Foreign Legal Gazettes in the Law Library of Congress

"The Law Library of Congress has been collecting foreign official gazettes since the mid-nineteenth century and maintains one of the largest collections of these sources in the world. Official gazettes are primary sources of law published by national governments to disseminate new legislation, regulations, and decisions of governmental bodies. These publications may also contain other information including the text of international agreements, court decisions, official announcements, and government notices. For countries with civil law systems, the official gazette often serves as the sole source of the authoritative texts of laws until updated codes are published. In most countries, a law enters into force on the date of publication in the official gazette.

The Law Library’s gazette collection includes current, historical, and subnational jurisdictions. The two dashboards (desktop External and mobile External) represent an interactive, geographic index of the gazette collection owned by the Law Library of Congress. Users can explore the collection via an interactive map, or use the dropdown menus to search and filter results. Each row represents a different record in the catalog and users can see specific holdings information by clicking on the Library Catalog link for that record. The collection represented in the dashboard is content owned by the Law Library of Congress meaning the “digital” filter in the search will yield only content that has been digitized by the Library and not gazettes in commercial databases or free online collections. Please refer to the Law Library's Guide to Law Online for gazettes that are freely available online. The dashboards are updated regularly to edit records and add additional jurisdictions.

For Law Library of Congress legal gazette holdings, please refer to the Foreign Legal Gazette Guide External, and for legal gazettes that are freely available online, please refer to the Law Library's Guide to Law Online. If you have questions about the collection, or need research assistance, please Ask a Librarian..."
Foreign Legal Gazettes