Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Short And Troubled History Of The Printed State Administrative Codes And Why They Should Be Preserved, Kurt X. Metzmeier

Faculty Scholarship

This article makes a case for the historical importance of early state administrative codes and urges that law libraries preserve them for future researchers of state administrative law and policy.

W&L Law Library Annual Report 2022-2023, The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

Law Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Lisp – An Historical Reminiscence, Heather Simmons

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Reflections on the history of the Legal Information Services to the Public group of the American Association of Law Libraries.

Which Office Essentials Are Actually Essential? I Relocated To The Conference Room To Find Out!, Olivia R. Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Publications

Hello and Happy New Year from my office home office temporary office/library conference room! January always brings new opportunities and challenges, but over here in NYC those challenges began at the end of 2022 when on Christmas Day three pipes burst at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, causing significant flooding throughout the building including—where else—the law library. And my office. What’s the saying? New Year, new temporary workspace? Something about this feels vaguely early-pandemic to me.

Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

Secondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.

Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of …

Making The Case For Law Tech, Janet Kearney

Staff Publications

As the concept of a “practice-ready” attorney continues to grow in both law firms and law schools, law school libraries are meeting this need by offering programming related to legal technology. In this article, a law librarian from the United States discusses their successes and failures in creating and maintaining legal technology programming, a first step in a larger conversation on practice-ready law graduates. This article is based on a June 2021 presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians.

Democracy Requires Good Law Libraries – With Books, Franklin L. Runge

Library Scholarship

In this brief commentary, the author argues for the continued presence of a print collection in law libraries because (1) law libraries serve as a fail-safe for democracy, (2) inexperienced researchers achieve a greater understanding of how primary law is produced when exposed to print materials, and (3) there is still a high demand for print materials in scholarly endeavors.

Cultivating A Culture Of Mindfulness In The Law Library And Beyond, Heather Simmons

Presentations

In this presentation Heather J.E. Simmons, Associate Director for Instruction and Access Services, University of Georgia School of Law, Alexander Campbell King Law Library shared her experiences in creating a more mindful environment for students, including methods and resources she has used in her current and past positions.

On Being A New Voice, A New Everything, Geraldine R. Kalim

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

In this thoughtful post, member Geraldine Kalim reflects on being a new librarian, a new University of Georgia employee, a new/returning resident of the state of Georgia, and a new mother.

AALL's New Voices is for members to share insights on any aspect of law librarianship. Pieces in this series also appear on the Members Open Forum in addition to being published as part of the AALL monthly eNewsletter. Topics in the series include: starting a new role, insights on professional development, recommending a favorite resource, providing an overview of an AALL webinar, or your take on an article …

Academic Law Libraries And Scholarship: Communication, Publishing, And Ranking, Dana Neacsu, James Donovan

Law Faculty Publications

We argue that the increasing role of scholarly impact in determining a school’s status will provide a new opportunity for libraries to assume a critical institutional role behind its traditional support of scholarship and teaching. In practice, this increased role can evolve in a multitude of ways. Based on the data used here, a strong argument can be made in favor of each library taking charge of both their faculty scholarly impact and publication of its school’s journals. Based on the success story of Perma.cc, a good argument can be made in favor of creating a consortium supporting both these …

Maximizing Your Faculty's Scholarly Impact: Techniques To Increase Findability, Caroline L. Osborne, Carol A. Watson, Thomas J. Striepe

Caroline L. Osborne

Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Inspired by “‘A Day in My Law Library Life,’ Circa 1997,” this compilation collects descriptions of a day in the lives of law librarians in 2018. The descriptions provide a current snapshot and historical record of the law library profession, with similarities to, and differences from, the profession of 1997.

Ask A Director: Tackling Technology Competencies, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Question: What technology competencies do librarians and legal information professionals need to assist their organizations as they grapple with issues such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, etc.?

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

W&L Law Library Annual Report 2017-2018, The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

Law Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Access To Print, Access To Justice, Kimberly Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article examines the relationship between self-represented litigants and digital literacy and how this particularly vulnerable patron group stands to be harmed by the elimination of print materials from public law libraries. An examination of the literature and a survey help to shed light on this growing problem.

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

To Leave Or Not To Leave—Law Libraries And The Fdlp: A Decade Later, Is That Still The Question?, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article recounts the literature of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when some librarians, considering the changing form of government information, questioned whether the FDLP would survive in its existing form and recommended FDLP changes that would keep depository libraries engaged as the means of accessing digital government information evolved. In the later 2000s, articles and reports included comprehensive suggestions to the GPO, by and on behalf of library associations, of ways to make depository libraries stronger partners in the FDLP. Possibly in response to these calls for reform, the GPO polled depository libraries in its 2012 FDLP Forecast …

The Quintessential Law Library And Librarian In A Digital Era, Femi Cadmus

Femi Cadmus

Libraries, like most institutions and industries today, are faced with disruptive technologies that challenge their relevancy in a digital era. As a result, erstwhile notions and nostalgia associated with the quintessential library and librarian are changing rapidly. This is a compelling era to reimagine the library, retaining essential traditions alongside the new technologies, which facilitate the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and delivery of information. It is also an opportunity for libraries to respond creatively and innovatively to change. The quintessential law library and librarian cannot only survive but can also thrive in the digital era by continuing to demonstrate value through …

The Quintessential Law Library And Librarian In A Digital Era, Femi Cadmus

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Libraries, like most institutions and industries today, are faced with disruptive technologies that challenge their relevancy in a digital era. As a result, erstwhile notions and nostalgia associated with the quintessential library and librarian are changing rapidly.

This is a compelling era to reimagine the library, retaining essential traditions alongside the new technologies, which facilitate the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and delivery of information. It is also an opportunity for libraries to respond creatively and innovatively to change. The quintessential law library and librarian cannot only survive but can also thrive in the digital era by continuing to demonstrate value through …

Finding The Middle Ground In Collection Development: How Academic Law Libraries Can Shape Their Collections In Response To The Call For More Practice-Oriented Legal Education, Leslie A. Street, Amanda M. Runyon

Leslie Street

To examine how academic law libraries can respond to the call for more practice-oriented legal education, the authors compared trends in collection management decisions regarding secondary sources at academic and law firm libraries along with law firm librarians’ perceptions of law school legal research training of new associates.

The Future Of Law Libraries, Tina M. Brooks, Franklin L. Runge, Beau Steenken

Law Faculty Popular Media

Law libraries are filed with the rules that govern our society, thoughtful scholars, conscientious lawyers, some hard working students, and some procrastinating students. In the past, this required libraries to collect hardbound volumes and loose leafs. Today, the collection is beginning to give way to research platforms filed with those same, or similar, materials and then some; much of the primary legal documentation is even freely available on the web.

While the physical footprint of the library may be smaller as a result of this transition, the amount of legal information that researchers have access to has grown exponentially. We …

Bringing Law To The Community: Facilitating Access To Justice In Metropolitan Detroit, Beth Applebaum, Jan Bissett, Michelle Lalonde, Michael Samson, Virginia Thomas

Library Scholarly Publications

Wayne County is Michigan’s most populous county with 1.775 million residents and its county seat in Detroit. Unlike many other counties throughout the state, Wayne county does not provide a government-supported law library to serve its residents. The Arthur Neef Law Library which serves the Wayne State University Law School has a long-standing tradition of opening its doors to provide legal research services and resources to members of the community.

A fundamental mission of the Law Library, as well as the entire University, is “…meaningful engagement in its urban community”. Legal professionals, students and faculty from other educational institutions, and …

The Quintessential Law Library And Librarian In A Digital Era, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

Libraries, like most institutions and industries today, are faced with disruptive technologies that challenge their relevancy in a digital era. As a result, erstwhile notions and nostalgia associated with the quintessential library and librarian are changing rapidly. This is a compelling era to reimagine the library, retaining essential traditions alongside the new technologies, which facilitate the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and delivery of information. It is also an opportunity for libraries to respond creatively and innovatively to change. The quintessential law library and librarian cannot only survive but can also thrive in the digital era by continuing to demonstrate value through …

Using Infographics To Report Research Results, Ayyoub Ajmi

Faculty Works

This article uses infographics to share how cross-departmental collaboration and open communication between librarians and IT professionals can lead to successful implementation of technology initiatives in libraries, and how shared services bring access to specialized personnel whom most law libraries and law schools wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of law libraries managing institutional repositories for their law schools. In 2011, there were some 30 law schools with such repositories; now, 80 of the top 100 law schools have their own or participate in a university-wide repository wherein the law school has an identifiable, school-specific collection or community. This article discusses a survey of the of the top 101 law schools, in hopes of facilitating an understanding of the breadth of material to be found in law school institutional repositories.

Managing Disruptive Patron Behavior In Law Libraries: A Grey Paper, Nicole P. Dyszlewski, Kristen R. Moore, Genevieve B. Tung

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Nearly all law library staff has encountered or will encounter challenging patron behavior. In this article, the authors develop best practices based on their 2014 online survey of law library staff, follow-up correspondence with several survey respondents, and a review of case law and relevant literature within law librarianship and other fields.

Libraries And Legal Education, Jonathan Franklin

Librarians' Chapters in Books

Academic law libraries are in the midst of radical change, probably more so than at any time in the past 100 years. Two factors are converging that make business as usual no longer viable for academic law libraries: transition of legal resources from print to digital formats and economic changes in legal education.

Best Practices for Legal Education did not address the role of law libraries in the delivery of legal education. The changes facing law schools suggest now is the time to articulate how libraries can best contribute to the endeavor. How can best practices for law libraries be …

Library Director As Educator: Analysis Two, Case Analysis And Commentary, Sally H. Wise

Books and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.