Law

The SOAS Library’s collection of printed materials on African law is shelved on Level D. Classmarks begin with A346.

The Library’s policy is to acquire laws and law reports from all African countries except South Africa and Namibia where Roman-Dutch law applies (collected by the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies). The Library has national responsibility to collect legal material for specific regions/countries of Africa. They include:

• Africa (except Common Law & Roman Dutch jurisdictions)
• Botswana (customary law)
• Gambia
• Kenya
• Lesotho
• Malawi
• Nigeria
• Sierra Leone
• Somalia
• Sudan
• Swaziland (customary law)
• Tanzania
• Uganda
• Zambia

The following sites provide access to articles and guides on foreign, international and comparative law:

• Globalex
• LLRX

Databases

Oxford Reports on International Law 
Contains:

• African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights
• African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights
• International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• Special Court for Sierra Leone
• International law cases from various African domestic jurisdictions

LexisLibrary
Contains:

• Butterworths South African Constitutional Law Reports (1991 onwards)
• South Africa Tax Cases (1920-1998)
• Butterworths Statutes of South Africa (1912 onwards)

Africa Bibliography 
This is an authoritative guide to works in African studies published under the auspices of the International African Institute annually since 1984.

Africa Wide-NiPAD
Provides single point access to over 40 databases. Records come from books, periodical articles and pamphlets. Databases included are:

• IBISCUS (1970 to present) a development database on francophone Africa.
• The Southern African Database (Sardius) (1961-1997) database of 34,000+ annotated records.
• Index to South African Periodicals (1987-present) covers more than 440 South African periodicals.

AllAfrica.com
Contains an Africa related news archive; with content from over 100 media organizations.

Online Resources

Worldlii – Africa
Provides links to free websites containing general legal information on Africa and for each country within the region. Provides links to primary resources (case law, legislation and constitutions) for each country, where available.

AfricanLii: African Legal Information Institute
Full text case law and legislation from a number of African jurisdictions, along with legal news & blog posts. Links through to the Legal Information Institute websites for Kenya (KenyaLaw), Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia & Zimbabwe.

African Union

OHADA: Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa

African Human Rights Case Law Analyser
Multilingual, free-to-access collection of the human rights decisions of African supra-national mechanisms.

University of Minnesota: African Human Rights Resources

African Journals Online
Provides free access to full text articles of journals published in Africa. Covers a variety of subjects, not only law. Users must register to use the service.