For the source of legal rules, there are two kinds of resources. First is "case", which is sentenced and documented by a court. Second is "law", which has some categories : statute, regulation, order, ordinance, and treaty. This paper introduces these Japanese legal information resources and describes some problems in the process of dissemination of legal information.

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There are some difficulties peculiar to conducting research in statutes. For instance, since the law constitutes a hierarchical system, research techniques vary depending upon which level the researcher will have to dig into and will vary according to the topic. Additionally, the researcher should be careful to note whether the particular statutes being searched have been revised or repealed. Besides, each statute book or database has some diferences in the editing and way of searching, researchers ought to keep these pecularities in mind when choosing the right sources. The purpose of this article is to classify sources of statutes according to their editorial characteristics and to show effective ways of searching by making a use of their indexes and so forth.

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When you search judicial precedent, there are basically two approaches you can take : One is from given data, and the other is from keyword(s). The given data includes the data of judicial decision, docket number, the court name, and the name of the law(s) applied to the case. It is significant, therefore, to learn how these data are given and quoted in actual legal documents. The structure of procedent is another important thing you had better keep in mind when you search legal cases, so its illustration is follwed. In the last part, effective ways of searching along wiht how to use legal case books and basic reference tools of printed materials, online databases, and Internet sites are broadly introduced.

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Here we show how to get legal information by using law materials held at The Center for Foreign Law Materials, Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo. Understanding how to use fundamental law materials like code books and case books is the first step and the best way to get legal information about these countries. So we introduce these law materials in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany and show how to use them.

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Since 1883 when it was first issued, Official Gazette has been issued everyday, except on holidays of administrative agencies, and it is a daily newspaper having the history of 118 years in 2001. Normally, Official Gazette is said to have three roles of "promulgation of laws and regulations", "public relations" and "official notice" and has played these roles while modifying its form and contents corresponding to the change of times. Centering around "promulgation of laws and regulations" which is one of these roles, this report introduces the outline of concept etc. for Official Gazette in the future such as history of and kinds of booklet for Official Gazette, construction of pages and reading service of Official Gazette by means of the Internet.

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Polymer Compound Term Free Keyword (PFK) was introduced into PATOLIS to decrease complexity and to reduce retrieval noise of a polymer search. We examined the reliability of PFK by coparing a polymer search using PFK with a polymer search using conventional keyword. Each of the polymer searchs were carried out on about ten different kinds of polymers such as polythylene. It turns out that PFK was useful only for general-purpose polymers and that the degree of retrieval leakage depends on the type of polymer originating from the indexing rule of PFK. It is therefore necessary to fully understand the indexing rule and the features of PFK in order to obtain a sufficient retrieval result in PATOLIS.

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[in Japanese]

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