Profile of the Directorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress

Michael Ravnitzky's The Directorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress: A Treasure Hidden Under a Bushel Basket has been published on LLRX.com. Here's the abstract:

Despite harsh criticism of the citation of foreign law in American court decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts solicit and are supplied with numerous studies surveying foreign law each year, according to the Library of Congress's annual reports.  The source of this scholarship is the talented staff of the Directorate of Legal Research (DLR), a little known but well-regarded and highly influential research department contained within the Library of Congress.  DLR is a sister organization to the better-known Congressional Research Service (which itself has an American Law Division that produces legal studies on U.S. Law).  The Directorate of Legal Research receives scant mention even among the legal research community.

[JH]