Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The GAL Bibliography is now live...

It is, I confess, a much-delayed announcement, but the Global Administrative Law Bibliography is now available online.

There are a number of challenges involved in presenting and maintaining a bibliography for an emerging field of this sort, vast in scope and rapidly increasing in popularity. The key issues are 1) ensuring that the resource is user friendly; and 2) ensuring that it is kept up-to-date, to the greatest degree possible, in as many areas as possible of this rapidly-developing field.

We have tried to confront these issues directly in the design of the bibliography, in two main ways. Firstly, we have tried to make it easier for users to navigate the wealth of information it contains - in the long-term at least - by introducing an "annotations" facility. Each entry has a cross in the top right-hand corner, and clicking on it will display the annotation where one is available. In this way, we hope, eventually, to be able to provide a more detailed account of the texts included than a title alone could offer.

Whence the second issue. Of course, annotating a bibliography of this size is a huge - not to mention Sisyphean - task. We have thus (magnanimously) decided to introduce a collaborative element to the bibliography, in order that users can suggest new entries and/or annotations simply by filling out this handy feedback form. The form can also be used for more general feedback/comments/criticisms on the resource in general. Any annotations published will, of course, be fully attributed.

Here is the structure of the bibliography, in full:

Bibliography homepage

I. The Field of Global Administrative Law
A. General Works
B. Global Administrative Law and International Law
C. Early/Historical Works

II. Global Norms for National Bodies
A. General
B. Trade, Competition and Intellectual Property
C. Foreign Investment
D. Development
E. Environmental Regulation
F. Others

III. Global Administrative Bodies
A. International Organizations - General
a. UN Security Council
b. UN Agencies
c. World Trade Organization
d. World Bank
e. International Monetary Fund
f. Others

B. Transnational Regulatory Networks
C. Hybrid Public-Private Bodies
D. Private Bodies with a Public Governance Function

IV. Issue-Specific Works
A. Accountability and Review
B. Transparency
C. Participation
D. Due Process
E. Fragmention, Defragmentation and Pluralism
F. Compliance and Effectiveness
G. Indicators as a Governance Tool

V. GAL Issues in Specific Regions
A. Europe
B. North America
C. Latin American and the Americas
D. Africa, the Gulf and the Middle East
E. South Asia
F. South-East Asia and the Pacific
G. East Asia

VI. Theoretical Works
A. Legal Theory
B. Political Theory
C. Democratic Theory
D. Postnational Constitutionalism
E. Legitimacy
F. International Relations Theory
G. Political Economy

VII. Other Related Works

Please do go and have a play around on it, and let me know what you think; and of course, feel free to use that feedback form...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is amazing..

P. Katsu said...

That is wonderful!!