HeinOnline Blog

Tip of the Week: How to Determine if a Treaty is Still in Force

Marcie Baranich — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:32:52 +0000

HeinOnline’s treaty research databases offer an easy way to determine if a treaty is still in force or if it has been terminated. This week’s tip explores how to make this determination using both the Treaties & Agreements Treaty Metadata Search and the United Nations Treaty Series database available in HeinOnline.

Watch the Tip of the Week on YouTube, or continue reading below the video for the full-text version.

Determining if a Treaty is Still in Force in the Treaties & Agreements Library:

First, let’s look at a scenario in which the U.S. is a party to the agreement. When the U.S. is a party to the treaty in question, you should always refer to the Treaty Metadata Search in the Treaties and Agreements Library. For our example, we want to determine if a treaty between the U.S. and Kazakhstan related to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 that entered into force on April 4, 2000, is still in force or not. To open the Treaty Metadata Search, go to the Search Tab within the Treaties and Agreements Library, and click on Treaty Metadata Search on the left menu. Or you can access this from the home page at the top of the Treaty Publications listing.

From the Treaty Metadata Search we are going to search by Country for Kazakhstan and by the in force date of April 4, 2000.

This search will yield one result for KAV 6532. Click on the Summary link from the result. This will bring up the treaty metdata for KAV 6532.

The treaty metadata contains a field titled Treaty in Force. This will indicate either yes or no. Alternatively, if you read the Description of the treaty, if the treaty was terminated, in most cases it will indicate so in the description. For this example, it says Treaty in Force: No, and the description also says “Terminated August 2, 2007“.

Determining if a Treaty is Still in Force in the United Nations Treaty Series:

Now let’s look at a different scenario in which the U.S. is not a party to the agreement. For treaties to which the U.S. is not a party, you should refer to the United Nations or League of Nations Treaty Series in the United Nations Law Collection. For our example, we want to determine if a treaty between Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden is still in force. The treaty is related to the transfer of insured persons from one sick fund to another and was signed at Reykjavik on July 20, 1953.

To search for the treaty, click on Search for a Treaty under Finding Aids on the United Nations Law Collection home page. Or, from the Search Tab within the library, you can click on Search for a Treaty. We are going to search across Multilateral Parties for Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and search across the treaty description for key terms “insured persons” AND “sick fund”.

This will bring up one result to Treaty I-3140, 227 UNTS 217. The result is displaying the treaty metadata. In some cases in the UNTS they have included a note about the termination in the description of the treaty; but that is not always the case, as we see in this example. In addition to reviewing the description information, you should always check the current status of the treaty by using the links at the bottom of the treaty summary under UN Current Status Information.

Start with the first link if there are multiple links listed, and review each current status link provided. The link will appear as a date which represents the Effective In Force Date of subsequent provisions to the treaty. When we click on 1955-01-01, it is going to open a window that shows the live data as is provided on the United Nations Treaty website. This current status information does not indicate anything about termination, however, you will notice an asterisk next to Sweden. This asterisk indicates a change in status for Sweden.

Now, close the current status window for 1955-01-01 and open the second link, 1958-08-01. Scroll to the bottom of the current status and you will find a chart of participants to the treaty and their status or actions to the treaty. Next to Sweden at three different dates, you will see there was a termination in the relations between participants.

If we click on the last entry for Sweden with the Date of Notification of 01/01/1955, it will pull up the subsequent status information for that date of notification. This will then indicate the treaty was terminated between Sweden and Norway.

Now, let’s look at another example in which the treaty description itself indicates the treaty was terminated. This is a treaty between Hungary and Sweden, for which we know the treaty number is 23178. We can quickly pull up the treaty by the treaty number. This treaty summary indicates right in the description that the treaty was terminated.

If we click on the UN Current Status Link, that too indicates it was terminated.

New Video Interviews Available in Spinelli’s!

Miranda Rosati — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:14:44 +0000

The next installment of video interviews has been added to Spinelli’s Law Library Reference Shelf in the Oral Histories of Law Librarianship Section. The new videos include interviews with:

Frank Y. Liu – Professor of Law and Director, Center for Legal Information Duquesne University
Lolly Gasaway – Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina
Susan J. Lewis – Associate Director for Public Services, Pence Law Library American University
Rich Leiter – Professor of Law and Director of the Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library, University of Nebraska
Charlie Dyer – Retired Director of Libraries and Secretary to the Board, San Diego County Public Law Library
Cindy Adams – Co-Director of Library Services, McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP
Mike Beaird – Retired Director of the Law Library and Associate Professor of Law Emeritus, The University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Nancy Johnson – Associate Dean for Library and Information Services and Professor of Law, Georgia State University
Anne Klinefelter – Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, University of North Carolina
Pam Gregory – Retired Law Librarian Circuit Court for Prince Georges, Maryland

The interviews are conducted by Patrick Kehoe, former AALL President, Michelle Wu, Director of the Law Library Georgetown University and Frank Houdek, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Southern Illinois University.

Log in to Spinelli’s Law Library Reference Shelf, and you will see a link to the videos on the left side of the page under Collection Resources. Or, watch a preview of the videos here:

May 2013 Trivia Contest

Miranda Rosati — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:52:29 +0000

Following is the HeinOnline May Trivia Contest:

Roxanne Marmion and Miranda Rosati missed the National Festival by a couple of days, but still got a picture in front of these flowering trees. Can you name what city Roxanne and Miranda are visiting in the below picture?

E-mail your guess to marketing@wshein.com by May 27, 2013. If you can name the location pictured above, you’ll be entered to win a Where in the World is Hein t-shirt. Be sure to include your name, organization or institution, and your mailing address. We’ll announce the winner in a follow-up blog post and in the monthly HeinOnline Newsletter, so stay tuned!

April Trivia Contest Winner

Miranda Rosati — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:19:10 +0000

Congratulations to our April Trivia Contest Winner:

Maryruth Storer
Orange County Public Law Library

Steve Roses was pictured standing in front of Tommy Trojan at the University of Southern California. The life-size bronze statue of a Trojan warrior sits in the center of campus and serves as a popular meeting spot, as well as a centerpiece for a number of campus events. Learn more»

Maryruth will receive a Where in the World is Hein tshirt for submitting the correct answer and winning our drawing.

Stay tuned for next month’s contest.

Tip of the Week: How to Search the Popular Name Tables in the United States Code

Marcie Baranich — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:27:43 +0000

If you know the name of an Act and want to know where it was codified in the United States Code, the best approach is by searching the Popular Name Tables. This week’s tip demonstrates how to search the Popular Name Tables for the name of the Act.

Watch the Tip of the Week on YouTube, or continue reading below the video for the full-text version.

Each version of the United States Code contains a popular name table, which lists federal acts alphabetically by their official or popular name and provides citations to those acts. The popular name tables are located immediately following title 50 in the United States Code and have each been indexed to allow a researcher to search across just those tables.

The citations include the number assigned to the act, which could be a chapter number or public law number (depending upon when the act was passed), the title(s) and section(s) in the U.S. Code, and any citations to amendments made to the act.

This tip illustrates how to search across just those tables within the U.S. Code.

For our example, we want to find a federal statute in the US Code by the name, in this case, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.

By looking up the statute in the popular names table, we can easily find the U.S. Code citation for it as well as the public law number with Statutes at Large citation.

In HeinOnline, the popular name tables have all been indexed as “Acts Cited by Popular Name” across the title field. This makes it easy to search across by inserting title: “Acts Cited by Popular Name” into the Advanced Search option. Then we can add keywords to search for the act by name.

The search would thus look like this:

title: “Acts Cited by Popular Name” AND text: “Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980”

This will return 12 results, which you can then sort by volume date ascending or descending.