Each year a number of our students do research on the laws of foreign countries. Finding these laws can be challenging, especially if you don’t speak the language. To help, we’re always looking to expand our access to foreign law and have recently subscribed to a new database that does just that. vLex is a great new addition to our collection as it contains primary and secondary authority from over 130 countries. Coverage is more complete for some countries than others. For example, vLex provides a great library of Spanish materials, while offering considerably less for South Africa. But, it does offer a number of secondary sources for South Africa, which would be difficult to find elsewhere. You’ll have to browse your country to see if vLex has what you need.
Users can search all countries or can choose a specific country to browse or search. If we take Argentina, for example, vLex provides a number of official bulletins for the Argentine provinces, the legislative Codes for the country, as well as case law for the provinces and the Supreme Court of the Nation. There are also a number of books and journals and even sections of model contracts. As you access each of these documents, vLex provides you with the option to translate the document, which is quite handy. To do this it will ask you to register for a free vLex account.
vLex certainly doesn’t have everything, but it provides BYU Law users with quite a bit more than we used to have in the foreign law realm. This should definitely be a place to check when doing research on the laws of a different country. For more places to check, don’t forget to go to our Foreign Law Subject Guide.