The Ginger (Law) Librarian

The most recent edition of The Law Library Journal was released this week, and there's an interesting article by Ursula Gorham & Paul Jaeger called The Law School Library or the Library at the Law School? How Lessons from Other Types of Libraries Can Inform the Evolution of the Academic Law Library in the Digital Age . The authors note that  [f]or much of their history, law school libraries were routinely characterized as the heart of their law schools . “The law library has always been a core part of the law school with the primary mission to serve the legal research needs of law school faculty and students.” Within the last 60 years, however, we've seen a huge transition from a focus on our print collections to, more recently, a focus on our services . The importance of the academic law library has long been reflected by its prominent mention within the ABA’s Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools. The 1960s marked the beginning of the golden ag

When we are in the midst of being bombarded with the various microaggressions that are commonplace as a law librarian in the law school hierarchy , we might lose sight of why we do this. Especially considering this: The ABA has been “over” law libraries for years now. After completing the last accreditation inspection team visit I went on, I swore I would never do another one. Back in the day, the librarian member of those teams mattered because the ABA’s Standards on law libraries had some teeth. Now, after years of watering down those Standards, law schools often tilt toward US News rankings as the end all/be all and as we know, library matters have an infinitesimal impact on USN’s calculations. I think the fact that no one (outside of our own professional association) is mentioning libraries as a part of the future of legal education is (sadly) not accidental. -  Steve D. Hinckley But we know, innately, that legal research is the foundation . It's complex and creative and h

We all love a good law movie, right? Well, we're all in luck because lawyer and law librarian Ted Tjaden created a database of Law-Related Movies . The 172 law-related movies on this site have been arbitrarily limited to those that contain one or more of the following features: interesting courtroom scenes, portrayal of lawyers, themes of justice or liberty, or discussion of substantive legal issues.  The pages have been divided into the following topics: "A to Z" List of Law-Related Movies Movies Organized by Substantive Law Subject Comedies Court Martial Movies Courtroom Dramas Documentaries Inspirational Lawyer Movies Prison-Related Movies Top 10 These movies are great for entertainment purposes or may be useful for instruction, particularly the "movies organized by substantive law subject." Law libraries might also use these titles to host movie nights. Or, like some of my wonderful colleagues at Texas Tech, to create a movie series at a

We know that link rot is a large problem in modern Supreme Court decisions . According to a ... study , 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work. The problem is that those citations allow lawyers and scholars to find, understand and assess the court’s evidence and reasoning. For most of the Supreme Court’s history, its citations have been to static, permanent sources, typically books. Since 1996 justices have cited materials found on the Internet 555 times, the study found. Those citations are very often ephemeral. As noted in 2013 by the NYTimes , the Supreme Court has taken modest steps to address the matter. Its opinions note the date each site was last visited, and its clerk keeps a hard copy of those materials. SCOTUS needs to do better and find a reliable electronic archival tool that will capture screenshots of the web resources and host them for easy access in perpetuity. We have Perma.cc , but the very busy Justices haven't taken the ti

In the seven years that I've been a law librarian, ABA reporting for law libraries has made a fairly dramatic shift from measuring inputs to measuring outputs. Chapter 6 of the Standards, along with most of the Standards, now places an emphasis on outcomes instead of inputs. For libraries, that means an analysis of how well the patrons of a library are being served rather than how much we spend for various activities, and much of the information now required comes from the sabbatical site visits rather than from annual information on expenditures or staff. One of my colleagues recently pointed out that during an ABA site visit, law libraries must highlight how our patrons are being served. As the physical collections shrink, we need to focus more on customer service.   This same colleague opined that, on the horizon, law school administrator's will look at this [measuring outputs only] as another opportunity to slash library budgets particularly in regard to print. Outsid

The clustering of women in legal writing, in clinics, in academic support, and in librarian positions means that a disproportionate number of women law teachers in the United States hold jobs with significantly lower pay, with more limited voting rights at faculty meetings, and with less support for many things that tenure-line faculty take for granted (sabbaticals, support for scholarship, travel, etc.). Starting today (International Women’s Day) and continuing until April 4th (Equal Pay Day), the Legal Writing Institute is collecting signatures on a statement advocating for all law professors to enjoy equal status – or “full citizenship” – on their faculties, regardless of the subject matter they teach. LWI Policy Statement on Full Citizenship for Law Faculty (Adopted March 2015): The LWI Board has adopted a policy statement on principles of equality for law faculty that will guide its future planning and decisions. This statement explicitly signals our commitment to the polic

We've caught wind that the ABA Standards Review Committee will be proposing to the ABA Council that Section III of the annual questionnaire (dealing with libraries) be eliminated, along with many other parts of the questionnaire not seeking data required by the Standards. This proposal will be considered by the Council at its July meeting for implementation in the 2017 questionnaire. Issues involving the questionnaires are not subject to hearings as are changes to the Standards--they just go directly from the Committee to the Council. The information regarding faculty members (director or teaching) in the library will continue to be collected in other parts of the questionnaire, and there will be a line for total library expenditures with other law school expenditures. This does not bode well for the compilations of law library statistics that we rely on to work with law school administrators. As mentioned in the announcement, the annual compilation of library statistics has be

After starting a new position, it's always a good idea to evaluate the programming at your new institution and possibly bring experiences and programming initiatives along from your previous institution. At my last institution, I was a reference librarian, and I also taught a full-length course on scholarly writing. When I arrived at my new institution, I noticed a hole in the curriculum when it came to instructing the students on best practices for scholarly writing.  Because many of our students take part in seminar courses or the journal write-on competitions each year, it seemed natural to start a scholarly writing initiative at my new institution.  Starting Fall 2016, two new scholarly writing programs were introduced by the law library. The first was a Scribes Student Legal Writing Society group. As the Executive Director of Scribes, I was tasked with starting local chapters of this group at the various law schools. The first year would be a pilot year with two