Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Passion Projects in Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute to Igor Kavass and His Personal Mission to Acquire and Organize U.S. International Agreements

Passion Projects in Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute to Igor Kavass and His Personal Mission to Acquire and Organize U.S. International Agreements. 114 Law Library Journal 431 [2022-18]  “In 1973, Kavass and his friend, Adolf Sprudzs, a law librarian at the University of Chicago, created the UST Cumulative Index, 1950–1970, which organized more than 5,000 U.S. international agreements published in U.S.T. between 1950 and 1970…Again, recognizing opportunity, in 1982 Kavass and Sprudzs created a companion index to their UST Cumulative Index. This companion index, which was also published with Hein and updated through the U.S. Treaty Indexing Service, was called the Current Treaty Index…In addition to launching the Current Treaty Index in 1982, Kavass and Sprudzs also began their Guide to the United States Treaties in Force in 1982…This source was also an index published by Hein, but instead of indexing primary sources for the text of U.S. international agreements, the Guide indexed a U.S. government source called the United States Treaties in Force (T.I.F.), which lists, but does not provide the text to, U.S. international agreements in force in any given year…Interestingly, in addition to indexing U.S. international agreements cited in T.I.F., Kavass and Sprudzs’s Guide took the additional step of including, as addenda to each edition, references to international agreements that had been listed in T.I.F. but that had not yet been published in any official government source.. Kavass and Sprudzs referred to these U.S. international agreements as “unnumbered treaties and agreements” since they lacked both T.I.A.S. and U.S.T. citations, but yet were in force according to T.I.F…In 1986, Kavass and Sprudzs created the Unpublished and Unnumbered Treaties Index, which was a separate index for those unpublished and unnumbered treaties they discovered through their research… They published a few annual updates to this source before eventually merging its contents and updates into the Current Treaty Index…” [via Lyonette Louis-Jacques | Foreign and International Law Librarian & Lecturer in Law The University of Chicago Law School | D’Angelo Law Library]

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.