Fundamentals of Treaty Research: U.S. and Non-U.S. (Electronic Resources).

Research Guides

Some basic steps to take in using electronic resources to find treaties:

Start with LEXIS or WESTLAW (both have the full text of U.S. treaties available, selected major treaties via International Legal Materials and Basic Documents of International Economic Law, as well as specialized collections of key treaties on trade, taxation, intellectual property, etc.).

Check Oceana's TIARA CD-ROM or the United Nations Treaty Collection database on the Internet (if you don't have access to LEXIS and WESTLAW or the costs are prohibitive).

Check web sites or electronic publications of international organizations (inter-governmental or non-governmental organizations (IGOs or NGOs) such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Greenpeace), government agencies (the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for instance), research centers, educational institutions, or associations specializing in the area, etc., for texts of treaties.

Backtrack for more information (or get more information about the treaty you are looking for to begin with) by checking Treaties in Force (or other treaty indexes), library catalogs (OCLC's WorldCat via FirstSearch, RLG's RLIN Bibliographic File as a CitaDel database with Eureka interface, etc., or individually cataloged treaties - U.K. treaties for instance published as Command Papers), news stories, journal articles (TP-ALL on WESTLAW is really useful), or Internet search engines such as Altavista.

If all else fails (or time is of the essence, and some quick checks locally don't help), call treaty offices or other agencies and organizations, or ask for help on related electronic discussion groups (such as INT-LAW).

Some useful research guides exist for getting background information, references to treaty collections, and links to Internet resources, on how to look for treaties in print and electronic format. You can check any of the ones below:

Christopher C. Brown, Locating Current Treaty Information on the Internet, CoALL Scuttle, Apr...

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