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Law Libraries of the United States: Development and Growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2019

Igor I. Kavass
Igor I. Kavass*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 22706, U. S. A
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Extract

Law libraries occupy a unique and, in many respects, an ambiguous status in the United States. This status tends to set them apart in a variety of significant ways from the ubiquitous prototypes of general libraries and, with the possible exception of medical libraries, even from the different categories of specialized libraries in other academic or professional areas. The distinctiveness of law libraries in the United States, which is shared to a greater or lesser extent by many law libraries elsewhere in the world, and especially in countries possessing legal systems based on common law, cannot fully be appreciated by anyone who does not have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the nature and content of law as well as a working familiarity with the idiosyncratic uses of library materials by the legal profession in the exercise of judicial and legislative processes. Unfortunately, the incontro-vertible value of this self-evident requirement if frequently overlooked.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Law Libraries , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 25 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © International Association of Law Libraries 1975 

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References

1 William, Dix, The Financing of the Research Library, 35 College & Research Libraries 252 (July 1974).Google Scholar

2 American Association of Law Libraries. Directory of Law Libraries, 1974.Google Scholar

3 Roalfe, William R. The Libraries of the Legal Profession (a Study prepared for the Survey of the Legal Profession under the Auspices of American Bar Association). St. Paul, Minn., West, 1953, pp. 35–37.Google Scholar

4 Goodwin, Charles A. The Library of Congress. New York, Praeger, 1974, p. 17,Google Scholar

5 American Association of Law Libraries. Directory of Law Libraries, 1974.Google Scholar

6 Dawson, John P. The Oracles of the Law. Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan Law School, 1968, p. 505.Google Scholar

7 Lawrence M. Friedman's account on this subject in his History of American Law (New York, 1973, at 356–357) is so enlightening that it is worth repeating here: Publishers continued to spew forth an incredible profusion of legal materials: cases by the thousands, statutes in every state, every year or every other year; rulings, ordinances, and local customs on a scale that dwarfed the imagination. Tricks of research made this fabulous diversity somewhat more tractable. In the last quarter of the century, the West Publishing Company, of St. Paul, dissapproved, or distinguished. It began as gummed labels, for lawyers to paste in their personal or office copies of reports. Then it graduated to bound volumes. These red books, thick and thin, useful but unloved, became as familiar to lawyers as West's little keys.Google Scholar

See also Mayer, Martin. The Lawyers. New York, Harper & Row, 1967, pp. 417–450.Google Scholar

8 American Bar Association. Standards and Rules of Procedure. Approval of Law Schools. 1973; Association of American Law Schools. By-Laws and Executive Committee Regulations. 1972.Google Scholar

9 New Directions for Law Libraries: Alternatives for the Future (a Panel Discussion of the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries), 64 Law Library Journal 507–521 (1971).Google Scholar

10 E. g., Columbia University. Foudation for Research in Legal History. A History of the School of Law, Columbia University. 1955, p. 334.Google Scholar

11 American Bar Association. Standards and Rules of Procedure. Approval of Law Schools. 1973. Standard 604; Association of American Law Schools. By-Laws, sections 6–8 and 6–9 (1972). See also James F. Bailey and Mathew F. Dee, Law School Libraries: Survey Relating to Autonomy and Faculty Status, 67 Law Library Journal 3 (1974).Google Scholar

12 Roalfe, William R., op. cit., 15–17; Kurt Schwerin, Law Libraries and Foreign Law Collections in the United States, 11 International & Comparative Law Quarterly 537 (1962); American Association of Law Libraries. Directory of Law Libraries, 1974.Google Scholar

13 Wolfe, Bardie C. Jr., Inflation and Book Costs, 4 American Association of Lato Libraries Newsletter 10–11 (Sept. 1974). See also Price Index for 1974, 99 Library Journal 1775 (July 1974).Google Scholar

14 Cohen, Morris L., Legal Research in a Nutshell, 2d ed. St. Paul, Minn., West, 1971, p. 1.Google Scholar

15 Association of American Law Schools. By-Laws, sections 6–8, and Executive Comittee Regulations, regulation 8.1; cf. American Bar Association. Standards and Rules of Procedure. Approval of Law Schools. 1973. Standards 602 and 603.Google Scholar

16 For example, Association of American Law Schools Executive Committee Regulations require a law library to maintain a current set of English statutes (regulation 8.1 a. 3). Why not Irish statutes or the Italian codes? American Bar Association standards are even more curious by requiring a library to have Mews Digest (Standards and Rules of Procedure. Approval of Law Schools. Library Schedule B)!Google Scholar

16a Cf. Statement of Minimum Holdings for Law Libraries in England and Wales, 11 Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law 93 (1970); also 13 Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law 113 (1974).Google Scholar

17 See note 7Google Scholar

18 Truly, publishers of loose-leaf services should be compelled to pay hefty fees to law libraries for filing of replacement pages! As matters stand now, they have the burdensome work done by library staffs without incurring any cost for the publicity they receive through the use of loose-leaf services.Google Scholar

19 With profound apologies to Juris, Lexis, Aspen, et al.Google Scholar

20 Gilbert, Frank B., The Law Library, 1907 American Library Association Papers and Proceedings 92.Google Scholar

21 Actually, with the notable exception of commissioning William R. Roalfe to write about the libraries of the legal profession in the late 1940's and early 1950's (see note 3), lawyers tend to ignore law libraries in their surveys of legal profession, legal education, or the judicial system of the country. In four recent works of seminal importance in this area, all of them written by law professors, law libraries are not mentioned even once. See: Herbert L. Packer and Thomas Ehrlich. New Directions in Legal Education (a Report Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education). New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972. [This work includes also the text of the celebrated Carrington Report on legal education which served as the basis for the Packer-Thomas Report and actually prompted its writing. Adding injury to insult, the Carrington Report also omits to mention law libraries. For a critical review of both Reports, which does not mention law libraries either in spite of its emphasis on cost aspects of legal education, see A. Kenneth Pye, 1973 Duke Law Journal 899]; Edgar H. Schein. Professional Education: Some New Directions (a Report Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education). New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972; and Robert Stevens, Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Virginia Law Review 551–707 (1973). By their silence all of these reports and surveys imply that libraries, like toilets, appear to be taken for granted by law students and professors of law alike (whether this is true of other branches of the legal profession is not known to the author). On balance it is difficult to judge whether the complete oversight of law libraries is a good thing because it is a mark of their complete integration into the complex system of this country's legal institutions or a bad thing because it simply means that the legal profession does not care about libraries as long as the books can be borrowed without too much trouble and at a reasonably low cost.Google Scholar

In any event, absence of any reference to law libraries is symptomatic of all surveys of the legal profession. They are not even mentioned by Martin Mayer in his highly entertaining work about the legal profession (The Lawyers. New York, 1967)!Google Scholar

Cf. Peter del. Swords and Walwer, Frank K. The Costs and Resources of Legal Education: A Study in the Management of Educational Resources. New York, Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (distr. by Columbia University Press). 1974. Pp. 191–219.Google Scholar

22 In general, see Howell, Margaret A., A Bibliography of Bibliographies of Legal Material. Woodbridge, New Jersey Apellate Print. Co., 1969.Google Scholar

23 See note 4.Google Scholar

24 Brock, Christine A., Law Libraries and Librarians: A Revisionist History; or More than you ever Wanted to Know, 67 Law Library Journal 325 (1974).Google Scholar

25 Brock, Christine A., op. cit., at 347.Google Scholar

26 Generally on this subject, see Bailey, James F. and Dee, Mathew F., Law School Libraries: Survey Relating to Autonomy and Faculty Status, 67 Law Library Journal 3 (1974).Google Scholar

27 Roalfe, William R., op. cit., 427.Google Scholar

28 Association of American Law Schools. By-Laws, sections 6–9, and Executive Committee Regulations, regulation 8.2. (1972).Google Scholar

29 For further information about law library quarters, see Law Library Architecture: A Symposium, 61 Law Library Journal 59 (1968); and Ralph E. Ellsworth. Academic Library Buildings. Boulder, Colo., The Colorado Associated University Press, 1973, pp. 407–413. The magnificently designed work on the American Courthouse, sponsored jointly by the American Bar Association and the American Institute of Architects (published by the Institute of Continuing Legal Education at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1973), devotes only five of its 320 pages to the planning of court library quarters!Google Scholar

30 American Association of Law Libraries. Directory of Law Libraries, 1974.Google Scholar

31 American Bar Foundation. The 1971 Lawyers Statistical Report; Official Congressional Directory, 1974, pp. 725, 738, 742, 751–764; The Council of State Governments. The Book of State, 1974–75, p. 121.Google Scholar

See also Packer, Herbert L. and Ehrlich, Thomas, op. cit. (note 21), 2.Google Scholar

32 Lewis, Alfred J., 1973 Statistical Survey of Law School Libraries, 67 Law Library Journal 283 (1974).Google Scholar