Sunday, March 11, 2018

Lexsitus: new free resource for international criminal law research

As a U.S. military lawyer, the other day I realized that my work computer, for whatever reason, was not able to access many of the international humanitarian law blogs and source materials from the ICRC. This caused me to reflect on how the goals of international criminal justice depend so much on effective dissemination: the right legal materials, in the right language, available on time to the proper legal advisers, investigators, or judges.

The Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP) seeks to address the challenge of dissemination through several of its initiatives. CILRAP is not just a Wikipedia of international criminal law but also a hub for original leading scholarship.

The most recent CILRAP initiative is called Lexsitus. From the CILRAP website:
Lexsitus assists the learning of, and work with, legal sources in international criminal law. It provides structured online-access to AV-lectures, commentary, case law, preparatory works, and digests, at the level of each article and main provision of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. It contains more than 230 lectures by a Lexsitus Faculty of initially 50 leading experts in international criminal law from around the world. Lexsitus has been made by CILRAP, HELM Studio and Mithya Labs, with funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, a key project partner. The Project has been academically co-directed by Professors Morten Bergsmo (Peking University Law School) and Mark Klamberg (Stockholm University), and the Lexsitus Project Consortium includes academics at Stockholm University, Peking University, National University of Singapore, Salzburg University, O.P. Jindal Global University, and the University of Oslo. You can access Lexsitus here.
Congratulations to the Lexsitus editors on this important achievement. Military lawyers ought to keep Lexsitus bookmarked -- and hope their government computers do not block it.

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