INADMISSIBLE

REBUILDING HAITI, ONE LAW BOOK AT A TIME

As Haiti marks the first anniversary of a devastating earthquake, George Washington University Law School’s law library is one of 13 around the world sponsoring a project to rebuild Haiti’s law libraries. The Hawaii-based Law Library Microform Consortium, a nonprofit cooperative dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents on film, is the project coordinator. The Library of Congress and Columbia Law School, which has a very large Haitian collection, are the two main anchors for the project. Calling the project idea “fantastic,” Associate Dean Scott Pagel, director of George Washington’s law library, said his institution has one of the finest historical French law collections in the country, containing, for example, a commercial code published in Paris in 1844 that includes a section on Haiti. “In some ways, we are filling in the gaps in their materials,” Pagel said. Other participating law libraries include Cornell, Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law libraries in Hamburg and Heidelberg, Germany. — Marcia Coyle