The 5th edition of Halsbury’s Laws, has started to arrive, as reported on this blog in May. The transition from the 4th edition to the 5th is likely to take seven years.
The complete set will be 102 volumes, numbered straight through from 1–102, and a reorganisation of the content means that the new volumes will be far more than mere updated versions of the old ones. For this reason, we are currently shelving the 5th edition in a separate sequence following the 4th.
In particular, EU legal information will be included under many subject areas. Previously it was relegated to two separate volumes (which we chose to shelve in the European Community collections at Euro Comm 200 H196a). No longer!
To quote Halsbury’s Laws of England publisher, Simon Hetherington, “European law … was regarded as marginal and sometimes inconvenient in the early 1970s, but has come to be recognised as a source of law, equal or superior to national law which must be given full consideration in any affected area”.
The same applies to human rights law, which according to Hetherington “used to be a last resort. Now Human Rights are everywhere. Every court can consider the Human Rights Convention and every Bill before Parliament must state whether it is Convention-compliant.”
The 5th edition reflects this integration of EU and human rights law into English law enabling researchers to find full information in a single source.
Five volumes are already out on the shelves at Cw UK 510 H196a5:
Agency, Agricultural Land, Agricultural Production and Marketing (volume 1)
Financial Services and Institutions (volumes 48, 49 and 50)
Health Services (volume 54)
Do you know of a reason to keep the 4th edition superceded volumes? Are you keeping them? Our library was leaning toward discarding them. Thanks, Marianne