Useful links

I haven’t had much time lately so to keep something on offer I’d like to refer to some of the best links on my site. I am afraid some of the items on the blogroll are dead, but some aren’t.

For legal translation:

The Centre for German Legal Information calls itself ‘the gateway to German law in English’. I normally use it to find translations of German legislation into English. They aren’t always reliable. On top of this, I believe it is the policy to drop translations of legislation which is no longer current. But we translators often have to translate old statutes! Of course you can’t rely on those translations, but they are worth a look. Some translators refer to the official German site with ‘official’ translations of statutes. But those are all at cgerli anyway. And what is very good, you can click through to search the German names. Sites that expect you to guess the translated name are harder to navigate. Cgerli also has judgments and other materials.

The German Law Journal is also always worth a look. It is published regularly with articles on a variety of areas of German law.

Incidentally,the similar-sounding weblog German American Law Journal has a new post on the Leistungsschutzrecht or ancillary copyright, which will restrict the use of more than snippets online, with a link to an essay, Leistungsschutzrecht for German Print Media — An Ancillary Copyright Protection by Felix Gebhard explaining the bill in English. (I had an entry on the early stages of this last July: Ancillary copyright/Leistungsschutzrecht).

Some of my favourite law blogs from the UK are IPKat, which currently has a very timely report on the third Bundesgerichtshof decision on chocolate rabbits: Bunny dispute: Lindt vs Riegelein – BGH decides again…; ObiterJ, which is always splendid at explaining its topics, as is the UK Criminal Law Blog – the latter has an interesting piece on Who, or what, is a lawyer?

‘Lawyer’ as such is not a protected term. That means that anyone can call themselves that without fear of legal repercussions (it is a criminal offence to pretend to be a Solicitor or Barrister or someone otherwise qualified to conduct reserved activities) – although if you start charging money for it you may find yourself hit with a fraud charge. ‘Lawyer’ as a legal term is not defined anywhere in the Legal Services Act 2007 and therefore there are no restrictions on who can, and can’t, call themselves one.

There are other legal translation blogs around, in particular Juliette Scott’s frequently updated From Words to Deeds: translation & the law, which is a good source not only for conferences and other academic links.

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