Open Digital Resources for International Law Research Link to heading
Competing in the 2025 Jessup International Law Moot Court?
Over the past few years I’ve created a number of open digital resources for international legal research that will make your life easier and may give you an edge in the competition:
- Complete collection of International Court of Justice (ICJ) case law and dissenting/separate opinions in English and French (1946–2023)
- Complete collection of Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) case law and dissenting/separate opinions in English and French (Series A, B and A/B)
- Complete collection of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions in all six official UN languages (1946–2023)
- Useful selection of key treaties and important international legal documents in English
Why bother? Link to heading
No more spending hours downloading individual documents from the ICJ website! You can get all of the case law at once, as a single ZIP archive.
All collections are available as PDF files with helpful file names that will make searching for relevant documents much easier.
The ICJ, PCIJ and UNSC collections also come with TXT files and CSV files to run through your favorite search program and do quick full-text searches across the entire universe of these key UN organs.
Want to go really wild? You can also apply modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to these datasets. I’ve written a tutorial on how to do Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) analyses and create X-Ray Plots with the ICJ dataset.
You might even consider feeding the documents to an AI or whatever, but I have some critical thoughts on that.
And the best part? Link to heading
These digital resources are open access, you aren’t forced to share your personal data with me and you don’t have to attend a mandatory training session with people trying to sell you things. Yeah, this is a thing.