Cornell Law Library's InSITE Website Reviews

Reviews published in the June 16th, 2008 issue of InSITE:

• Council of Europe: Action Against Economic Crime
• Ciminal Law Conversations
• HumanTrafficking.org
• Interviews of United States Supreme Court Justices
• Venice Commission

[RJ]

Council of Europe: Action Against Economic Crime
http://www.coe.int/t/DG1/LEGALCOOPERATION/ECONOMICCRIME/

This site aggregates press releases, documents, and publications produced by several different
committees of the Council of Europe, all relating to the topic of economic crime.  "Economic crime"
is defined as including corruption, money laundering, cybercrime, human trafficking, and the activities of organized crime (i.e., drug and weapons trafficking). The site also tracks activities related to the improvement of judicial cooperation in Europe. The site is well updated, although such updates consist primarily of press releases by the various projects and agencies. The site suffers from a lack of any search engine or site map, and some content is behind a "Restricted Access" firewall.  The most useful feature of the site would likely be the lists of the various relevant treaties and legal instruments under each of the topic areas.  Each specific treaty has, in addition to its full text, a "Summary" of the legal effect, a time line of developments in its implementation, and an "Explanatory Report" which gives a
plain-language narrative of the reasoning behind it.  The site also lists specific projects underway, although these pages in some cases less well updated and use numerous undefined acronyms. [JPC]

Ciminal Law Conversations
http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/phrobins/conversations/

Criminal Law Conversations (CLC), a web project hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Law School, brings a new approach to peer review of legal scholarship.  Criminal law scholars are invited to submit texts, which then will be commented on by several peers, with a final reply by the author.  Based upon the “conversations,” essays will be either rejected or selected to be published in an upcoming book from Oxford University Press.  CLC seeks to promote thoughtful discussion of issues rather than
having opponents “talk past each other.”  The site is not a blog; instead, it is “a vehicle for
nominating and organizing the project’s topics and contributors.”  The Introduction and FAQ
pages provide details of the process that submissions go through, including nomination, drafts, finals, and final replies.  The Status Table provides a summary of the submissions.  Items in the table include papers submitted as “core texts” and the comments on those texts.  The author, position or thesis,
title, phase, and date is listed for each item in the table.  The “phase” indicates the stage of development for that “conversation” covering the range from nomination to replies by the core text
author.  As an added service, the site allows users to subscribe to get daily e-mail notification of submission activity. [MM]

HumanTrafficking.org
http://www.humantrafficking.org/

The HumanTrafficking.org website provides information to help governments and nongovernmental organizations combat human trafficking in East Asia and the Pacific.  The website is sponsored by the Academy for Educational Development (www.aed.org), a non-profit organization located in Washington,
D.C., with funding provided by the U.S. State Department.  Through links on the home page, users can view pages detailing human trafficking information for individual East Asian and Pacific countries.  The individual country pages contain information on government agencies with jurisdiction over trafficking, including contact information; relevant laws, including non-obvious links to the text of the laws, if available (the links are often labeled “see more information”); that country’s initiatives to combat human trafficking; and on non-governmental organizations working within the country.  The
“related issues” link on the homepage takes users to pages on general human trafficking topics,
such as prosecution, child trafficking, prostitution, human rights, and legal issues.  Information available under those topics includes recent HumanTrafficking.org news updates; publications by HumanTrafficking.org, governments, and NGOs; and links to websites for other organizations.  The “Resources” section of the website contains links to training, teaching, and information tools.  The website can be searched using a search box in the right-hand sidebar.  For additional information, users can email the director of HumanTrafficking.org, sign up for its monthly email newsletter, or subscribe to its RSS feed. [LB]

Interviews of United States Supreme Court Justices
http://lawprose.org/supreme_court.php

This site is put out by LawProse, a “provider of CLE training in legal writing, editing, and drafting.” While most of the LawProse website focuses on advertising their services and training sessions, this section of the site provides video interviews with eight of the nine current Supreme Court justices, voicing their thoughts on legal writing and advocacy.  The videos are available free of charge.  Windows Media Player or a Mac WMV plug-in are needed to view the videos.  There are also additional
archived interviews from judges and lawyers across the country.  Those interviews can be  found under the heading "Educational Video Clips" and cover a number of different topics, but focus primarily on legal writing and related issues.  This site is beneficial to lawyers and law students looking for advice on how to improve their writing skills. [SA]

Venice Commission
http://www.venice.coe.int/

The Venice Commission in the common name for the European Commission for Democracy through
Law.  It is an independent legal think-tank which advises the Council of Europe on constitutional
matters.  The Commission promotes democracy, human rights, and the rule of law by assisting countries with drafting constitutions and electoral laws.  It also monitors and collects information on the activities of constitutional courts, and developments in electoral and constitutional law.  Much of the information the Commission collects is available in online databases accessible through its website, and is available in English and French.  The CODICES database contains information on the “most
important” constitutional cases from constitutional courts, European and American courts of equivalent jurisdictions, the European Court of Human Justice, and the Court of Justice of the European Communities.  The CODICES database is updated three times per year, and contains information from 1993 forward.  It can be navigated by a sidebar index, or through an advanced search function; however, both are non-intuitive and difficult to use.  The VOTA database contains information on the electoral legislation for “all Council of Europe member states, and other states which participate in the
Commission’s work.”  Users should access the database through the sidebar link, rather than through the link in the elections and referendums section of the website, which requests a user name and password.  Users can easily search the database through indexes found under “overview” and “browse,” or through a search engine which allows users to narrows searches by topic, country, language, and date.  The documents section of the website allows users to access primarily documents prepared by the Venice Commission, such as opinions and reports, organized by country, topic, and type of document
(opinion, studies, and seminars). [LB]