Transitions

Transitions 2020–2022

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