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This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joy, and cutteth griefs in half. - Francis Bacon

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It is a new mailing list designed to help legal practioners and scholars, as well as businessmen and other interested people share information concerning the new Russian (plus CIS and U.S.-Russian) Laws and Regulations.

This mailing list lives under the auspices of the jointly developed (by citizens from US and Russia) information service called "Friends and Partners" and its specialized part "Russian Legal Server".

The purpose of this list? Basically, we feel that it will provide the best mechanism for communicating with each other about the development an practices of law to: (1) promote development of the Rule Of Law in Russia; (2) help educate citizens of the United States and Russia (and the other states of the former Soviet Union) about our legal systems; (3) provide a common base of information about issues related to the topic; and (4) provide a common 'meeting place' where folks can find and communicate with each other.

To promote participation of Russian lawyers that may be vital for the whole thing, we encourage people to write in either English or Russian (transliterated or KOI8). Language is still a major problem for many Russians. Nevertheless, given the experience of other mailing lists, it is expected that for the first time the principal correspondence will be in English and later we may come up with automated translation service.

We hope is that this service will promote mutual understanding and facilitate international business. It emerges upon the work already being accomplished by our governments and by the various groups, centers, and institutes who have been working for so many years towards this same goal of cooperation and friendship. It also hopes to build upon and contribute to the already excellent listservers in existence on the Internet dealing with U.S.-Russian-East European issues.

Perhaps the only difference from other efforts is the intention to use the World Wide Web on the Internet as the method of communicating information. We have developed a specialized part of the "Friends and Partners" Web - "Russian Legal Server".

The World Wide Web was chosen because of its ability to handle mixed media (text, graphics, audio, etc.), the excellent graphic and non-graphic browsers available for free on the Internet, and its ability to 'integrate'information from all of the best Internet-based tools and utilities -- Listservers, Gophers, WAIS databases, FTP archives, etc.

We welcome your contributions not only to the mailing list, but to the Russian Legal Server as well. The 'end product' -- an evolving and continually changing information resource -- should be useful to many and will hopefully help bridge the gap of understanding that exists between our nations. It will hopefully also demonstrate the potential for good that exists with this wonderfully chaotic, global resource we call the Internet.

• To send a message for everyone on the list, e-mail it to:

  [email protected]

• To take yourself off the list, send a message with the words:

  unsubscribe aibec

  to the following address:

  [email protected]

If you wish to visit, the following uniform resource locator (URL) will allow you to connect to the World Wide Web server:

http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/fplegal/main.html

Please send us your comments, criticisms, suggestions (and offers of help! :-) ). Also, please, remember to send your SUBSCRIBE and UNSUBSCRIBE send your messages to [email protected] !

"Russian Legal Server" Crew

Ilya Nikiforov	Mark Sanor
St.Petersburg, Russia [email protected]	Cleveland, Ohio, USA [email protected]