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I am one of the three privileged persons awarded a 2005 IALL scholarship to attend the Association's annual conference. The grant of US $1,500 assisted me in many aspects, which are highlighted in this report.

First, I would like to thank the members of the Scholarship Committee of IALL for giving me the opportunity to attend the IALL annual meeting celebrated in Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, last September. Our library has a limited budget for travel. We participate in the annual conferences of the American Association of Law Libraries, which uses almost our entire travel budget. In recent years, the opportunities for participating in good conferences are greater but our budget continues to be the same. That is why I think that the grants given by IALL to new attendants are a great way to encourage librarians to participate in professional development opportunities and should be promoted continually.

The process through which the founding Treaties of the European Communities came to function and be regarded as a constitution and the role of the Court of Justice in that process are well known. According to a widespread view, the Court would have been the main or even the only actor in the constitutionalization of the Treaties, transforming them into constitutional entities by virtue of some judgments of the 60s and 70s. For many, in those judgments the Court would have been excessively prointegrationist, too audacious, almost “running wild”. At some point, a number of constitutional courts, in particular the German Constitutional Court with its Maastricht decision of 1993, would have voiced their concerns, tracing potential limits to judicially driven integration. As a result, the Court of the 90s would have become wiser, more self-restrained, at times even minimalistic – more like a court and less like an omnipotent legislator or “pouvoir constituent.” With the calling of the European Convention and the drafting of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, the Court would have been more than ever on a second plane, as if constitutional matters had finally returned to the political actors to which they belong.

This article aims at analyzing the relations and differences between the United States of America Copyright Law and the European Union Directive 2001/29/CE and how they affect the management of protected work in the libraries.

This paper presents a specific case, in other words, the situation in one of the 25 European countries. It goes over the more general aspects that have been presented just a moment ago by my colleague Marco Marandola on the impact for libraries of the implementation of the European Copyright Directive. I have decided to select two aspects. The first part of my paper reviews briefly the French legal background. In the second part, I stress the actions undertaken at present by libraries and documentation associations in France.

I.1. A choice: the use of comparative methodology to describe one's own national legal system.

Accessing legal information is a primary requirement for a variety of communities: ordinary citizens, scholars, and professionals. The dissemination of legal information contributes to the rule of law and to the overall ideals of democracy in a number of ways. Many are the benefits of accessing legal information, such as the awareness of the applicable rule of law, the creation of conditions necessary to the equality and fairness of a legal system, while improving the functioning of democratic institutions, the development and improvement of social and economic conditions.

The “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project aims at establishing standards for Italian legislation and tools to promote their adoption. In this paper an overview of these standards, including their latest version features, as well as a description of the tools developed by ITTIG-CNR for their implementation are presented.

The Open Access (OA) movement in Italy enjoys the active participation of single universities, research centres and supercomputing consortia. An overview of OA initiatives in Italy is followed by a more detailed presentation of PLEIADI-Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives, the Italian national platform to provide central access to digital content deposited in Italian Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi). The presentation will conclude with some considerations of the future prospects of OA in Italy.

The need for a more consistent and coherent European contract law is a current priority of the EC institutions. Despite decades of pointillistic legal harmonization, cross border transactions within the Internal market of the European Union continue to take place in the shadow of divergent procedural and substantive law rules, differing legal cultures and significant linguistic diversities. Whilst national contract law systems function more or less efficiently internally, it is their partial non-compatibility with other Member States’ private laws that provokes isolated distortions on the market. As a consequence, the European Commission has presented its ‘Common Frame of Reference’ research strategy aimed at fostering common contract law principles, model rules and uniform legal terminology, which, it is believed, will better facilitate commercial actors. The European Parliament has moved a step further by lending institutional credibility to the case for a European civil code. However, this clamour for codification of private laws – an idea premised on two formalisms, legal and economic – has in many respects overlooked the mechanics of modern commercial contracting in particular, the importance of contract drafting and the complex negotiations that lead to deals both domestically and cross border. This paper therefore provides an alternative assessment of the development of a European ius commune, or ‘common law’ of contract, and considers the urgency of improved means of legal information exchange in order to better facilitate the ongoing harmonization effort.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal (247-182) achieved a most extraordinary feat: he crossed both the Pyrenees Mountains and the Alps with an army of about 38.000 soldiers, 8.000 Cavalry and 37 elephants, aiming to win the Second Punic War by a bold invasion of Italy before the Romans were prepared. Even if his attempts to defeat the Roman legions failed in the end, common lore stills tells the story of the elephants crossing the Col du Mont Genevre in deep snow, setting thus an example of a near impossible achievement for generations to come.