See our international law research guides: Public International Law, United Nations, Council of Europe, European Union and Private International Law.
All the subscription databases mentioned on this page are available via the Law Databases page.
TIP: to trace a specific treaty, look up a treaty's UNTS citation, find the date of signature and so on, use the FLARE Index to Treaties.
HeinOnline has a vast collection of recent and historical treaties, the World Treaty Library; it brings together the UN Treaty Series, League of Nations Treaty Series, treaties involving the US, the contents of the Consolidated Treaty Series and more; it also includes Hein's World Treaty Index.
HeinOnline's UN Law Collection includes the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS), the League of Nations Treaty Series (LNTS) and many pre-20th century treaties.
Lexis+® UK has treaties involving the United States.
Westlaw International has treaties involving the United States, EU treaties, and treaties concerning tax, arbitration and the environment.
IBFD Online has tax treaties.
TradeLawGuide has WTO and GATT treaties.
Many large treaty collections are available free of charge online, on websites including:-
WordLII's International Treaties Collection
Council of Europe, WIPO, UNCTAD and other intergovernmental organisations' websites
UK Treaties Online and other national sites (many are listed on Eagle-i, tagged with the name of the jurisdiction and the word 'treaties')
Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL) has cases from international courts and tribunals, UN committees and municipal (domestic) courts. IALS Library's subscription covers five ORIL modules: International Law in Domestic Courts, International Courts of General Jurisdiction, International Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law and International Investment Claims.
Westlaw International Materials has cases from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Iran-US Claims Tribunal and the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia (all under 'Administrative Materials').
Westlaw UK has European Human Rights Reports, which publishes important cases from the European Court of Human Rights.
Lexis+® UK has a collection of cases from the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the commercial series Butterworths Human Rights Cases; it also has ICJ cases and International Tax Law Reports.
HeinOnline has Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) cases (in the Foreign and International Law Resources Database); ICJ cases (in the United Nations Law Collection); and cases from the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (in the World Trials Library).
See also: - individual series such as International Law Reports and ICSID Reports, which are available online via the Catalogue.
- free resources such as WorldLII's International Courts and Tribunals Collection, the ICJ website and other court/tribunal sites.
Westlaw International Materials (IM) has a collection called 'International Arbitration Materials' (see link on IM homepage) which includes awards by the London Court of International Arbitration, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the International Chamber of Commerce, the WTO/GATT and other bodies. Westlaw IM also has Iran-US Claims Tribunal Decisions (see 'International Materials Index', or use search facility).
TradeLawGuide is a database of WTO and GATT dispute cases, with commentary and related material, a treaty article citator and a case citator.
Lexis+® UK has WTO/GATT cases.
HeinOnline has Reports of International Arbitral Awards, the UN series covering disputes between states from 1798 onwards. (RIAA is also on the UN website).
Oxford Reports on International Law has an International Investment Claims module, covering cases from arbitral bodies including ICSID, the ICC International Court of Arbitration, the London Court of International Arbitration and the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
See also: online versions of individual series, such as ICSID Reports, International Law Reports and Investment Arbitration Reporter; these titles can be accessed via the Library Catalogue,
If you are looking for a specific journal article:
Look up the journal on the IALS Library Catalogue. If it is available online, there should be a link to the appropriate database.
TIP: article titles are not listed on the catalogue, only journal titles.
If you are looking for any articles on a particular topic:
Encore can be used to do a basic search for journal articles on international law, but it does not search all of our e-resources, and it only searches Westlaw UK on site. For a wide-ranging literature search, try the following databases (via the Law Databases page):
Westlaw UK, Journals collection: about twenty-five full-text international/European law journals + abstracts from about 170 more.
Westlaw International Materials, World Journals collection: full-text journals published in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, including over 120 international law titles.
Index to Legal Periodicals: indexes international (and other) law journals published in the US and elsewhere.
HeinOnline: see Law Journal Library, Foreign & International Law Resources Database, Harvard Research in International Law and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (despite its name, this index covers many international law journals and yearbooks).
Lexis+® UK: the International tab has more than ninety international law journals and the Content tab has about twenty-five.
Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law (Recueil des cours): large collection of papers given at the prestigious summer courses held each year at the Hague Academy of International Law.
Encore Discovery can be used to do a basic search within our e-book holdings, but for technical reasons it does not cover everything that we have. Individual e-books are listed on the classic Library Catalogue, but the classic catalogue does not search within e-books, it only searches their titles, subject headings and (where available) contents lists.
The following e-book collections (accessible via the IALS Law Databases page) include a substantial number of titles focusing on international law:
Cambridge Core Books Online
Brill Online
Oxford Legal Research Library
Oxford Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law
Elgaronline
Hart e-books collection
HeinOnline's Legal Classics
eBook Central
See also: The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (OUP), which includes more than 2,000 scholarly essays on international law topics, with bibliographies (access via Library Catalogue).