, we have put a few pointers below.  We have also produced a 15 minute video to go through things in more detail for those that prefer to see it demonstrated rather than static screen s ..read more

Until 17 July 2020, holders of an Oxford SSO will be able to read books on the  Perlego platform Despite what the name might suggest to some of us, Perlego is a multidisciplinary library of some 300, 000 titles. The website owners have collected the law titles together so that you can browse the 4,000 or so titles in this subject area quickly. At the top of the same page you can also do a search if you have a particular title or author in mind. (Start search with some keywords/surnames, then filter to search for books only matching on the title, author, the topic, or the keyword ..read more

By Ronald Richenburg Today, Saturday, 11 December 2021, is an important anniversary that no longer receives the commemoration that it deserves, being the 90th anniversary of the Statute of Westminster 1931. [1]  This was an act of the United Kingdom Parliament in which, most importantly, it was explicitly stated that no future act would extend or be deemed to extend to any of what were then known as the British dominions other than at the request and with the consent of the dominion in question.  Most of the limitations on the legislative powers of the dominions themselves were also ..read more

Do you want to keep up to date on your subject?  This blog post will go through some of the current awareness tools, sources and methods you can use to save you time in keeping abreast of recent developments in your area of law. We will be looking at delivery methods, table of contents services, databases alerts, news sites, and social media.  This blog post focuses on receiving updates within an area of law rather than doing an initial subject search (although some of the alerts are results of a search).  If you want to know about these sorts of tools and sources ..read more

  Are you having to do a formal literature review or just needing to start your research?  Below we discuss some of the things that may help you.  We will be looking at each of the different elements briefly but will (hopefully) point you to resources so you can dive a little deeper. This blog post is in support of a class we ran at the beginning of this month.  A recording of that class can be found at https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/119859/external_tools/496 if you are an Oxford University member.   Overview So first things first, what is a literature revie ..read more