The Education of Law Librarians in the U.K.

Extract

Law librarianship in the U.K., like all other types of librarianship elsewhere, is a service profession which reflects the activities of the body of users served. Lawyers in the common law system depend upon the written law, and must refer to the primary sources –statutes and cases– for authoritative statements in support of their arguments and actions. The absence of a formal legal code has long been one of the main characteristics of the U.K. legal system, and marks it off from many other systems, both of civil and common law, although the increasing predominance of statute law in the U.K. has resulted in more and more effectual codification of more and more specific areas of our law during this century. However, in the absence of a “master” code, or even an agreed set of principles underlying our law, U.K. lawyers, perhaps even more than others, are tied to the primary, written legal data base. Their education is concerned mainly with the handling of this data base - locating materials on specific subjects within it, and making classifications of legal subjects according to current trends. Superimposed upon the primary data base are many secondary sources (indexing, abstracting and summarizing services), with which the lawyer becomes acquainted, sometimes as a student, but more often as a practitioner. These are sweeping generalizations, but I hope that my main point will be adequately illustrated by them: that the role of legal information officer or law librarian (apart from purely custodial activities) closely reflects an important part of the role of a qualified lawyer; indeed one upon which his education lays great emphasis.