As a former academic law librarian who taught legal research and writing
and then became a public law librarian, I would like to answer Question # 3.
Yes, law librarians should teach legal research in law school. In fact,
an increasing number of public law librarians teach legal research to
self represented litigants. Some also teach in paralegal programs. Some
also teach advanced research courses for attorneys and judges. Law firm
librarians have a long history of teaching legal research to summer
clerks and young associates.
Now for the reasons they should: Librarians, in both their formal
education and their continuing education, study the theories of good
research and learn about the newest resources available to an extent
that is not done for law professors generally. Law students need to be
exposed to adequate search strategy, such as the use of the concepts of
precision and recall when doing online searches, or even their hard copy
equivalents, index method and topic method. Nowadays, trying to
understand the complexities of how different search engines operate only
makes the task more complicated and more necessary. Law professors who
find teaching legal research boring probably find it boring because they
have not been exposed to the theoretical elements of information
science. More likely, they find it intimidating in that the requirements
for maintaining currency are just as important in teaching legal
research as in teaching a substantive law class.
An aside: When I taught legal research and writing at a law school, I
was intrigued with the ways with which one could establish parallels
between research theories and writing theories. For instance, if you
were doing the traditional IRAC approach, the Issues and Rules would
require a broad approach to be sure of coverage, thus needing to utilize
more recall than precision, and writing the results as a broad induction
that would create your general premises for your deduction (Application
and Conclusion). But if you were trying to determine whether either of
two lines of cases would apply, then you needed to do a comparison and
contrast, and the more proper research would be based on facts, rather
than concepts, i.e., more precision rather than recall.
Now, some years later, after working with self represented litigants, it
became apparent to me that teaching legal research and writing in law
school is a small part of a much larger problem. Through their
substantive law classes, law students become versed in legal discourse,
and the semantic understanding required to do legal research is much
easier for them than for self represented litigants. Furthermore, the
accepted logic of legal argument is new to self represented litigants as
well. The accepted Aristotelian logic (the traditional form taught in
universities for centuries) is not native to people who have not been
formally trained in law or philosophy or science and math or to some
extent in the humanities. I am now studying the recent advances in
cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and even corpus studies to
help devise better ways to work with self represented litigants. With
the ever increasing numbers of self represented litigants, anyone
entering law practice in the next years will have to learn to face and
cope with them. Many law school faculties are opening up to
interdisciplinary studies, but they are still mostly far removed from
the practical application of such studies. Librarians, on the other
hand, have always been aware of other sources of information besides law
materials and in general are less reticent to apply techniques and
practices from other disciplines. (Need I mention our greater knowledge
of management theories, an example so common to us that we often don't
realize how much they are not a part of the discourse of law school
professors.) Anyway, as the justice system comes to grips with the new
realities, we need the deep involvement of law librarians at every
stage, including teaching legal research in law schools.
Charles R. Dyer
Among other things, I am:
Chair, Law Librarians Working Group, and Member, Research Working Group,
Self Represented Litigation Network
Marshall, Sibyl D wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> This question is primarily for academic law librarians and those who
> have been academic law librarians. I’m in a position, with two open
> reference positions in my department, to do some thinking about who
> teaches Legal Research, and how, and why. I would love to get input
> from other law librarians addressing these general issues:
>
> --Do law librarians at your school participate in formal teaching of
> Legal Research? If so, how are the classes structured (large sections,
> small sections, regular visits to Legal Writing classrooms, etc.)?
>
> --Do all law librarians teach, or just some? If just some, how is the
> distinction made? If you have multiple dual-degreed librarians, do all
> or just some of those folks teach Legal Research? If only some teach,
> is that because the librarians who don’t teach hate teaching, because
> the library thinks their talents are better focused elsewhere, there
> are enough other librarians to cover Legal Research, or some other reason?
>
> --Do you think law librarians should be teaching Legal Research in
> general? Is this an important part of our mission as librarians, or
> have librarians who teach Legal Research classes been co-opted by law
> faculty to teach a class they (the law faculty) find boring, without
> having to pay adjuncts?
>
> --Who makes the decision about whether Legal Research is taught by
> librarians? The librarians? The library director? The Dean of the
> college? The law faculty? Everyone working together?
>
> I realize this email may be calling for a dissertation in response –
> please feel free to answer just those questions you find personally
> compelling or interesting. I will summarize, and remove all
> identifying material, for the list.
>
> Thanks in advance. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this issue.
>
> Sibyl Marshall
>
> Head of Public Services
>
> Joel A. Katz Law Library
>
> University of Tennessee College of Law
>
> _smarshal@utk.edu_ <mailto:smarshal@utk.edu>
>
> (865)974-5906
>
-- Charles R. Dyer Charles R. Dyer Consulting 808 East Maple Street Bellingham, WA 98225-5225 360-738-6439 fax 360-738-6439 (call first) mobile 360-483-9446 charlesrdyer@clearwire.net www.charlesrdyer.com
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