Bibliotheque Cujas : 22/09/06

I spent a very good morning at the Bibliotheque Cujas, the central law library for a variety of different Universities in Paris and the largest and most extensive law collection in France. The Bibliotheque Cujas has a collection of material of great value to scholars and academics although the library also currently caters for higher level undergraduates. This will change with the opening of a new centralised law library nearby, which will then be used by all University Law faculties in Paris (I think I'm correct in saying this). One huge student law library sounded like rather a good idea. The Bibliotheque Cujas faces similar problems to us, with students coming to them without background legal research skills, and needing to be taught from scratch by the librarians.

I was given a tour of the inner workings of the Library, the reading rooms, and the way the Library makes its huge collection available to its clients. As with most very large libraries the shelves are not open; instead it uses a retrieval board by which allocated numbers light up when the selected choices have been brought into the reading rooms.

Legislative process

I quizzed the specialist legislation librarian about how to use Legifrance, as she has central responsibility for it, and also how the legislative process happens in France. I'll outline it briefly here for anyone who might be interested:

France has a centralised government i.e. no state based laws to deal with although there are provincial bureaucratic rulings that operate at the local level. These are physically available from the Mairie (Town Hall) of each region.

Lois

The procedure in the Parlement (Assemblee Nationale et Senat) for bringing into being new laws is similar to but different from ours i.e. the Petite Loi is introduced in the lower house (generally, I can't say whether this is always the case) but the toing and froing between lower and upper houses is more extensive and open to more change, and a piece of introduced legislation will move backwards and forwards between the Houses up to five times.

Extrinsic materials

Questions can be put to the Assemblee by an MP regarding a Loi in its different incarnations on the way towards achieving the force of law, and these will be answered in print (spoken but reported I think) and the answers will form part of what we would think of as extrinsic material. Travaux preparatoire contain the government's explanatory material relating to the legislation, in some ways like our explanatory memoranda, but more open to interpolation of new paragraphs of explanation.

Commencement

Commencement of an Act happens by published 'Declaration',(I have to double check this as it's from memory) and the date of the Declaration is the date of commencement of the Act. I asked if there were some automatic period of time by which a Declaration must be published, but the answer strangely was no.

Code Civile

The Code Civile, which I had misunderstood as codifying all French civil laws, in fact sits alongside certain major pieces of legislation. These Acts of parliament are not fully consolidated, although the Civil Code is. The part of the law which is codified functions in much the same way as the US Codes, but it seems that the part of their legislative process relating to other Acts more resembles the UK process, which I've never fully understood and no-one has ever been able to explain to me properly. These Acts are not consolidated.

Legifrance

Legifrance goes back in time in fulltext for only a number of years; prior to that it provides only the number title and description of legislative material, but the fulltext of these can be requested from the Bibliotheque Cujas. It provides detailed fulltext material with all changes, declarations and travaux preparatoire available from its site. It is of course free, although the Bibliotheque Cujas reference librarians also use LexisNexis.fr (mais naturellement).

Reference services

The Library is very happy to receive questions from anywhere, provided of course there's been a proper attention paid to resolving the question first before presenting it to them. Naturally, I carry around in my head several unresolved reference queries which have frustrated me over the course of time, so I left them with one from 2004. What legislation in France protects the privacy of any person from being photographed without their consent?

Their reference librarian took a quick stab at it, no luck. She's going to email me!

Situé

Finally, the Library is in a rather wonderful part of Paris – next to the Sorbonne, and set just off that huge circular Place surrounding the Pantheon. It's within walking distance of anywhere that matters i.e. St Germain des Pres, heaps of Indie cinemas, Notre Dame de Paris. The librarians are lucky enough to have quite civilised ideas of working conditions i.e. they can turn off their own fluorescent lights (I noticed most people did), and they can open their windows! No battery hen psychosis in the making there.

Dejeuner

I had a very good North African lunch with my two colleagues who had been at the Russian conference. They were very welcoming and hospitable.

Then I went for quite a long walk down to the Seine and across the Ile St Louis to see an exhibition of Italian photographers at the Maison Europeene de Photographie. The sun was shining, the air calm and smooth; it was a day for us all to enjoy.