The International Legal Aid Collections of The National Equal Justice Library

The National Equal Justice Library has begun assembling a comprehensive library of materials about legal aid in other countries. Read on to learn more about the goals of this set of collections and some interesting comparisons we already can make between the status of equal justice in some other industrial democracies and in the United States.

The NEJL International Legal Aid Collections-- A Unique Resource

For decades most of those involved in civil legal services and indigent defense in the United States essentially ignored legal aid developments elsewhere in the world, or at best assumed this nation only had lessons to teach and nothing to learn. But in recent years, more and more of them have begun to pay attention to the truly remarkable growth of legal aid funding in other industrial democracies and some of the innovative approaches those countries have embraced. In part in recognition of this new interest in legal aid developments elsewhere in the world and in part to facilitate the development of a worldwide legal aid community, the National Equal Justice Library is building an International Legal Aid Collection.

The NEJL International Legal Aid Collections seek to assemble the world’s first comprehensive collection of published materials – books, articles, statutes, government reports, studies, court decisions, etc. -- about legal aid and related developments in all countries. As to materials published in a language other than English, the Library anticipates creating English language translations – or English language summaries. It also has created this website with a large and growing section devoted to legal aid in countries outside the United States.

The goals of the International Legal Aid Collection include:

• Encouraging and facilitating more and better research on legal aid developments around the world by providing scholars with one-stop access to materials describing and analyzing legal aid programs in other countries.
• Providing a resource for policymakers and administrators in one country desiring to know how other countries have addressed issues that country is now confronting or the experience of those countries with solutions they are now contemplating.
• Providing the knowledge base for generating comparative charts and statistical comparisons that can be published as a resource for scholars, policymakers and administrators.

Eventually this international website component will also include a comprehensive catalog of the Library’s International Legal Aid Collection holdings, which already exceed 1000 volumes. (The first such listing -- for the current holdings on legal aid in the United Kingdom and Ireland -- already appears in this website. See "Publications about Other Nations' Legal Aid Programs" above.) Staff will respond to inquiries from other countries as well as from U.S. policymakers and administrators.