Practitioners, academics, officials, and others will be glad to know that the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law has just published the new editions of the Practical Handbooks on the operation of the Service Convention and the Evidence Convention. I promise you no one has paid me to say: I use the Evidence Convention handbook all the time in my work, and I look forward to taking the new edition for a spin.

You can purchase the handbooks at the HCCH website, in either paper or electronic versions. It’s a bummer that the electronic versions are sold with DRM, which I find troublesome to use and glitchy. I get that every penny counts for the HCCH, but I have to imagine that the volume of handbooks sold is quite small, and that anyone who wants a hard copy is going to buy a hard copy. I think it would be good for the work of the HCCH if the digital versions were made available on its website for free, as is already the case with the Practical Handbook on the operation of the Apostille Convention and perhaps others. Perhaps the HCCH could make use of the Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license for this purpose. But listen to me kvetch.