Looking for decisions of international tribunals, or interested in the application of international law in a foreign country’s courts? This kind of research can be challenging, since there is no consolidated database of all such case law, and when these decisions are published, they normally lack the headnotes and other editorial content American lawyers and law students are used to relying on.
Written by Gabriela Femenia, Foreign and International Law Librarian
Looking for decisions of international tribunals, or interested in the application of international law in a foreign country’s courts? This kind of research can be challenging, since there is no consolidated database of all such case law, and when these decisions are published, they normally lack the headnotes and other editorial content American lawyers and law students are used to relying on.
Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL) makes international case law research a bit easier by enhancing the full text of selected international law decisions with headnotes, summaries of facts and holdings, expert analysis and commentary, and suggested further readings. In the case of courts that don’t use English as their primary language, ORIL also offers reliable English translations of key portions of decisions.
This database is organized into five subject-specific modules, all accessible from one central research portal:
- Oxford Reports on International Law in Domestic Courts, containing international law as applied in the domestic courts of 70 jurisdictions
- Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law, covering decisions of the International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, as well as post-WWII military tribunals
- Oxford Reports on International Human Rights Law, comprising international decisions on human rights from a variety of global and regional courts, including European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American human rights bodies, and UN human rights bodies
- Oxford Reports on International Investment Claims, highlighting investor-state dispute awards, decisions, and determinations from leading arbitral bodies such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), ICC International Court of Arbitration, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the London Court of International Arbitration
- Oxford Reports on International Courts of General Jurisdiction, compiling rulings of the International Court of Justice, Permanent Court of International Justice, International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration
Case reports can be browsed by module, subject or date, so that the researcher can look for the most recent decisions, or decisions specifically applying international environmental law, for example. Within each module, you can look for decisions by an individual international or regional tribunal, or explore international law decisions by the national courts of a specific country.
It is also possible to search for decisions by keyword within one module or across multiple modules at the same time, by using the basic or advanced search functions in the upper right corner of the database. Useful cases can be printed, downloaded as PDFs, or emailed to yourself or another person.
ORIL is frequently updated, with approximately 120 cases added each month and existing case reports revised with additional content. The newest cases can be immediately viewed on the Oxford Reports on International Law homepage.
Oxford Reports on International Law is accessible through Biddle Law Library’s E-Resources page or through the LOLA catalog. For assistance in using this database and for help researching international law decisions, email Gabriela Femenia, Foreign and International Law Librarian, at gfemenia@law.upenn.edu, or stop by Tanenbaum 412.