School Notes: Yale Law School
May/June 2018

Law Library provides access to legal research for developing countries

The International Labor Organization (ILO) and a group of academic partners that includes the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School have launched a program to provide free or inexpensive access to legal information and training to promote research in low and middle-income countries and help strengthen the rule of law. The program, known as GOALI (Global Online Access to Legal Information), will give users in more than 115 developing countries access to a wide range of essential legal information for their work and studies that they would not normally be able to obtain.

Some of the key topics covered in the program are international law, human rights, humanitarian law, and labor law—areas that can help strengthen legal frameworks and institutions in many developing countries. The program will also contribute to UN Sustainable Development Goal #16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. GOALI has been developed with the participation of publishers, UN organizations, and academics as part of Research4Life, a partnership to boost evidence-based research, health care, policymaking, and global justice.

The program was launched at ILO headquarters in Geneva, together with representatives from the Brill Nijhoff academic publishing company, Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, the Cornell Law School Library, and the International Training Centre of the ILO.  The Lillian Goldman Law Library, for its part, is “adding hundreds of legal journals and e-books daily, along with associated metadata to ensure the content is easily discoverable by GOALI users,” explains law librarian Teresa Miguel-Stearns.