Early law libraries in the U.S.A

[post to come, which will ultimately wind its way as a paragraph or two into my report on "The history of law libraries"]


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Research Notes:

The "Law Library Journal" (LLJ) is the official journal of the American Association of Law Libraries and was first published in 1908.

Our library has an online subscription to the journal via HeinOnline, a subscription based electronic resource, containing, among other things, a searchable index of hundreds of legal journals.

I plan to use "Hein" for extensive searching for any articles from any journal on law library history, but thought using the LLJ as a starting point would be ideal. I hope that by reading some specifically USA based articles from the LLJ I might just come across some general pointers to law library history in general.

I have noticed that articles in the Law Library Journal often include extensive bibliographies. So while I very much doubt that my final report will begin with talk of USA law library history, the LLJ is where I choose to start.

Ignoring my access to HeinOnline for the moment, I have noticed that the LLJ is publicly available on their website from 2000- as PDF files. However, these issues do not seem to be searchable from the site.

I noticed that all the PDF's sit under the same directory on the server though, so I will use a google advanced search and make use of its excellent PDF indexing ability.

I search for "law library" AND "history", limiting my result to only files of type "PDF". I limit the domain to: http://www.aallnet.org/products/ - where I know the LLJ PDF's are located. Trawling through the results, I make a note of any articles that seem interesting, these will be the beginnings of my research..

A Historical Sketch of the Montana State Law Library

Law Library Journal: The First Fifty Years

Irish Legal History: An Overview and Guide to the Sources

Not much of use in this, though:

"¶30All of the manuscripts that Binchy used in compiling his Corpus Iuris
Hibernici are either in Ireland (at Trinity, the Royal Irish Academy, and the
National Library of Ireland) or England (at the British Library and the Bodleian
in Oxford), with a lone manuscript in Copenhagen.50 At the beginning of the
Corpus Iuris Hibernici, Binchy included a list of the manuscripts he used and
where each is printed in the Corpus Iuris Hibernici.51 "

.. Might be worthwhile keeping in mind the role of libraries in general in preserving ancient books of law....

A Library Lover's Guide to

At the Heart of a Law School

AALL Centennial Feature The Victorian-Era Law Office: How to ...

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries

Milestones in Academic Law Libraries

" The Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, the earliest
known freestanding law school (1784), was supported by a library that still exists" (p10)

Our Century of Change:

I now quickly try my luck with the above search narrowed to the phrase "law library history"

Frederick C. Hicks: The Dean of Law Librarians*

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... Starting to feel the pointlessness of looking for "firsts" but need to work in the law library of congress somewhere of course:

"Congress established its Law Library in 1832, recognizing its need for ready access to reliable legal materials. The Law Library has grown over the years to become the world’s largest law library, with a collection of over 2.65 million volumes spanning the ages and covering virtually every jurisdiction in the world."
http://www.loc.gov/law/about/


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"The timeline is based on The University of Iowa Law Library: The First 139 Years, 1868 to 2007 (469KB PDF*) researched and written by Ellen Jones, Reference Librarian, at the University of Iowa Law Library."