Yale Law Library Biennial Report 2020 - 2022

Yale Law School

lillian goldman law library in memory of Sol Goldman

Lillian Goldman Law Library

127 Wall Street New Haven, CT library.law.yale.edu

Edited by: Femi Cadmus

Contributors

Julian Aiken Jordan Jefferson Kathryn James Cate Kellett

Julie Krishnaswami Caitlyn Lam Scott Matheson

Lucie Olejnikova Fred Shapiro Dawn Smith

Mike Vanderheijden Yale Law School Office of Public Affairs

Photography: Gregg Chase Harold Shapiro Shana Jackson

Design

Gregg Chase, Yale Printing and Publishing Services

Printing

Yale Printing and Publishing Services Cover

Watercolor painting of the Lillian Goldman Law Library Class of 1964 Reading Room by Cheryl Chalmers ©2022

From the Law Librarian

It is wonderful to be back! Exactly ten years after leaving the Lillian Goldman Law Library, I returned to a warm and enthusiastic welcome in the summer of 2021 (read more on page 27 of this report). Notwithstanding the fact that my arrival occurred in the middle of a global pandemic, it has truly felt great to return to a well-beloved library.

Since the publication of our last annual report, the Lillian Goldman Law Library has bravely faced and continues to adapt to a context redefined by a global pandemic. You will read in this report how our prodigious staff collectively rallied to maintain continuity of excellent services to our users. We did not stop acquiring and processing materials in print as well as digital formats, thus preserving the ability of faculty and students to conduct research and scholarship. Our research, reference, and instructional services successfully migrated to virtual platforms. Library outreach such as our Faculty Book Talk Series continued in virtual and hybrid spaces. Undeterred by the pandemic, we even hosted our first successful Symposium on Citation and the Law in spring 2021 with over 500 registrants joining us virtually from all over the world. Another first for us was a well-attended virtual pre-release film screening to the law school community of My Name is Pauli Murray in fall 2021.

In spring 2020, we were saddened by the death of Dan Wade, Curator for Foreign and International Law who had spent over three decades at Yale building our foreign and international law collections. We bade farewell in spring 2021, to Mike Widener our esteemed and highly regarded Rare Book Librarian of 15 years. We were excited to welcome a new Rare Book Librarian, Kathryn James, and new research librarians, Nicholas Mignanelli and Trezlen Drake to the library. You can read the full details about these transitions in our report. As our library emerges from a global pandemic, we are creatively delivering impactful services in non-traditional and novel ways. Our users have come to anticipate a full suite of library services in physical and virtual spaces, and we are making every effort to respond to these new expectations. Our bold and somewhat audacious vision remains to be the best academic law library in the world.

Femi Cadmus Law Librarian and Professor of Law

Instruction and Reference Services in a Pandemic

The Pandemic Begins: Spring 2020

“Have a restful, safe, and healthy Spring Break. See you in a week!”

During the week of March 2, 2020, we adjourned our classes without knowing that this was the last time we would see the students. But only a few days later, the instruction librarians gathered in a classroom to learn the basics of teaching via Zoom. Then, we left the building to work at home with laptops and headsets “but only for a week or so until the Coronavirus can be contained.” Or so we thought. Meanwhile, Spring Recess was extended to two weeks, giving instructors additional time to learn how to teach virtually—no easy task for most of us. Most of us were new to Zoom and struggled with the learning curve, but we worked together, meeting regularly from our new home offices to practice.

We continued teaching the semester’s courses beginning “in person” but finishing over Zoom. As the weeks passed, the Law School closed, and the University mandated that all students stay at home indefinitely. It was also announced that classes would be no credit/no credit, so we revised our syllabi. Similarly, we began the process that would continue over the subsequent academic year: learning to teach over Zoom. The new mode of instruction required working with our students to create Zoom norms and remodeling class exercises to work virtually. Likewise, we were now required to hold office hours and meet with students in Zoom rooms. Some of us even experimented with providing live feedback and comments over Zoom. In addition to research courses, instructional librarians continued to teach workshops and provide guest lectures virtually.

The Pandemic Continues: 2020–21 Academic Year

As a new academic year began, the Law School classrooms remained empty, and we welcomed our new and returning students remotely. Each instructional librarian introduced a group of new students to reading and briefing cases as part of the Orientation Program. taught by different librarians over the first few weeks of school. In addition, Julie Graves Krishnaswami continued coordinating the research instruction for the twelve First Term Small Groups, with each instructional librarian teaching their Small Group remotely.

The 2020–21 academic year presented some new challenges: students were Zooming in on all their courses and activities from around the globe, and the realities of the pandemic and the loss of the “in-person” law school experience set in. Nevertheless, the Instructional Team worked together to share strategies, technological insights, and community. For example, we discussed virtual teaching pedagogy and classroom policies in the Instructional Unit’s regular meetings, referred to as the Textbook Committee. Similarly, we strategized how we would contend with Zoom fatigue among students and manage requests for accommodations.

We continued to teach research classes without skipping a beat, and students filled nearly all the virtual seats. The following classes enrolled students remotely during the academic year:

fall courses

• Advanced Legal Research (Krishnaswami)

spring courses

• Advanced Legal Research Section 1 (Krishnaswami)

• Advanced Legal Research Section 2 (Nann)

• Research Methods in American Legal History (Nann)

• Specialized Legal Research in Corporate Law (Eiseman and Vanderheijden)

• Specialized Legal Research in Foreign and International Law (Ma and Olejnikova)

The Return to Campus and the Classroom: 2021–22 Academic Year

As roughly the entire YLS community was vaccinated, all welcomed the return to classroom instruction! Everyone wore a mask, and students spread out in large rooms, sometimes even meeting outside. We began the academic year by teaching the Introduction to Case Briefing for the First-Year students and the Fundamentals of Legal Research for the graduate students. Similarly, we continued introducing the First Year students to legal research in their Small Groups. In addition, we taught the following courses and workshops:

fall courses

• Advanced Legal Research (Krishnaswami)

spring courses

• Advanced Legal Research Section 1 (Krishnaswami and Mignanelli)

• Advanced Legal Research Section 2, (Nann)

• Research Methods in American Law, (Mignanelli)

• Specialized Legal Research in Foreign and International Law (Olejnikova and Ma).

The Virtual Reference Desk: Reference Assistance in COVID times

The rapid spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 and the imminent shut-down of the Sterling Law Building presented the Research and Instructional Services Department with the question: How will students and faculty access research assistance, at their point of need—which in the coming weeks could be anywhere in the world? Although historically, 40–45% of the questions we field from patrons arrive through our personal email boxes, traditional, walk-up reference at a physical reference desk still accounted for 35–40% of the questions we received. That’s not an insignificant number of questions that could potentially go unanswered. With the law school and the library closed, how could we best replicate the accessible, just-in-time nature of a physical reference desk?

In the years leading up to COVID, members of the department had individually, experimented with and adopted the use of video conferencing technologies to occasionally meet with students when in-person meetings were impractical. For this reason, when the physical law school shut down in March of 2020, we were prepared to adapt these same video conferencing tools to meet with YLS researchers who would soon be in various lockdowns around the world.

To approximate an online version of the law library’s reference desk, we created a shared Zoom account monitored by members of the RIS team 40 hours a week. During these hours researchers could drop into our “virtual reference room” (affectionately dubbed the VRROOM) to discuss questions they had about research and library resources. The questions ranged from inquiries about access to online versions of materials and short demonstrations of databases to in-depth strategy sessions for clinic cases, course work, and scholarship.

Jordan Jefferson, Associate Director for Research and Instruction in reference consultation with student.

The pandemic forced our team to reevaluate and change a number of workflows, and we took this opportunity to explore and develop new technologies to support our work. Circulation of materials during the pandemic was challenging, due to both access and safety issues. There were long periods when library staff, students, and faculty could not enter the law school building, and even after access was restored, we needed to find ways to circulate material while keeping physical contact to a minimum. To make our books available, we partnered with Yale University Library for home mailing and book pick-ups. Additionally, we relied far more heavily than usual on e-books and scanning materials for distribution. There was a precipitous dip in materials circulated at the height of the pandemic and then a gradual uptick in 2021 and 2022 as we emerged from the pandemic.

law materials circulated

2019–2020: 28,115

2020–2021: 6,802

2021–2022: 16,262

The library launched a new Open Reserves room, employing RFID and self-check technology to allow students to check out course reserves and other popular materials without staff contact, a form of contactless delivery. We also had the good fortune to host two excellent library Fellows, Rashida Crawford and Bamise Onabanjo who worked on the digital repository and faculty research support respectively. During the pandemic, because of COVID restrictions, all of their work had to be done remotely, but it was wonderful to see them growing into professional roles within the library, and our team learned as much from them as they did from us.

eYLS Scholarship Repository Migrates to an Open-Source Platform

The law library maintained an open access repository of faculty scholarship, on the bePress platform for over a decade. When BePress was acquired by Elsevier in 2017, we (like many other libraries) started to explore options to move to an open-source platform. In fall 2021 we moved to an open-source platform which now enables us to retain control over our data and contain rising costs. The migration of data utilizing DSpace repository software was completed in December 2021.

Julian Aiken, Associate Director for Faculty and Access Services handing book to student.

Foreign and International Law Collections

We remained committed to our foreign and international law collection development efforts during the pandemic, with a continual focus on about twenty jurisdictions (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, China, Taiwan, Japan, Koreas, Singapore and Malaysia, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Switzerland), and a set of subjects. We actively collect in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Although not as vigorously, we collect monographs in English for any jurisdiction in the world. Notable acquisitions included South China Morning Post (SCMP.com); The China Wire; and Westlaw UK.

Lucie Olejnikova spearheaded efforts to continue building our foreign and international law collection by coordinating with our team of foreign law selectors and streamlining processes with our Technical Services colleagues to adapt to needs of remote work. We continued our collaborative collection efforts, participating in Northeast Foreign Law Librarians Cooperative Group (NEFLLCG) meetings and hosted the inaugural virtual Zoom (NEFLLCG) meeting in June 2020.

The two-credit ten-week course Research Methods in Foreign and International Law was offered remotely in spring 2021 and 2022, and both offerings enjoyed healthy enrollments. We embraced the flexibility of remote instruction and invited out-of-state and overseas speakers. Susan Goard, Reference Librarian at the Dag Hammarskjold Library at the UN Headquarters, presented on the United Nations structure and researching its UN documentation. In spring 2021, we also welcomed Iris Mueller, the thematic legal adviser in the ICRC legal division, Ismaël Raboud, the ICRC Reference Librarian for the collections related to both the Diplomatic and International Conferences, and Sonia Crenn, the Reference Librarian in charge of International Humanitarian Law at the ICRC who together delivered a lecture introducing the foundation of International Humanitarian Law, drafting history of Geneva Conventions including the treaties database and digitized travaux, as well as how to research state practice implementing International Humanitarian Law.

Strengthening our Collections in a Pandemic

Collection development is one of the foundations underlying our services to faculty, students, and other researchers. It is a unique aspect of librarianship, particularly at a major research library such as we aspire to be. Collection development for us includes preserving publications and manuscripts that may be as much as 800 years old, addressing the needs of scholars and students stretching far into the future, collecting resources from around the world, and supporting research and scholarship of the national and global communities.

During the pandemic era, our University was far less open to visiting researchers than usual, and our primary patrons—the faculty and students of Yale Law School—faced unprecedented difficulties in their education and research. Thus a significant part of the Law Library’s efforts needed to focus on developing special methods of making our collections accessible to the primary patrons and acquiring online study aids helpful to students. One aspect of this enhanced service in 2021–22 was that we initiated a subscription to the Aspen Learning Library, which consists of multiple types of popular study materials.

Another new subscription this past year was to Intelligize, a tool for streamlining corporate filings research. We also acquired access to Westlaw UK, a basic resource for British legal research. The University Library added to its holdings a license to Bloomberg.com, which includes articles not available through Bloomberg Law and which has been much desired by our faculty and students. We also negotiated a deal with the Wolters Kluwer company for an unprecedentedly large discount on their electronic and print products.

In furtherance of our library goal of contributing to the public good, we have increased our attention to social justice issues in our collecting of rare and non-rare publications.

Social justice issues have also been prominent in our exhibits, as described elsewhere in this Annual Report. Looking forward, Kathryn James and Fred Shapiro have worked prodigiously on a major exhibit on the Founders of Yale Law School and Slavery, which will open in the Fall 2022 and is expected to be of significant importance to the Law School.

In the past, the Law Library has not acquired archival collections of papers by Yale Law School faculty or prominent external individuals. We have provided funding for an archivist processing law-related papers for the University’s Manuscripts and Archives department, but this was a term position that is drawing to an end. We are now investigating whether there are sustainable possibilities for our launching a small Law Library archival program as part of our mission of preserving and providing access to historical resources relating to YLS and the larger legal and social-justice communities.

In terms of our organization and processes for collection development, we inaugurated (with substantial impetus from Lucie Olejnikova) regular meetings of the Associate Director for Collections and our selectors. The selectors (Lucie, John Nann, Evelyn Ma, Cate Kellett, Trezlen Drake, and Kathryn James) play a crucial role in the collection development operation.

Library Publications

One example of publications emanating from the Law Library is that we have for over a decade partnered with the Cengage Gale publishing company to create the Making of Modern Law digital legal history resources. This is one of the most important legal-history digitization projects in the world. During this last year, we lent microfilm reels of records and briefs from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to Gale as part of a MOML module of federal Courts of Appeals briefs. Another library-related publication is the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference. This is a book series published by Yale University Press and featuring outstanding scholarship by our own faculty and other authors. It has been described by the Press as one of the “crown jewels” in their prestigious publishing program. The 14th book in the series, Power and Justice in Medieval England by Joshua C. Tate, was published in May 2022, and the 15th book, Oscar Wilde on Trial by Joseph Bristow, is forthcoming in October.

Rare Book Outreach in a Pandemic

Our new Rare Book Librarian, Kathryn James, formerly Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library took the reins in June 2021 following the retirement of Mike Widener. Kathryn undeterred by the challenges posed by the pandemic planned a host of successful outreach programs during the academic year.

The Rare Book Collection was integrated into the fall 2021 “American Legal History” course taught by Professor John Witt. Materials from the rare and general collections were carefully selected to accompany the class. Over the course of the semester, items covered a broad range, as represented by the discussion “Of Masters & Servants,” in Seth Perkins Staples’ copy of the lectures by Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield Law School, the introduction to the United States Supreme Court offered by Peter W. Barnes, Marshall, the Courthouse Mouse: A Tail of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998), from the Morris Cohen Juvenile Jurisprudence collection. The Rare Book Collection was introduced to many other Law School and Yale College classes over the year, including “Research Methods in United States Law,”(Mignanelli) “Research Methods in Foreign & International Law,” (Olejnikova and Ma) “History of the Common Law,”(Langbein) “Roman Law”, and “Law and History.” (Lenski) and “Law and History” (De).

Some highlights from the Rare Book Collection’s exhibition and outreach program include a fall 2021 exhibit, ‘Fresher, More Recent Tragedies’: Media and the Memory of the Attica Prison Uprising, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the September 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The exhibit drew in particular on the Rare Book Collection’s holdings for Jeremy Bentham, alongside those for Charles Dickens, Gary Trudeau, Michel Foucault, and others.

In spring 2022, an exhibition on Constance Baker Motley was organized with Shana Jackson and Jordan Jefferson in the Law Library and with representatives of the Yale African American Affinity Group, the Working Women’s Network, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, and the New Haven Club, Inc.-NANBWC. In a display of unique archival materials owned by Constance Royster, Motley’s niece, the Yale Law Library commemorated Judge Motley’s career from her time as an honors student at Hillhouse High School in New Haven through the Bill to posthumously award a congressional gold medal to Constance Baker Motley, introduced by Senator Blumenthal in January 2022.

Joel Motley and Connie Royster viewing the Constance Baker Motley: Lady of the Law exhibit with Rare Book Librarian, Kathryn James.

Exhibits, Book Talks, and Other Events

EXHIBITS

“Fresher, More Recent Tragedies:” Media and the Memory of the Attica Prison Uprising by Kathryn James (Fall 2021)

Showcasing the Harold D. Lasswell Collection by Evelyn Ma (Fall 2021)

Law of Holiday Displays by Nicholas Mignanelli (Fall 2021)

SPEAKER SERIES

The library hosted a series of virtual and hybrid speakers in 2022

Kent Olson, Head of Research (retired), Arthur Morris Law Library, University of Virginia, All Things Research, June 2022

Constance Baker Motley: Lady of the Law by Kathryn James (Spring 2022)

Ukraine and The Crime of Aggression by Lucie Olejnikova and Evelyn Ma (Spring/ Summer 2022)

Wang Chong-hui and The History of US-China Relations by Jingjian Wu (JSD Candidate) (Spring 2020)

Katie Kitamura, discussed her book Intimacies, a virtual Book Club event hosted by the Lillian Goldman Law Library, May 2022

Jane Bahnson, Head of Research, Goodson Law Library at Duke, The Makings of an Open Access Legal Research Book, March 2022

Customary and Religious Law by Eduardo Colon-Semidey (Winter 2019–2020)

The Largest Witch Hunt in World History: The Basque Witch Trials (1609–1614) by Dan Wade (Fall 2019)

Blessed Barriers: Highlighting Foreign Language Materials in Law by Lucie Olejnikova and Evelyn Ma (Summer 2019)

Randi Flaherty, Head of Special Collections, Arthur Morris Law Library, University of Virginia The Slavery Research Project at the University of Virginia Law School, March 2022

Kathy Fletcher, University of New Hampshire Law Library, “Casebooks, Bias, and Information Literacy— Do Law Librarians Have a Duty?” Virtual, February 2022

Yale Law School Virtual Symposium on Citation and the Law

The Lillian Goldman Law Library hosted its very first symposium which focused on Citation and the Law on April 22 and 23, 2021. Due to pandemic restrictions, the symposium was hosted in a virtual format only with over 500 registered attendees from all over the world. The symposium highlighted the scholarship of law librarians and faculty interested in issues ranging from the US News and World Reports rankings for scholarly productivity, to link rot, to empirical research in the use of citations, and more. The symposium commenced with a welcome address by Yale Law School Dean, Heather Gerken. Keynote speaker Fred Shapiro, Associate Law Librarian for Collections and Special Projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, set the stage with his paper “The Most-Cited Legal Scholars Revisited” published in 2021 in the University of Chicago Law Review. Scholarly papers from more than 20 authors were subsequently published in a 2022 book by the William S. Hein Company, The Role of Citation in the Law: A Yale Law School Symposium, AALL Publications Series No. 86, edited by Michael Chiorazzi.

Name is Pauli Murray— Virtual Pre-Release Screening Event

On September 22, 2021, the Lillian Goldman Law Library hosted a wellattended virtual pre-release screening and panel discussion of “My Name is Pauli Murray,” a new Amazon Studios documentary about the life and ideas of the Pauli Murray ’65 JSD, a non-binary Black lawyer, poet, and Episcopal priest who influenced both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. The discussion featured Academy Award®-nominated director/ producer and filmmaker Betsy West and Talleah Bridges McMahon, awardwinning director and producer in conversation with Professor Gerald Torres. The virtual event was attended by over one hundred Yale Law students and alumni. Co-sponsored by the Latinx Law Students Association, the Outlaws, the Yale Black Law Students Association, and the Yale Creative Society.

My

BOOK TALKS

Bruce Ackerman ’67 Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law. September 4, 2019

Jerry L. Mashaw. Reasoned Administration and Democratic Legitimacy: How Administrative Law Supports Democratic Government. Commentary by Nicholas Parrillo ’04 September 16, 2019.

Paul DeForest Hicks. The Litchfield Law School: Guiding the New Nation. Commentary by Mike Widener September 26, 2019.

Daniel Markovits ’00. The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. Commentary by Samuel Moyn. October 15, 2019.

Justin Driver. The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, The Supreme Court and the Battle for the American Mind. October 29, 2019.

Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson. Democracy and Dysfunction. Commentary by Justin Driver, Jacob Hacker ’00, Robert Post ’77 and Francesca Procaccini. November 6, 2019.

Anthony Kronman ’75 The Assault on American Excellence November 11, 2019.

Linda Greenhouse ’78, Melissa Murray ’02, Douglas NeJaime, Katherine Shaw, Reva Siegel ’86 Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories. Moderated by Emily Bazelon ’00. January 22, 2020.

Daniel C. Esty ’86 A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future Commentary by Douglas Kysar. February 5, 2020.

Michael J. Graetz. The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It. Commentary by Ian Shapiro. February 18, 2020.

Courtney McAllister Change Management for Library Technologists. Commentary by Scott Matheson. February 20, 2020.

Christina Rodriguez ’00

The President and Immigration Law. Commentary by Harold Hongju Koh October 26, 2020.

Susan Rose-Ackerman ’70. Democracy and Executive Power: Policymaking Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany and France Commentary by Ricard Parrillo. March 2, 2022.

Paul Kahn ’77 and ’80. Testimony. Commentary by Linda Greenhouse ’78. March 30, 2022.

Elizabeth Hinton America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellions Since the 1960’s. Commentary by Monica Bell ’09. April 21, 2022.

Digital Collections Services

In early 2020, the Technology & Digital Initiatives Department was reimagined as Digital Collections Services. This change narrowed our focus in order to better support an integrated, sustainable, and responsive digital program, building on the foundation and services we developed in prior years.

When the pandemic hit, the sudden shift to remote work, staffing changes, and a hiring freeze would force an adjustment of priorities. Faced with uncertainty as we self-isolated and connected in an unfamiliar Zoom environment, we began shuffling priorities to plan for projects that could be completed remotely and optimistically plan for projects that would resume with the return to on-site. In such a hybrid environment, the two years that follow presented a number of opportunities alongside the challenges.

Digitizing Collections

Just prior to the pandemic, we completed digitization of several historical publications of Yale Law School. This includes early printings of the Bulletin (1869–2001), Directory (1960–1998), and Facebook (1998–2011) of Yale Law School; a series of student publications successively published as the Yale law mirror (1898–1900), The Yale Shingle (1893–1912), and The Yale Law Reporter (1946–1970); and the complete 16-volume, Yale Law Library Publications series which documents the history of the law school and its law library, in addition to annual publications of the Library Readers’ Manual and Guides between 1954 and 2007.

We added four digitized volumes of Litchfield Law School student notebooks, which includes three volumes of

manuscript notes taken by Henry Cowles Booth between 1817 and 1818 and one volume of notes taken by Russell Jarvis in 1813. We also completed digitization of seven manuscript volumes of Italian municipal statutes, which includes “Appointments of various officials by the two doges Leonardo Loredano and Andrea Gritti (1503–1530)” and the Constitutio pro Consiliariis Reipublicas Venetiarium (1569).

Over the course of the year, we completed the second phase of a multi-year collaboration with Law School ITS, digitizing over 1,200 at-risk, in-house recorded media. Treasures found in this collection ranges from early audio recordings of the YLS Film Society, founded by Robert Bookman ’72 and active from 1969–1970, to recordings of Robert M. Cover’s

American Legal History course, in addition to decades of sponsored lecture series and other law school events.

In 2021, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, which funded the initial project to digitize Litchfield student notebooks held by the Yale Law Library and the Litchfield Historical Society, gifted us with another grant to digitize Litchfield notebooks held at other institutions. Through a multi-institution collaboration coordinated by Caitlyn Lam and Whitney Bagnall, former Special Collections Librarian at Columbia Law School, the Cromwell grant enabled us to digitize student notebooks from the archives of Wesleyan University Olin Memorial Library, Columbia University Diamond Law Library, Boston College Law Library, George Washington University Jacob Burns Law Library, and Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. When our time on site was limited by the pandemic, outsourcing material to digitization vendors enabled us to digitize 37 volumes of student notebooks, among which includes the notes of Litchfield students, Edward Fenwick Tattnall, William Samuel Johnson, Abraham Bruyn Hasbrouck, James Booth, Ulysses Selden, and Roger Sherman Skinner.

Upon resuming on site work, we installed and implemented a Digital Transitions imaging platform for cultural heritage material. Now equipped with some of the most advanced imaging tools for in-house digitization, we are able to expeditiously and effectively digitize collections material that meet FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) guidelines for digitizing cultural heritage materials. Using this new equipment, we completed digitization of a collection of early 20th century legal postcards donated by Lois Montbertrand ’85, fragile issues of the Advocate, a Yale Law student-run newspaper (1969–1970), donated by Hugh J. Moore, Jr. ’69, and posters and photographs of the Yale Law Film Society (1969–1970).

New Digital Collections System

At the start of the pandemic, the University Libraries recognized that digital access to collection materials is paramount in a remote academic environment. The University Library prioritized their plans to build and deploy a new Digital Collections platform to replace our legacy FindIt platform. The new Digital Collections system integrates next-generation image viewing technologies developed under the open standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Two embedded IIIF-compliant viewers, Universal Viewer and Mirador, provide different dynamic features and functionality

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for viewing, navigating, and comparison of high-resolution digital content, while incorporating rich metadata display. This new Digital Collections system is now home to the Law Library’s growing digitized collections. Enhanced access to mage-based resources will enable us to better unlock content contained in legal books, manuscripts, archival documents, and other special collections material, for use in research and scholarship in new and innovative ways.

Flickr

The Yale Law Library Flickr site was created by former Rare Book Librarian, Mike Widener. Established in 2007, the Flickr library currently contains more than 8,000 digitized images from the Law Library Rare Book collection. In collaboration with our Cataloging department and with the help of library staff, we extracted collection metadata from Flickr and reconciled each image with catalog records for the original objects. This will enable us to better support the collection over time, while enhancing access and discovery of our special collections’ material in a more integrated environment. The data reconciliation work was coordinated by our Technical Services Assistant, Joanne McCarthy, with special help from the library’s book monitors, Peter Bloomfield, John Healy, and Philip Liscio. In a normal year, our book monitors greet library patrons and visitors on site. During quarantine, this project provided them with remote work, and in turn, their flexibility, adeptness, and willingness to help, provided us with the timely support we needed.

Web Archiving

In 2022, we launched our first web-archiving initiative. Through the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service, we launched the Law Library’s official web archive collection. This effort was initiated, in part, in response to an immediate need to archive the Legal Affairs website. Legal Affairs was the first general interest magazine about the law, launched by Lincoln Caplan in 2002, under the auspices of Yale Law School. Although Legal Affairs became a non-profit independent organization, upon its dissolution nearly two decades later, Mr. Caplan gifted the organization’s assets, including the website and magazine content, to the Yale Law School. The archived website can now be found in the Law Library’s Archive-It collection and digitized copies of the print magazine will soon be available through our Digital Collections library.

In the future, we envision our web archives collection will provide access to curated, at-risk or vulnerable web content with legal themes and topics of special interest to the Yale Law School community and broader legal community. It will also serve as an archive of the Law School’s websites and affiliated sites. In addition, it archives the Law Library’s legacy website, as the website is slated for a major redesign in mid to late 2022.

Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law Database

In collaboration with Lucie Olejnikova, Head of Foreign and International Law, we created the Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law Database. The data in this database was collected and analyzed by Professor Oona Hathaway, et al. in the course of writing the article Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law, 104 Cornell L. Rev. 1593 (2019), and it includes decisions by international courts and tribunals (International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Special Court for Sierra Leone, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals) addressing aiding and abetting liability in international criminal law. The database is available through the library’s Documents Collection Center.

As we emerge from the pandemic and look back on the years that markedly changed our lives and the way we work, we have gained new perspective on the opportunities and challenges presented by a digital environment. We can no longer take our access to physical space for granted. The pandemic provided real-world examples of the ways in which our digital space is central to our mission, as much as a traditional, physical library. Behind the scenes, our digital collections environment is a vast network of integrated systems, digital objects metadata, different file types, interoperability standards, and dispersed locations, through which we can virtually connect people from all over the world to resources that were previously siloed. In many ways, our unit’s transition to remote work was a natural one, as we typically operate in this virtual space. However, remote or hybrid work means that we are increasingly reliant on remote tools to communicate, collaborate, and build human connection. We are still in the process of finding new balance between both worlds, while uncovering new opportunities along the way.

Technical Services: Acquiring and Making Materials Discoverable in a Pandemic

Technical services continued to acquire, process, and make the library’s collection discoverable for users. The team developed new ways of working during the pandemic and have refined and retained some of the most useful of those tactics. Continued flexibility of the staff has made the department function well.

Acquisitions and Serials

In spring of 2020, materials continued to be delivered to the library after staff had transitioned to remote work. Shipments that were paused temporarily had to be resumed as warehouses filled up and overseas shipping logistics required deliveries. We had fortuitously made changes to online workflows in the prior year which meant that staff working remotely could continue to order and pay invoices. At a point, staff had to return to the building to receive materials to make room for increasing shipments. As Staff returned on-site during summer 2020, we spread out in the mostly empty and unoccupied library, careful to maintain pandemic distancing protocols. Work then began in earnest to tackle a daunting backlog of materials. Over the summer and fall of 2020, on-site days were increased to expedite processing. The full return to our new on-site schedules coincided with the completion of the backlog —about 18 months after we dispersed in March of 2020 due to the pandemic.

Cataloging

The Cataloging Department similarly adapted to remote work by changing workflows, prioritizing digital materials, and transporting books home. To work around Covid related materials handling challenges, the cataloging team loosened some of their traditional cataloging norms, for example, cataloging titles without the physical object present. The entire team completed weekly online trainings or readings and continued their regular professional development work, such as conference presentations and publication of articles. The cataloging team also completed additional database cleanup projects and metadata enhancements. For example, Cataloging Assistant, Jonathan Lasky added subject headings to and upgraded thousands of records lacking subject access. The whole team reviewed four thousand item records with location “LSF” but with no record of being accessioned by the Library Shelving Facility. Metadata Librarian Yuksel Serindag assessed hundreds of records for rare materials in Latin containing older spelling conventions and added additional titles with modern or alternative spellings to facilitate searching. Data show that the cataloging department was just as productive, if not more, while working remotely. The work may have changed, but the team’s output remained outstanding.

Materials Added to the Collection and Processed

Materials processing activity stayed fairly consistent during the pandemic, with a downward trend in serials added and the most noticeable dip in binding due to restrictions on physical materials handling during the pandemic.

Valerie Wellons, Acquisitions Assistant processing materials.

Professional Activities

JASON EISEMAN

CAP Tips: Building & Using Case Datasets with Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project, AALL Spectrum (May/June 2020), with Tina Ching and Shawn Nevers.

CATE KELLETT

AALL liaison to the ALA’s Subject Analysis Committee and GODORT Cataloging Committee liaison to CC:DA. Secretary/Treasurer of CT GODORT, Chair of the TS-SIS Heads of Cataloging Roundtable.

JULIE GRAVES KRISHNASWAMI

The Bluebook Confronts Slavery, AALL Annual Meeting, July 2021. Insight into the Mental Health of Our Students: Leading the Way to Open Communication, Access to Information, and Institutional Support, AALL Annual Meeting, July 2021. Critical Legal Research: The Next Wave (A Panel Honoring Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic) Open Source Program, AALS Annual Meeting, January 2021; Dismantling Library Collection Bias, “Dismantling Bias,” LLNE & SNELLA Virtual Conference, October 2020; A Peek Behind the Curtain of the U.S. Code, AALL Annual Meeting, Washington DC, July 2019; and Research Instruction at Yale Law School, “Dismantling the Separate But Equal Paradigm: Integrating Legal Research and Writing into the Law School Curriculum,” Penn State Dickinson Law, in conjunction with the Legal Writing Institute, December 2, 2019. Using Principles of Critical Information Theory to Teach Progressive Approaches to Regulatory Research, 101 B.U. L. Rev. Online 38 (2021); Tackling Administrative Law Research: Ten Tips to Help You Prepare

Your Course or Workshop (with Mari Cheney & Jason Sowards), 23 AALL Spectrum 22–26 (2019). Recipient of the Law Library Journal Article of the Year Award, 2021 for The Shadow Code: Statutory Notes in the United States Code (with Shawn G. Nevers), 112 Law Library Journal 213 (2020)

CAITLYN LAM

Yale University Library E-Variant Records Task Force, Web Archiving Working Group, and Metadata for Digital Assets Advisory Group. Lillian Goldman Law Library Anti-Racism Committee, Chair Events and Programs Planning Subcommittee

EVELYN MA

Book Review, Introduction to Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics and the Law edited by Jorge L. Contreras, et al. (Edward Elgar, 2022), Int’l. J. Legal Inf. (forthcoming). Book Review, Research Handbook on Asian Financial Law edited by Douglas W. Arner, et al. (Edward Elgar, 2019), 48 Intl. J. Legal Inf. 137 (2020). GlobaLex: UPDATE: Researching the Trading Systems in the Asian-Pacific Region - APEC, ASEAN, TPP, CPTPP, RCEP and their Members (2020)

SCOTT MATHESON

PEGI project on preservation of electronic government information, AALL Representative on the Government Publishing Office’s Task Force on an All-digital Depository Library Program. Presenter, Innovative Users Group virtual meeting. Member, ALA Government Documents Roundtable.

NICHOLAS MIGNANELLI

Article “A Matter for Interpretation: An Inquiry into Confederate Symbolism and the Florida State Flag,” 10 U. Miami Race & Soc. Just. L. Rev. 115 (2020), was awarded the Gherardi Davis Prize by the

Flag Research Center in 2022. The Gherardi Davis Prize is presented for a significant contribution to vexillological research. This same article is now cited in Sutherland on Statutes and Statutory Construction. In 2021, Nicholas was named to the Fastcase 50, an annual awards program that honors the top innovators in the legal field. Earlier that year, he organized “Critical Legal Research: The Next Wave,” a panel honoring Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic held at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting and published as a symposium issue of the Boston University Law Review Online. In 2020 and 2019, Nicholas won the American Association of Law Libraries/LexisNexis Call for Papers (New Members Division) for his articles “Legal Research and Its Discontents: A Bibliographic Essay on Critical Approaches to Legal Research” and “Critical Legal Research: Who Needs It?,” respectively.

JOHN NANN Speaker, “The Bluebook Version 21–an Update with the Editors,” AALL Annual Meeting July 19, 2021. Awarded, Post-Graduate Certificate in Laws, University of London, July 2020.

LUCIE OLEJNIKOVA Recipient 2021 FCIL-SIS Daniel L. Wade Outstanding Service Award for outstanding contributions to the FCIL Special Interest Section. She was also recognized as the Editor of GlobaLex for her editorial work by the International Legal Research Interest Group section of the American Society of International Law that awarded the 2020 Jus Gentium Award to GlobaLex. Her publications included, Using a Quasi-Experimental Design to Compare the Effectiveness of Live and Recorded Lectures in Becoming a

Practitioner-Researcher: A Practical Guide for Information Professionals, ACRL, (Lee Ann Fullington, Brandon K. West, & Frans Albarillo eds. 2020) with Jane Bahnson.

YUKSEL SERINDAG

Member, Global Online Access to Legal Information Committee, Research4Life Content Strategy and Policy Committee, and Antiracism Committee at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

FRED SHAPIRO

The New Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press, 2021). “The Most-Cited Legal Scholars Revisited,” 88 University of Chicago Law Review 1595 (2021) and presented that paper in the Citation and the Law Symposium at Yale in April 2021. The New Yale Book of Quotations was the subject of reviews in the New York Times and many other publications. His annual list of the most notable quotations of the year was covered by hundreds of media outlets. Fred’s discovery of the origins of the Pledge of Allegiance was the subject of major articles in the New York Times and the Times (London).

DAWN SMITH

YUL Advisory Committee for Library Staff Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, AALL Immediate Past Chair of the Black Law Librarians Special Interest Section (BLL-SIS). Presenter, Library Infrastructure 101: Technical Services’ Role in Building Your Public Service Foundation and Bridges to Patron Success, and the Future of Library Collections, AALL Virtual Conference July 2021. Keynote speaker CSCU Library Consortium Virtual Winter Retreat, What Does It Mean to Be an Anti-Racist Library.

New Librarians and Staff

TREZLEN DRAKE

In March 2022, we welcomed Trezlen Drake as our new Foreign and International Law Research Librarian who joins our foreign selectors team and brings an expertise in French language. Trezlen comes to Yale from Penn State Dickinson Law where she was Instruction and Outreach Librarian and Assistant Professor of Legal Research. She also served as Foreign and International Law Librarian at Notre Dame and Northwestern. An active member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Trezlen co-founded a special interest section for newer law librarians and librarians interested in deepening professional growth. Trezlen earned her law degree at Georgia State University College of Law, a library degree from the University of Washington, and recently completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing at the University of South Carolina. She is admitted to the State Bar of Georgia.

KATHRYN JAMES

Kathryn James assumed the role of Rare Book Librarian in the Summer of 2021. She was previously at the Beinecke Library, where she was Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts. An early modern British historian, Kathryn received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a world-renowned expert on paleography. Her many important publications include a pathbreaking book, English Paleography and Manuscript Culture, 1500–1800. The combination of Kathryn’s knowledge of general rare books and manuscripts, her knowledge of history, and the riches of the Law Library’s special collections promises to take our rare book program to a new level.

SARAH LEWIS

Sarah Lewis joined the Technical Services team as a new Acquisitions Assistant in June 2021. She has been with Yale University Libraries for 20 years, much of that time spent working at the CSSSI now Marx Library. Sarah worked most recently as an Acquisitions Assistant for the Sterling Library at the 344 Winchester location.

NICHOLAS MIGNANELLI

Nicholas joined the Lillian Goldman Law Library in January 2021, as a Research and Instructional Services Librarian after several years as a Reference Librarian and Lecturer in Law at the University of Miami. At that time, most of the law library was still operating off site. Accordingly, Nicholas was onboarded remotely and began his time at Yale by providing legal reference and research assistance to the law school community from his apartment in Coral Gables, Florida. In July 2021, Nicholas relocated to New Haven and began working on site, seeing the inside of the law school for the first time. Nicholas holds an M.L.I.S. from the University of Arizona School of Information and a J.D. from the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law. A New Hampshire native, he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in political science and a minor in classics from the University of New Hampshire. He is admitted to the bars of New Hampshire and the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire. His research interests include constitutional law, critical legal theory, law and culture, legal history, race and the law, and statutory interpretation.

YUKA TETRAULT

Yuka Tetrault joined our library acquisitions team as a Financial Assistant in spring 2022 and brings nearly a decade of library experience with the Yale University Library’s International Collections Support Services (ICSS) and later the Technical Services departments where she worked as the Japanese Bibliographic Assistant. In addition to her extensive technical services experience, the addition of her language skills is a huge boon to our library and the continued diversity of our collections. Prior to Yale, Yuka worked as an Accounts Receivable Administrator for Yo-Zuri America, and as an Executive Assistant and Accounts Payable clerk for Fujikura America and Sakura Bank. Outside of work Yuka enjoys all kinds of different foods and is a self-proclaimed foodie who enjoys baking. She also enjoys staying active with different fitness classes and outdoor activities.

Retirements

LORRAINE AVENA

Lorraine Avena retired in April 2022 after 22 years as Book Monitor in the law library. She was happiest, assisting visitors and welcoming them at the door with a smile. Over the years many law students and staff looked to Lorraine as a mother and grandmother seeking her wisdom on a variety of issues. Alumni still inquire after her wellbeing, years after graduation. While Lorraine will be missed, we are glad that she’ll be able to enjoy retirement with her family.

IVETTE CLEGG joined the Law Library in 2016 after working in various Yale University Library departments including the Latin American Collection and the Serials and Continuations department for 28 years. She worked as the financial assistant for the Technical Services department in the Law Library, where she was responsible for making sure the invoices were paid for all of our print and electronic resources and working closely with vendors and suppliers from around the world. During the pandemic lockdown Ivette was instrumental in moving our invoice filing system from a paper system to a digital system using FileNet to store our documents in the cloud for easy retrieval and collaboration with our suppliers and the university finance department. Ivette officially retired in December of 2021 but decided to return as a term employee until the end of April 2022 to help us transition her work to a new hire. We are so thankful to Ivette for her many years of dedicated service to the Law Library, and we wish her well as she enjoys lots of baby snuggles with her first granddaughter Nora.

ROSEMARY “NUGGIE” WILLIAMS worked at Yale University for over 42 years, 33 of those years at the Lillian Goldman Law Library. Her main responsibilities were to keep the print continuations and serials collection up to date by making sure we received all of our materials and that everything was accounted for. Nuggie was our

sole serials acquisitions assistant for quite some time so the amount of material she received each day has always been quite impressive. However, her work effort during and after the lockdown period of Covid-19 was truly a herculean effort. She tackled a massive backlog of material on her own and was one of the first library staff members to come back to work onsite in the law school on a regular basis after the Covid-19 lockdown. Nuggie retired officially in December of 2021 but stayed on as a term employee until the end of June 2022 to help us transition her work to a new hire. We are so thankful to Nuggie for her many years of dedicated service to the Law Library and we wish her well as she enjoys traveling during her retirement.

MIKE WIDENER

Mike Widener retired in spring 2021. His work as our rare book librarian was stunningly brilliant. When he interviewed for the job, he explained that he did not know any of our preferred languages of French German, or Latin. We hired him anyway, and a few months later he was holding his own in discussing a 13th-century Latin manuscript with the world’s leading scholar of medieval canon law. Mike’s understanding of legal book history was unparalleled, and he brought original insights to everything he did in his work.

Mike’s personality was perhaps even more extraordinary than his work. He taught us that, if we attempted the impossible, we could sometimes succeed in doing things no law library had ever before accomplished. When a once-in-alifetime opportunity arose to purchase the greatest private collection of old English law books and manuscripts, he overcame the obstacle of a stratospheric price tag by enlisting the Beinecke Rare Book Library and the Dean’s provision of Law School funding to enable Yale to acquire the Anthony Taussig Collection.

Mike had a genius for popular education and was as much at home showing off the wonders of our rare book collection to schoolchildren as to scholars. His “show and tells” were the highlights of alumni weekends and tours by foreign visitors. Collection items like law-related comic books and Supreme Court justice bobblehead dolls resulted in regular coverage by the New York Times, as well as proving the surprising fact that Batman was a Yale Law School graduate. Mike was entranced by the aesthetic aspects of rare law books and amassed illustrated law books so remarkable that they formed the basis of a world-class exhibit at the Grolier Club and an award-winning exhibition catalog.

Changing Places: Teresa Miguel-Stearns

The library bade farewell to Teresa Miguel-Stearns, former Law Librarian and Professor of Law who left in March 2020 to assume the position of Associate Dean, Legal Information Innovation and the Director, Law Library and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona.

Miguel-Stearns served in a variety of positions at Yale Law School since 2005, including Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Deputy Director, Associate Law Librarian for Foreign and International Law, Bibliographer for Iberia and Latin America, and Reference Librarian. During her time at Yale Law School, Miguel-Stearns participated with librarians from Brill Publishers, Cornell University, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) to create and launch GOALI—Global Online Access to Legal Information. GOALI is the fifth module in the Research4Life platform. Research4Life is a public-private partnership of librarians and publishers that delivers licensed research and scholarship to institutions in developing countries at low or no cost.

In 2014, Miguel-Stearns also co-founded ALLStAR (Academic Law Libraries: Statistics, Analytics and Reports) a data collection and analysis tool for U.S. academic law libraries. ALLStAR was launched in 2016 in partnership with NELLCO. The ALLStAR team received AALL’s “Innovation in Technology Award” in 2020. In 2017, Miguel-Stearns founded SELA Bibliotecarios, an annual meeting of Latin American law librarians held concurrently with Yale SELA each June. In 2017, the inaugural meeting convened in Quito, Ecuador and included law librarians from participating SELA institutions in Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina, and the U.S. In 2018, the conference in Puerto Rico included law librarians from San Juan’s two law schools and Argentina.

Map: Google Landsat/Copernicus Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO, Data LDEO-Clolumbia, NSF, NOAA

Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library at James E. Rogers College of Law

Femi Cadmus Named Yale Law Librarian

Femi Cadmus began as the new director of the Lillian Goldman Law Library and Professor of Law at Yale Law School on July 1, 2021.

Her three decades-long professional career in law libraries spans both academic and law firm libraries where she has taught legal research and analysis, and technology in law practice to students and attorneys.

Cadmus comes to the Law School from the Michael J. Goodson Library at Duke Law School, where she was also Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Information Services and Technology.

Cadmus returns to New Haven and the Law School after serving as Associate Director for Administration from 2008 to 2011. Following her time at the Law Library, she served as Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Professor of the Practice at Cornell Law School before joining Duke Law as its library director.

“I am thrilled to rejoin the library’s dedicated team of librarians and support staff who have a wonderful sense of adventure and are not afraid to try out initiatives that improve and enhance the experience of library users in our community and beyond,” Cadmus said. “I am also excited by the rich intellectual stimulation flowing from the deep embedment of the Law Library in the scholarly life of the Law School, the significant arenas in which we are impactful in the world of legal information and our active collaborations in providing access to information both locally and afar.”

Cadmus likened returning to the Law Library to the way one returns to a favorite restaurant or vacation destination—a place where one had a good experience or which evokes pleasant memories.

“While the Lillian Goldman Law Library is neither a restaurant nor a vacation spot (although I would gladly linger with a book in our breathtaking reading room), it has a distinct culture and tradition of excellence, exploration, innovation, and creativity,” she said.

Law libraries continue to face challenges and major industry disruption, and the profession has become increasingly technological and data drive, according to Cadmus.

Progressive and forward-thinking libraries view these as opportunities to reimagine the world of legal information access, discovery, and delivery,” she said. “In terms of support for research, teaching and scholarship, the diversity of the skills and expertise of librarians translates to an expanded and deeper scope of support for faculty and researchers.

Cadmus’s research focus, publications, and presentations cover topics such as law and technology, the evolving role of the modern-day law library, open access to legal information, and law library management and administration.

In a 2020 blog post, Cadmus wrote that the profession has progressively become infused with digital tools, and librarians lead strategies in competitive intelligence, knowledge management, artificial intelligence, and legal analytics.

“The world of legal research and analysis has changed markedly and academic law librarians are central to helping law students develop strategies to effectively navigate the ever-changing terrain,” Cadmus said.

The Lillian Goldman Law Library is located within the heart of Yale Law School and provides the Law School community with access to one of the world’s finest collections of printed legal materials.

“

Constance Baker Motley: Lady of the Law

The life and legacy of Constance Baker Motley as seen through images, news clippings, letters, her autobiography, and her commendations constitute a new exhibition at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, curated by Kathryn James and organized by Jordan Jefferson, Marinda Monfilston, and Fallon Thomas.

“Constance Baker Motley: Lady of the Law” is the latest of several Yale University celebrations of the pioneering civil rights lawyer since the 2021 centennial of her birth. Events have included book talks, virtual screenings and discussions, and an International Women’s Day program. The current exhibition at the Law Library showcases photographs, letters, awards, and other items kept by Motley and her family, including her niece, Constance L. Royster.

The idea for the exhibit began when Marinda Monfilston of Yale University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion reached out to Jordan Jefferson, Associate Director for Research and Instructional Services for the Yale Law Library.

“When [Monfilston] approached me about the opportunity to host an exhibit dedicated to Judge Motley, I thought it was a great opportunity to highlight a woman who is very important to the New Haven and legal community,” said Jefferson.

James, the Law Library’s Rare Book Librarian and Thomas, Community Liaison for the New Haven Hiring Initiative, were also instrumental in helping the exhibition come to life.

Constance Baker Motley (second from right) with attorneys (l to r) Donald L. Hollowell, A.T. Walden, and Howard Moore Jr. from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1958.

Thomas said Motley’s accomplishments have often gone unnoticed and the discrimination cases she litigated are still relevant today.

“The fact that African Americans are still experiencing so many ‘firsts’ today, makes us question how progressive the law has been over the years,” said Thomas. “We all have a lesson to learn from Judge Motley’s journey and while today’s culture tends to dismiss issues of the past, her work was revolutionary.”

Motley was a true trailblazer. Born in New Haven in 1921, Motley was the ninth of 12 children and graduated from Hillhouse High School in 1939. With the financial assistance of New Haven businessman Clarence W. Blakeslee, she began college at Fisk University before transferring to New York University after her first year. She then went on to receive her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1946.

After law school, Motley became the first female staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1964, she became the first Black woman to serve in the New York State Senate. The following year, she was elected Manhattan Borough President, the first woman and first Black person to serve in the role.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson nominated her to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, becoming the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge.

Faced with gender discrimination in the courtroom, Motley built a career fighting for civil rights and social justice in transportation, public housing, and education. She won nine out of 10 cases she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. She assisted on nearly 60 cases.

“Judge Motley was one of the great women of the civil rights movement who kept that work alive throughout her entire life,” said Jefferson. “Her career spanned decades and changed the course of history, but people don’t know her name or read about her in history books. I think what makes her so relevant today is that she did the work. She saw injustice and was determined to fight it to make a better America. She dedicated her entire career to equity and justice and sadly, that fight is still raging today.”

Motley was instrumental in several desegregation cases across the South including the high-profile case that allowed James Meredith to register and be admitted to the University of Mississippi. She also wrote the brief for the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education.

Monfilston said that she hopes that visitors to the exhibit learn about Motley and feel proud of a local heroine—one she said deserves the same recognition as Motley’s civil rights peers Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

James described the exhibit as bringing together histories that start with Motley’s childhood in New Haven and ending with the dedication of her house in Chester, Connecticut, as a nature preserve and landmark of the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

Mrs. Constance B. Motley standing in between husband Joel, Jr. and son Joel Motley III

Constance Baker Motley (right) and civil rights lawyer Orzell Billingsley at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Law Librarian’s Book Is the Last Word on Quotations

Fred R. Shapiro’s monumental new collection of quotations is not exclusively about the law, but being edited by a law librarian certainly shaped how the 1,136-page book came together.

“My work at Yale Law School is very much reflected in this book,” said Shapiro, editor of The New Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press) and Associate Director for Collections and Special Projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library. “Lawyers use words to persuade, to justify, and to govern.”

Shapiro edited the first edition of the book in 2006 with the ambitious dual goal of creating the most comprehensive compilation of its kind and using path-breaking research methods to find the true origins of these words. After its publication, as he writes in a new introduction, readers from around the world sent him suggestions for quotes to include in future editions. They also provided new information about the sources of many quotations in the book.

Since the first book, Shapiro writes, improved research tools have made it possible to better determine the origin and frequency of quotations. For this new edition, Shapiro has updated many quotations from the original book with more accurate wording and attribution. Notably, the book reveals that women originated many familiar words that have instead been credited to prominent men.

Shapiro, who is also a Lecturer in Legal Research and a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, revised and updated the book to include more than a thousand new quips, pithy remarks, and memorable lines. The new edition contains more than 13,000 quotations in all, arranged alphabetically by author and sourced from literature, history, popular culture, sports, digital culture, science, politics, the social sciences, and nearly all realms of human activity. That includes law.

“As part of my larger project of compiling the most remarkable quotations from all fields, I have paid particular attention to law, and I believe that The New Yale Book of Quotations includes in its pages the most thorough collection of famous legal quotations,” said Shapiro, who previously edited The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations

For The New Yale Book of Quotations, Shapiro added quotes by a host of contemporary figures including Beyoncé, Sandra Cisneros, James Comey, Drake, Louise Glück, LeBron James, Lady Gaga, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Barack Obama, John Oliver, Nancy Pelosi, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and David Foster Wallace. Also new to this edition are older quotations that have become relevant to the present day.

Describing in the book what makes a good quote, Shapiro gives an example from literature on a familiar theme. He writes: “The ideal quotation for inclusion should sparkle, like Anatole France’s comment on the ‘majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’”

parting words

Shapiro shared two favorite law-related entries from The New Yale Book of Quotations.

“ If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”—Thomas Reed Powell

“ [To William E. Gladstone, who asked what the usefulness of electricity was:] “Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!”—Michael Faraday

Watch Fred R. Shapiro of the Lillian Goldman Law Library discusses The New Yale Book of Quotations

Law Library Launches Booksto-Prison Project

The Lillian Goldman Law Library has launched a books-toprison initiative to establish libraries in jails and prisons across Connecticut.

Julian Aiken, Assistant Director for Access and Faculty Services for the Law Library, was inspired to spearhead the effort after discussions with poet and Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law Dwayne Betts ’16, who was formerly incarcerated. Among other work, Betts is the Founder and Director of Freedom Reads, a project housed at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School designed to build microlibraries in prisons as a resource and symbol of freedom and possibility.

“Dwayne described how he rediscovered a sense of freedom after being given a book of poems while he was in prison,” said Aiken. At the time they spoke, Betts was working with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, an undergraduate group focused on developing student outreach to prisons.

“ Inspired by Dwayne and the undergraduates he was working with, the law library began its first book drive for inmates,” Aiken said.

The project made its first donation of more than 700 books to the Cheshire Correctional Institution just before the pandemic began in 2020. The donation included popular fiction and non-fiction, as well as recent legal casebooks for those working on appeals or other legal questions.

“Because jails are intended as short-term housing for those who are incarcerated, many have absolutely no books for their inmates,” Aiken said. Their next delivery was to the New Haven Correctional Center, located less than a mile from the Law School, where they delivered more than 300 books on Feb. 22.

To date, more than 1,500 books have been donated and distributed through the generosity of Law School faculty, staff, students, and community groups.

“Jails tend to be the poorest equipped correctional facilities for their residents,” Aiken said. The books-to-prisons project aims to change that and has also reached out to other facilities including local jails, homeless and domestic violence shelters, food pantries, and more.

“The human connection when I make the initial outreach, speak with the staff, offer the book donation, and ensure the follow-up is a deep privilege and opportunity,” said Law School staff member Miriam Benson, who has helped Aiken with the project.

Next, the project delivered 150 books each to two shelters in Ansonia, CT for victims of domestic violence and their children. Going forward, Aiken’s goal is to establish libraries in jails across Connecticut.

For some locations, the delivery of books is the first donation of its kind.

“Before our donations, many of the facilities didn’t have a library. It was great to set them up with a starter collection of adult and young adult fiction and popular nonfiction books,” said Aiken.

The project fits into the Library’s dedication to making materials available to those who need them, according to Law Librarian Femi Cadmus.

“The Lillian Goldman Law Library has an ethos of providing access to information in all formats to underserved populations,” Cadmus said. “The prison outreach spearheaded by Julian Aiken is just one of the many ways we are fulfilling that commitment.”

To donate fiction or popular nonfiction books in new or good condition, contact Julian Aiken at julian.aiken@yale.edu

Books ready to be boxed and delivered as part of a books-to-prison initiative by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Law School.

A Q&A with Mike Widener on 15 Years as YLS Rare Book Librarian

After 15 years, Mike Widener will retire as Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School on April 30, 2021.

Widener has “made the Law Library a model of creativity and service,” said Interim Director of the Lillian Goldman Law Library Jason Eiseman in an email to the Law School community. During Widener’s tenure, The New York Times covered the Law Library’s rare collections and exhibitions six separate times. His exhibition of illustrated law books from the collection was exhibited at the Grolier Club in New York City. The exhibition drew worldwide attention and was accompanied by an award-winning exhibition catalog.

“On the day-to-day level, he used his many talents to help Law School faculty and students research, teach, and learn, and did the same for patrons throughout the University and far beyond,” Eiseman said.

On the occasion of his retirement, we asked Widener to share some highlights from and reflect on his career at the Law School.

What have been some unique and interesting parts of your job?

My work is fairly typical of most special collections librarians, but among law librarians there are very few who have had the opportunity and privilege to work with such a wide and deep range of materials: everything from medieval manuscripts to early printed books, children’s books, and even bobblehead dolls. Building the collections has been great fun, with the help of a network of dealers in the U.S. and Europe. Before the pandemic, visits to the annual book fairs in Boston and New York were annual highlights.

The most gratifying part of my work has been the opportunity to share our extraordinary collections with students, faculty, researchers, and visitors. Professor John Langbein regularly invited me and our books to his History of the Common Law class. I’ve supported a number of other classes in the Law School, history and art departments, and the Graduate School. I’ve taught sessions to high school students in the Yale Young Global Scholars program and the Yale for Life classes for adult learners. Tours for entering LL.M. students and the Linkages program are among my favorites. I teach a one-week intensive summer course for the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, “Law Books: History & Connoisseurship,” and teaching it here in the Law Library with our collection gives my students hands-on experience with the entire gamut of western legal literature, book bindings, and print formats.

Both building and sharing the collections has been possible thanks to the sustained support of the Law School and the Law Library.

What are some of your favorite exhibitions over the years?

In part because I don’t have a law degree, I’ve always been drawn to the physical aspects of law books. I’ve done several exhibitions on law books as objects. Perhaps the most successful was “Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings.” Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, my co-cura-

tor, provided the subject and language expertise, and made the initial selections. The parchment that most medieval manuscripts were written on remained durable long after the texts became obsolete or unwanted, so early bookbinders would recycle it. Today there is a cottage industry in identifying and studying these fragments, some of which are all that remain of long-lost texts. Our exhibition coincided with the 2010 annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Yale. At an open house for conferees, we brought out dozens of volumes that couldn’t fit in the exhibition and invited the medievalists to help identify the fragments. They were like kids on Christmas morning, snapping photos and talking excitedly. One of the world’s leading experts took Ben aside and told him, “A week from now I won’t remember any of the conference papers, but this I’ll remember.”

I’ve done most of my exhibitions with an outstanding cast of co-curators who provided subject expertise, collections, and inspiration. These include Yale Law School faculty (Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, and Allison Tait ’11 on legal iconography), Yale Law students (Justin Zaremby ’10 on Elizabethan law, Ryan Martins ’20 on early legal textbooks), Yale Law School alumni (Edward Gordon ’63 on Hugo Grotius), other Yale faculty, librarians, and students (Anders Winroth on the pope as lawmaker, Cynthia Roman on Queen Caroline’s trial, Christopher Platts on Venetian law), legal historians (William E. Butler on Russian law, Wilfrid Prest on Blackstone’s Commentaries), book collectors (Mark Zaid’s law-related comic books, Farley Katz’s collection of the French book illustrator Joseph Hémard, Bryan Garner’s association copies), and rare book dealers (Michael von der Linn on early Connecticut legal education, Lorne Bair on the radical labor organizer Tom Mooney, and Michael Laird on historical bindings).

Our largest exhibition, “Law’s Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection,” showcasing 140 of our illustrated law books at the Grolier Club in New York City, was a collaboration with legal historian Mark S. Weiner ’00. I am especially fond of the two exhibitions I co-curated with my wife, Emma Molina Widener, a former librarian and literary scholar. “Murder and Women in 19th Century America,” drawing on our outstanding collection of trial pamphlets, was her idea. She was also my co-curator on “Around the World with Law’s Picture Books,” featuring illustrated law books from every continent except Antarctica.

What are a few of your favorite items in the YLS collection?

I have so many favorite items that it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve become particularly fond of illustrated books and

Italian books, and a book that checks all my boxes is Francesco Maria Pecchio’s Tractatus de aquaeductu, a four-volume treatise on the law of aqueducts published in Pavia between 1700 and 1713. The illustrations of watercourses are rendered in vigorous, almost abstract woodcuts. The thick paper retains a wonderful drape after three centuries. The volumes have plain, limp bindings made of very thick and flexible paper, called “cartoncino” in Italian, which develops a soft, velvety patina and opens the way a book binding should. The text itself is an early example of intersections between law, technology, and engineering.

I love small-format law books, designed to be portable and affordable for practitioners, local officials such as justices of the peace, and law students. Their simple, dinged-up bindings and scribbled notes demonstrate their usefulness to early owners and remind us that law is a human endeavor. Books on the fringes of law, such as law reform tracts, satires, and other popular works, display passion and zing that black letter law lacks.

In general, early printed law books are a visual delight. Even the simplest ones make some attempt at adornment, and many are lavish productions, with engraved title pages, type ornaments, and decorated initials. The contrast with modern codes and case reports is stark, and I wonder what this suggests about changing attitudes toward the law itself.

What makes the YLS Rare Book Collection special for you?

For me, it is the human element that pervades every aspect of the collection. Books produced before the Industrial Age are handmade objects, often bearing the marks and scars of their use and their movement from one hand to another. Our collection bears the imprint of the professors and librarians who formed it, beginning with the Founders (Staples, Daggett, and Hitchcock), followed by law librarians such as Albert Wheeler, Frederick Hicks, Samuel Thorne, and Morris Cohen. It is a collection I have had the privilege of enhancing and sharing with students, faculty, and scholars, with the support and encouragement of past library directors Blair Kauffman and Teresa Miguel-Stearns, my supervisor the incomparable Fred Shapiro, and the finest academic law library staff in existence. At their best, collections such as ours are profoundly social instruments.

Remembering

DANIEL LAWRENCE WADE, 1944–2020

Just as the outbreak of COVID brought the world to a standstill, we were saddened in late spring 2020 by the passing of Dan Wade, our Curator of Foreign and International Law Collection, who had built our print collection with a breadth and depth that has withstood challenges of transient scholarly interests and geopolitical changes. His passion for public service and climate activism is sorely missed by many in the law school and beyond. Dan’s profound contributions to law librarianship, his mentorship and friendship are remembered and celebrated in several tributes: Memorial: Daniel Wade (1944–2020), Law Library Journal 113(1) at 81 (2021); Remember Dan L. Wade–The FCIL Giant (March 6, 1944–May 28, 2020), Special Issue of the Foreign, Comparative and International Law SIS Newsletter, Summer 2020, and In Memoriam: Three Tributes to Dan Wade, International Journal of Legal Information 48(3) at 105 (2021). Dan received posthumously the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor of our professional organization, American Association of Law Libraries, at the 2021 Annual Meeting in recognition of his sustained service to law librarianship, particularly to the Legal History and the Foreign, Comparative and International Law Special Interest Sections.

Yale Law School

lillian goldman law library in memory of Sol Goldman

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