2. Section of the English language (Great Britain and Ireland, English colonies, United States);
3. Section of Northern languages (Germany, Holland, Norway and Sweden, Russia, Austria-Hungary, German Switzerland, Servia, Bulgaria);
4. Section of Southern and Eastern languages (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Roumania, Turkey, Egypt, Spanish America, Brazil, and Japan).
Any member can, if he chooses, take part in the work of any one, or even of all the sections.
The Executive Council appoints annually, from the members of the Society, for each section, a President, two Vice-Presidents, and two Secretaries, all chosen on account of their standing and their qualifications.
Each section meets four times a year. The President at the opening of the meeting reads the list of laws to be noticed or to be translated, and then follows the distribution among the members of the section, whether present or not, to each one according to his special knowledge of the different branches of the law. One, for instance, devotes himself exclusively to questions of commercial law; another to labor questions; a third to maritime law; a fourth to the land laws and mortgages, and so forth. The union of persons of such varied capacities makes the division of labor easy, and the assignment of laws is quickly accomplished. When the distribution is made, the question arises whether all the laws assigned are worth being inserted or translated in extenso in the collections published by the Society. Therefore the texts of laws whose importance does not appear at first sight are made the subject of a special report at the next meeting by the member to whom the law has been provisionally assigned. Upon this report, the section votes whether it is a case for insertion or translation in full, or if, on the contrary, it is a case either for a short analysis or a mere mention.
The notice and the translation of the laws being provided for, the President of the section asks the members present for information as to the work on comparative law which they have undertaken or wish to undertake. This work consists of studies on matters of principle which may help the legislature to a solution of divers questions of the day, either in a given country or in all the principal civilized countries. These studies furnish the material for papers read by their authors at a general meeting.
The Society has for this purpose four general meetings a year,
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