The World Law Bulletin is a monthly publication of the Law Library of Congress that reports on significant or interesting legal developments in countries around the world.
For its own peculiar reasons, the Law Library has declined to make this serial available to the public. (In response to insistent pleas, a derivative publication called the Global Legal Monitor was created last year for public release.)
But now a collection of back issues of World Law Bulletin, dating from October 2000 to March 2006, has become publicly available through alternate channels.
Its most enduring value may be in the legal responses to terrorism that are described in the months following September 2001. But the Bulletin also contains all kinds of legal odds and ends that one is unlikely to encounter elsewhere. (“Latvian lawmakers adopted a resolution that imposes weight limits on children’s school bags following a study which concluded that 60 percent of Latvian students have posture problems.”)
Copies of the World Law Bulletin dating from July 2001 to April 2005 were obtained by Michael Ravnitzky who kindly shared them.
The whole collection may be found here.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.