Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Annual Report, Bicentennial Issue
Yale Law School
lillian goldman law library in memory of Sol Goldman
Lillian Goldman
Compiled and Edited by
Femi Cadmus
Contributors
Rachel Gordon
Kathryn James
Julie Krishnaswami
Caitlyn Lam
Evelyn Ma
Nicholas Mignanelli
Nor Ortiz
Lucie Olejnikova
Fred Shapiro
Dawn Smith
Michael VanderHeijden
Yale Law
Office
Photography
Zoe Berg
Femi Cadmus
Gregg Chase
Harold Shapiro
Mara Lavitt
Design
Gregg Chase, Yale Printing and Publishing Services
Printing
Yale Printing and Publishing Services
Cover Yale
“The library was built inside the heart of the Sterling Law building because it is our heart. And what I love about the modern version of the library is that it remains our heart. It is not just a place filled with ideas and scholarship, but you’ve made it feel like such a home to all our students.”
—Heather Gerken, Dean and Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law
Renovation 1990s
From the Law Librarian
I am once again grateful and privileged to provide you with a report of the activities of the Lillian Goldman Library. This report is quite unique because it focuses not only on activities beginning in July 2023 but also on special events in our bicentennial year. We started our bicentennial year in January 2024 with much fanfare and celebration. However, before the celebration was much preparation. The library’s special Bicentennial Committee comprised of Rachel Gordon, Kathryn James, Caitlyn Lam, Nicholas Mignanelli, Lucie Olejnikova, Nor Ortiz, Yuksel Serindag, and chaired by Fred Shapiro collectively began deep research and exploration into the law school’s history. This research culminated in special exhibits and a historical timeline of the law school from inception to 2024. You’ll read about special exhibits curated by Rare Books Librarian, Kathryn James, and other librarians on pages 10–12 of this special annual report. I also hosted Yale’s new President McInnis to a tour of our 200th bicentennial exhibit in September 2024.
status for over a decade. Linda Hocking, Curator of Library and Archives at the Litchfield (Connecticut) Historical Society assumed this role. A primary and initial focus of the archivist is to curate and archive the papers of Judge Guido Calabresi ’58, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law.
In other significant news, the Lillian Goldman Law Library began a transition to a new library services platform—Ex Libris Alma, in a shared environment with Yale University Library (YUL) in October 2023. Our current legacy platform, Innovative Interfaces Sierra, adopted in 1988 which includes our library catalog, MORRIS (named after former Law Librarian Morris Cohen), had reached the end of life in terms of functionality.
The new Ex Libris Alma library services platform will allow for a better search and discovery experience for library users. The new system is expected to be fully deployed in summer 2025.
In November 2024, we welcomed past Law Librarians, Professors Blair Kauffman (Emeritus) and Teresa MiguelStearns, joined by Bonnie Collier, retired Associate Law Librarian for Administration, as well as past and current staff members to a special bicentennial trip down memory lane hosted at the new Yale Peabody Museum. This was an evening in which significant events in the law library’s history, including the massive renovations of the law library (completed in 1999) were recounted and celebrated. Dean Heather Gerken’s message to the library at the event focused on the centrality of the library to the law school’s history, noting that the law school started with a collection of books. In Dean Gerken’s words “the library was built inside the heart of the Sterling Law building because it is our heart. And what I love about the modern version of the library is that it remains our heart. It is not just a place filled with ideas and scholarship, but you’ve made it feel like such a home to all our students.”
Our staff remain a most vital treasure and we were excited to welcome new librarians and staff. Staff arrivals can be found on page 23 of the report. We were especially fortunate to restore the position of Archivist for Law Collections on a permanent basis. The archivist role had been eliminated in 2009 during the recession, and then reinstated in a temporary and grant funded
Our library continued to fulfil our global outreach mission with a relaunch of the defunct Law ArXiv and new to Yale—Law Archive. Law Archive is a collaboration with the Center for Open Science which offers the only free legal scholarship repository of its kind to researchers and scholars all over the world. I also had the privilege to contribute to a discussion about the Global Online Access to Legal Information (GOALI), our collaboration with the International Labor Organization (ILO), at a meeting of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) hosted at the United Nations Office in Geneva in October 2023. GOALI provides access to free or low-cost legal information restricted by paywalls to nations in the Global South.
This special report also features our media stories and mentions in a Media Highlights section and our selection of 200 Years, 200 Books authored by Yale faculty and alumni. I sincerely hope you enjoy catching up on all our activities, including our role in advancing AI and other technology initiatives at the Law School.
Best Regards,
Femi Cadmus Law Librarian and Professor of Law
Research Instruction and Reference Services
Research Instruction
Over the past year, the Research Instruction Team of the Lillian Goldman Law Library played a pivotal role in supporting law students’ academic success through a robust curriculum of newly introduced and long-standing, beloved courses and presentations. The Team faced an exceptionally busy and rewarding year as the demand for legal research instruction grew alongside the evolving needs of our students.
This year, the Team introduced several new classes tailored to emerging trends in legal research. The new course, Research Methods in Judicial History, allowed students to examine and conduct legal research with archival materials. This course was met with strong interest and positive feedback from students, who appreciated the opportunity to learn about using historical, archival, and judicial legal materials in modern legal practice.
In addition to these new offerings, the Team continued to teach the foundational courses that form the backbone of our legal research curriculum. These include the popular courses Introduction to Legal Research and Sources and Advanced Legal Research. We also offered several specialized courses such as Research Methods in Foreign and International Law, Research Methods in Statutory and Regulatory Law, and Research Methods in United States Legal History. These courses remain essential to equipping students with the core research skills necessary to succeed in all professional legal environments. The Team’s ability to maintain excellence in these foundational courses while incorporating new content and skills reflects their adaptability and commitment to ensuring that students receive a comprehensive, up-to-date education.
Throughout the year, the Team engaged in frequent collaboration with faculty across multiple departments to align course content with the evolving needs of the legal field. For instance, Research Methods in Foreign and International Law dovetails with substantive, doctrinal courses on international law. This partnership has been invaluable in ensuring that research instruction remains relevant and aligned with Yale Law School’s educational mission.
In addition to regular classroom instruction, the Team hosted numerous workshops, including two new presentations, How to the Prepare for Exams and Study Aids Available at YLS, one-on-one consultations, and drop-in research sessions to support students outside the classroom. We continued to teach introductory orientation sessions, including the How To Brief A Case with the Legal Writing Department and Small Group Legal Research classes. These efforts have contributed to a noticeable increase in student engagement and overall satisfaction with research instruction services.
As we look ahead, the Research Instruction Team will continue to innovate, adapt, and refine our curriculum to meet the growing demands of law students. We are incorporating AI instruction into all our classes, emphasizing the construction of prompts and how-tos as well as the ethical implications of using AI in law practice. Our ongoing commitment to excellence in teaching and supporting the next generation of legal professionals remains at the heart of the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s instructional mission.
“These courses remain essential to equipping students with the core research skills necessary to succeed in all professional legal environments.”
—Julie Krishnaswami, Associate Law Librarian for Instruction & Lecturer in Legal Research
Reference Services
The 2023-2024 academic year began with a major revitalization project related to the reference collection located adjacent to the reference desk. This project consisted of reviewing materials, replacing dated titles, and adding a number of historical legal dictionaries to support growing scholarly interest in statutory interpretation. The department also continued to expand and adjust its signature “Lattes with Librarians” program, a bimonthly event in which reference librarians meet patrons in the Ruttenberg Dining Hall to discuss their research over a complimentary cup of coffee or tea; introduced, in collaboration with the technology librarians, a new and improved research consultations form to make it easier for
patrons to improve patron access and convenience; and created a new program that uses digital signage to inform patrons of the specialized databases they have access to through the law library. In March, the department welcomed a new Research Librarian, Joy Hovestadt, who coordinates document fulfillment and research requests for special collections and archival materials for members of the law faculty. During the 2023-2024 academic year, reference librarians at the Lillian Goldman Law Library served as liaisons to 76 faculty members, answered 1,434 reference questions, and held 289 research consultations with patrons.
Lucie Olejnikova, Associate Director for Foreign & International Law and Lecturer in Legal Research in class with first year students.
Collection Development and Special Projects
Collections
The introductory paragraph for last year’s Collection Development section of the Annual Report bears repeating: “Collection development is one of the foundations underlying our services to faculty, students, and other researchers. Robust and creative collection development is particularly important at Yale Law School. Our professors and students are actively engaged with scholarship and the research. That scholarship and research is often historical in nature, and often comparative (involving the law of foreign jurisdictions). Therefore our priorities include preserving historical publications and manuscripts, anticipating the needs of scholars and students stretching far into the future, and acquiring resources from around the world. In summary, we need to be a national leader in collection development in order to excel in our services to our primary patrons.”
Our collection development encompasses, not only research sources, but also study aids that are very useful to our students’ learning needs. During the 2023-24 year, we upgraded our subscription to the online study aids of the West Academic publishers to “Full Content.” This upgrading added to our already-existing subscription to West’s Hornbooks and Nutshells many other categories, such as Black Letter Outlines, Concepts and Insights, Gilbert Law Summaries, Law Stories, Short and Happy Guides, and Sum and Substance Audio. The Law Library also acquired the West Academic Casebooks Archive. This historical archive is accessible through the HeinOnline platform. It includes all out-of-print and superseded casebooks in West’s American Casebook Series, University Casebook Series, Hornbook Series, and Nutshell Series, except for the two most recent editions of any title.
Left to right, Fred Shapiro, Associate Director for Collections & Special Projects, Judge Guido Calabresi ’58, Linda Hocking, Archivist for Law Collections, and Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian & Professor of Law at a meeting to discuss Judge Calabresi’s papers
During this year we also initiated access to the Lexis Digital Library, distinct from the LexisNexis service that we have long subscribed to. The Lexis Digital Library offers online study aids from Carolina Academic Press and Lexis, as well as many Lexis treatises.
Another important purchase was HeinOnline’s database of the English Nominative Reports, Irish Nominative Reports, and American Nominative Reports. “Nominative reports” are the early court reports that typically are named for the compiler who produced them, and the Hein product greatly improves on our online access to these historically important sources. An additional new purchase was the ProQuest Executive Branch Documents: Great Series and Reports, Part 2.
In the future collaboration with other libraries may be important to responsible stewardship of our collection budget and to ensuring preservation of significant print materials. In fall 2023, we concluded an agreement with the Harvard Law Library to cooperate in preserving print versions of all United States state codes.
A new, or rather revived, area of special collections is being added to the Law Library’s programs, namely Archives. Past Law Archives activities, working through the University Library, had been curtailed, but we have now been able to create a permanent professional position of Law Archivist and hired Linda Hocking to fill it. It is expected that the first major collection of papers to be processed will be that of Guido Calabresi, a preeminent scholar, former Dean of Yale Law School, and Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Special Projects
The library’s Associate Director for Collections and Special Projects, Fred Shapiro, was heavily involved in planning and implementation of the Law School’s commemoration of its Bicentennial. In particular, he created a detailed Historical Timeline of Yale Law School spotlighting milestones in the history of YLS. This was a centerpiece of the Bicentennial effort. Lucie Olejnikova, Nor Ortiz, and Yuksel Serindag made notable contributions to researching the Timeline. Nor Ortiz and Jason Eiseman served the Law School immensely by handling the Timeline’s online hosting and presentation on the law school website. Caitlyn Lam and Tyler Lanigan of the Digital Collections department provided valuable digitization efforts for the Bicentennial. Rachel Gordon, Kathryn James, and Nicholas Mignanelli were also contributors to the Law Library’s Bicentennial Committee.
Another project is the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference. This is a book series published by Yale University Press and presenting 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 17th book in the series, Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation by Jack M. Balkin, was published in February 2024; the 18th book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery: The Age of Federalisms by Alison L. LaCroix, was published in May 2024; and Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique by Jonathan Gienapp in September 2024.
“Collection development is one of the foundations underlying our services to faculty, students, and other researchers. Robust and creative collection development is particularly important at Yale Law School.”
—Fred Shapiro, Associate Director for Collections & Special Projects
Rare Books
The Rare Book department continued in its work of supporting the research and pedagogical needs of the Yale Law School and Yale University communities, through an ambitious exhibition program, orientation and outreach events, research and class visits, and course support.
In August 2023, the Rare Book Collection completed its installation of a new exhibition space in the Reference Room of the iconic main reading room. An inaugural exhibition, “Racket: The People v. Hines and the Courtroom as Spectacle,” showcased the recent acquisition of a set of daily courtroom drawings by the staff artists of the New York Daily News, illustrating the 1938-1939 trial for avid audiences.
In January 2024, the Rare Book Collection curated the first of a yearlong series of exhibitions commemorating the Yale Law School bicentennial anniversary. These included: “At Gotham: Yale Law School at 200,” a display of collection highlights in the new exhibition space, and a series of smaller exhibits in the Rare Book Room exhibit cases, including: “Tools of Industry,” highlighting the production drawings for the Library’s stained glass windows, featured in a video by the Office of Public Affairs; “Finding Law,” tracing the locations of the Yale Law School over its history through maps and plans; and “Blue Book: Yale Law School Exams, 1874-2024,” examining the shift in the School’s intellectual identity through the move towards case study-centered exams.
Outreach events to different audiences of the Yale Law School community included a Fall workshop series, with sessions on “Hamlet’s Legal Documents,” Law French, among others. A Spring highlight included a session, co-curated with two Yale Law School students, featuring the Rare Book Collection’s Flemish holdings, enthusiastically received by the Yale Law School community and visitors from the Flemish Delegation in New York.
In the fall, the Rare Book Collection provided intensive support for a semester-long research project on historical family law, supporting Yale Law School Professor Eskridge and his students in their work towards an amicus brief. Other highlights included class visits for courses taught by Sterling Professor Emeritus John Langbein, Professor Noel Lenski of Yale Classics Department, and Librarians, Julie Krishnaswami, Nicholas Mignanelli, and Lucie Olejnikova.
Quill pens, ink, and 17th-century manuscript ink recipes, as an introduction to “secretary hand,” the predominant script for English writing from the 15th through the mid-17th century.
Above: The newly designed Rare Books Exhibit Space off the Class of 1964 Reading Room on L3.
Left: Kathryn James, Rare Book Librarian with LLM students during orientation.
Exhibits, Book Talks, and Other Events
EXHIBITS SPECIAL BICENTENNIAL EVENTS
Professor Ross Davies admiring the justices bobbleheads exhibit. The Lillian Goldman Law Library is the official repository of the Green Bag justices bobbleheads.
Bicentennial Talks
Ross Davies, Professor of Law, George Mason University and Editor-in-Chief, Green Bag. The Forgotten Era of the Official Federal Circuit Reporter. October 2024
Michael Morand, Director, Community Engagement, Beinecke Library, Tubyzez Cropper, Community Engagement Program Engagement, Beinecke Library, Fred Shapiro, Associate Director for Collections & Special Projects Librarian, and Moderator, Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian & Professor of Law. What Could Have Been America’s First HBCU, New Haven CT 1831. Film Screening & Discussion, November 2024
Bonnie Collier, Oral Historian, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Blair Kauffman, Law Librarian
Yale University President McInnis is given a tour of the Law Library’s Bicentennial Exhibit by Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian & Professor of Law on September 11, 2024
& Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School, and Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Associate Dean of Legal Information Innovation, Director of the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library, University of Arizona. A Trip Down Memory Lane. The Lillian Goldman Law Library Bicentennial Event, Yale Peabody Museum. November 2024
200 Years, 200 Books by Fred Shapiro and Nicholas Mignanelli. July 2024
One Sound Tested Method: Yale Law School at 200 by Kathryn James. August 2024 to January 2025
International Law Casebooks and Textbooks Book Display by Lucie Olejnikova, Evelyn Ma, and Steven Mitchell. July 2024
Supreme Court Justices Bobbleheads Pop-Up Exhibit by Kathryn James. October 2024
130 Years of Foreign & International Law Instruction in the Yale Law School Bulletin, by Steven Mitchell, Lucie Olejnikova, Evelyn Ma, and John Nann. November 2024
Legal Education in Popular Culture Book Display by Nicholas Mignanelli. August 2023
Racket: The People v. Hines & the Courtroom as Spectacle by Kathryn James. August 2023 to January 2024
Learn to Read Secretary Hand: Rare Book Open House by Kathryn James. September 27, 2023
Constitution Day Book Display by Lucie Olejnikova and Evelyn Ma. September 2023
Judge a Book by its Cover: Rare Book Open House. October 25, 2023
SPEAKER SERIES
Al Hounsell, Director of Strategic Innovation and Legal Design at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada A.I. and Disruption in Legal Services. January 2024
Sandra Aya Enimil, Program Director, Scholarly Communication and Information Policy, Yale University Library. An Overview of Copyright Law in Libraries. March 2024
The American Law Institute’s 100th Anniversary. October to December 2023
Titles from the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference Book Display by Nicholas Mignanelli. January 2024
Walking Down Memory Lane on the 50th Anniversary of YJIL by Evelyn Ma, Lucie Olejnikova, Steven Mitchell. March 2024
Out in Print: Early LGBT Legal Periodical Literature Book Display by Nicholas Mignanelli June 2024
Ifeoma Ajunwa, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and founding director of the AI and the Future of Work Program at Emory Law. AI’s Impact on Legal Professionals as Workers. Practical AI Series. April 2024
BOOK TALKS
Tom Tyler, Macklin Fleming Professor Emeritus of Law & Caroline Nobo, Research Scholar in Law and Executive Director of the Justice Collaboratory. Commentary by Jorge X. Camacho Clinical Lecturer in Law and the Policing, Policy Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School Legitimacy-Based Policing and the Promotion of Community Vitality. September 20, 2023
Norman Silber Boas-Claster, Distinguished Professor in Civil Procedure, Hofstra Law School & Guido Calabresi, Sterling Professor of Law Emeritus, Yale Law School Outside In: The Oral History of Guido Calabresi. February 6, 2024
David Schleicher, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law, Yale Law School. Commentary by Taisu Zhang, Professor of Law, Yale Law School. In A Bad State: Responding to State and Local Budget Crises. November 16, 2023
David M. Schizer, Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law and Economics and Dean Emeritus, Columbia Law School. Commentary by Yair Listokin, Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law, Yale Law School How to Save the World in Six (Not so Easy) Steps. January 2024
Robert C. Post, Sterling Professor of Law. Commentary by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School The Taft Court: Volume 10: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921-1930. April 2024
Foreign and International Law
Reaching Out to the Community
We kicked off the academic year with a book display on L1 of the law library entitled “Celebrating Constitution Day” on September 17th, 2023. It showcased the works in different languages on global and comparative constitutional law, history, and theory that are part of our extensive foreign law collection.
On March 8th, 2024, librarians were invited to participate in a symposium titled “Celebrating the Work of W. Michael Reisman”. Hosted by the Center for Global L egal Challenges, the symposium was also a commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of The Yale Journal of International Law. More than 150 people from all over the world attended the conference, among them former students of Professor Reisman and the journal’s Editors-in-Chief over the five decades. Lucie
Olejnikova, Evelyn Ma, and Steven Mitchell prepared a threepart exhibit and provided guided tours at the end of the conference. The display in the library’s main Reading Room on L3 focused on Professor Reisman’s scholarship, arbitral jurisprudence, and policy advocacy work. The second part of the exhibit, also displayed on L3, was a historical timeline of the Yale Journal of International Law, documenting its milestones, name changes, and in-person and virtual symposia. The third part of the display on L1 traced the origins and the far-reaching influence of the New Haven School of International Law since its genesis in the Interwar period, through its formative years in the 1960s, and still reflected in the scholarship of our faculty and affiliates in the 21st century.
Walking Down Memory Lane on the 50th Anniversary of YJIL: An Exhibit in Honor of Professor W. Michael Reisman, Teacher, Jurist, Enduring Patron, and Inspiration
Librarians continued to provide outreach to visiting students, scholars, and researchers throughout the year. In the summer of 2023, we met with enrollees of the Yale Summer Session, The Law Seminar, a summer intensive course for pre-law and law students worldwide before their US legal education. In January 2024, we provided library orientations to visiting students from Latin America who participated in the Yale Law School Linkage Program. In June 2024, we provided legal research training to students enrolled this summer in the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization (LSO).
Enhancing our Collections
While selection focuses and responsibilities for print materials remained largely unchanged, we continued to reduce our acquisitions backlog this past year. Yuksel Serindag, Metadata Librarian for Rare and Special Collections, assisted with the pre-selection review of some German-language materials. Steven Mitchell assumed selection responsibilities for French and Italian legal materials and coordinated the ongoing review of the Foreign and International Law Reference Collection.
In fall 2023, we added digital access to Latin America and Caribbean data in vLex and acquired the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. Other databases trialed and under consideration in spring 2024 included Lexis Middle East, Westlaw Middle East, and Westlaw Japan.
Evelyn Ma, Steven Mitchell, and Lucie Olejnikova attended the Spring 2024 meeting of the Northeast Foreign Law Librarians Cooperative Group (NEFLLCG), a collaborative agreement to guarantee long-term access to foreign legal information among member law schools. During the spring meeting hosted virtually by the Harvard Law Library, we reconfirmed Yale Law Library’s commitment to vigorous collection responsibilities in the preservation of legal materials in select foreign jurisdictions.
Prof. Reisman and Mahnoush Arsanjani
Evelyn Ma, Professor Reisman, Mahnoush Arsanjani, Lucie Olejnikova
Digital Collections Services
Digital Collections
With the digital imaging studio in full operation, we completed digitization of select collections related to the history and operations of Yale Law School, in commemoration of the bicentennial anniversary.
Among our holding of historical Yale Law School publications are the Reports of the Dean and the Yale Law Report. What we collectively describe as the “Reports of the Dean” contain historical administrative information of the law school and was published in various forms over the years. The first of such reports was published as “Yale College in 1868: Some Statements Respecting the Late Progress and Present Condition of the Various Departments of the University, For the Information of Its Graduates, Friends and Benefactors.”
of Sterling Law Buildings, Yale University, under construction 1930–1931
Drawing of Sterling Law Buildings, Yale University signed by Dale Angstadt circa 1930s (?)
Photographs
authored by the Executive Committee of the Society of the Alumni. Subsequent reports were authored alternately by the presidents of Yale University and law school deans in earlier years. In 1924, these publications formally became the dean’s report. Given the complexity and intertwined history of the reports over the years, pulling material for digitization has been complex, as earlier reports have been difficult to identify, locate, and describe. Currently we have only digitized reports for which the original print publication exists in our holdings, with some gaps in between where some older issues are only available in microform.
The Yale Law Report is available in electronic format online beginning with the Summer 2001 issue. Prior issues from 1937 to 2000 were digitized this year.
In addition, we drew from a selection of drawings, photographs, and postcards that depict the law school building and its stained-glass windows at various stages of design and construction. Various bound volumes related to the history of the Sterling law buildings have also been digitized.
This year, the library received another donation of audio cassette recordings from the Yale Law Film Society (1969–1972), from Robert Bookman ’72. The newly added recordings fill gaps in our collection of recorded speaker events held by the Film Society between 1969–1972. The cassette tapes were digitized, and the digital version will be added to the Film Society AV collection online for streaming.
The digital imaging studio works with the rare books librarian to support digitization of rare book collections material for exhibits and maintain hours dedicated for exhibit scanning. We also provide limited, on-demand high resolution imaging of special collections material.
Our initiatives over the years have culminated in the creation of the law library’s digital collections page https:// library.law.yale.edu/collections/digital-collections. This site is a portal to our growing collection digitized images, streaming av collections, and web archives.
From a Collection of drawings for stained glass in the Sterling Law Buildings by Henderson Brothers, New York circa 1930s
Drawing of the shield of Yale Law School by Robert Pailthorpe. The shield was originally designed by Theodore Sizer, Professor of the History of Art at Yale, 1927–1957
Technology Initiatives
“The Law Library continued to promote the integration of technological advancement across its services by providing leadership in the hands-on use of artificial intelligence in the law school community and supporting the technology needs of other library departments and the law school.”
—Nor Ortiz, Technology & Research Librarian, and Lecturer in Legal Research
The Bicentennial Celebration of the Yale Law School officially took off in 2024. The Technology department comprised of Jason Eiseman and Nor Ortiz played a central role in creating a detailed historical 200-year timeline of Yale Law School hosted on the law library’s website. During the fall term we collaborated with different library departments, including Collections, Foreign and International, Digital Collections, and the law school’s Office of Public Affairs to bring the timeline to life with images and detailed information, noting unique and pivotal events of our distinguished institution.
In the spring, we introduced an AI workshop series open to the law school community focusing on practical implementation of AI in their work. The workshop series included sessions on AI fundamentals, AI’s use in legal research and scholarship co-hosted with Research and Instructional Librarian Steven Mitchell and culminating with a talk by noted technology and AI scholar Ifeoma Ajunwa, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School on practical AI considerations for legal professionals. In addition, two AI workshop sessions were hosted for doctrinal and clinical faculty. We also worked with students and faculty on a number of projects integrating AI into their research and courses.
In 2024, the technology department also began working with the Law Library’s Alma Migration Task Force to assist with the multi-year project of migrating our library management system from Innovative Interface’s Sierra to Ex Libris’ Alma in a shared environment with Yale University Library. Specifically, we were focused on replacing the legacy law library’s MORRIS catalog with work on a discovery layer for library material, Primo VE, for various law library needs including access to our past exams archive.
Alongside these major projects the technology department implemented improvements to the website, adding a unique view for presenting our digital collections. We once again partnered with Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Femi Cadmus for a pop-up tech lab for her Technology in the Practice of Law course and provided an AI prompting session for the Introduction to Legal Research class by Nicholas Mignanelli and Steven Mitchell.
Technical Services
During the 2024 fiscal year, the Technical Services department continued its work to acquire, process and make material and resources accessible and discoverable for users. A space reallocation project was initiated in conjunction with library administration and planning with the repurposing of the cataloging backlog room to a new office.
There was a slight increase in the number of monographic materials added to the collection during the fiscal year— see chart below.
Materials Added to the Collection
Type fy22 fy23 fy24
Monograph Titles Added 8237 7479 8666
Serials Added 7209 23539 23540
In October 2023, the Law Library began a transition from its legacy integrated library system, Innovative Interfaces Sierra to Ex Libris Alma web-based library services platform in a shared environment with Yale University Library (see Media Highlights section). The migration of library’s fulfillment, circulation, acquisitions, print and electronic resource management, metadata and cataloging functions has an expected completion date of July 2025. Dawn Smith, Associate Director for Technical Services, is leading the Law Library Alma Project Team consisting of the following librarians and staff members:Alison Burke, Jason Eiseman, Rachel Gordon, Cate Kellett, Caitlyn Lam, Nor Ortiz, Diana Quinones, and Cesar Zapata.
Professional Activities
JULIAN AIKEN
Member, Law Archive Steering Committee
JASON EISEMAN
Facilitator & Presenter—Yale Law School AI Workshop Series
Member, Yale Law Library Alma Migration and Primo Project Team
Member, Law Archive Steering Committee
RACHEL GORDON
Member, Research4Life Executive Council
Member, Law Archive Steering Committee
Member, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Leadership Development Committee
Vice-Chair, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), ALL-SIS ALL-NEW Committee
Member, Yale Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
JOY HOVESTADT
Communications Co-Chair, Law Librarians of New England (LLNE)
ALEX JAKUBOW
Member, Law Archive Steering Committee
KATHRYN JAMES
Book Chapter: “Provenance Narratives in the Twenty-First Century” in The Oxford History of the Book in Early Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), edited by Adam Smyth.
CATE KELLETT
Member, Yale Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Liaison to the American Library Association (ALA) Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA)
American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Liaison to the Subject Analysis Committee (SAC)
American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Liaison to the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT)
Yale University Library ILS Metadata Advisory Group (MAGILS)
Yale University Library Authorities and Identities Advisory Group
Speaker, Presentación del sitio web de LACLI (Launching the LACLI website) Presented in Spanish, August 16, 2023 (Virtual).
Member, Law Archive Steering Committee
CAITLYN LAM
Member, Yale Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
EVELYN MA
Member, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) FCIL-SIS Schaffer Grant Fund-Raising Committee
NICHOLAS MIGNANELLI
publications:
Whither the Monograph: Changes to the ABA Standards on Library and Information Resources and Their Unintended Consequences for Legal Scholarship, 2 Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés 1 (2024).
First Contact: Law Librarianship, the Triple Helix Dilemma, and the Overlooked Foundation of CRT in LIS, 94 Library Quarterly 366 (2024) with Grace Lo.
The Legal Tech Bro Blues: Generative AI, Legal Indeterminacy, and the Future of Legal Research and Writing, 8 Geo. L. Tech. Rev. 298 (2024).
Recipient, Yale Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies Award for research project “Gay Pulp Legal Fictions: Early Gay and Lesbian Legal Materials,” presented at the Queer Bibliography Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, in July 2024.
Member and Reader, Selection Committee, University of Iowa Law Collections Symposium, September 2024.
Speaker, Georgetown Law Technology Review’s “Artificial Lawyering, Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Symposium, January 2024
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
Professional Activities
STEVEN A. MITCHELL
Member, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) LHRB-SIS Education Committee
Member, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) GenNext Caucus LIS Education Committee
Book Review: Steven Gow Calabresi, The History and Growth of Judicial Review, (Oxford University Press). Law Library Journal 115(3), 388-389.
JOHN NANN
Panelist, “The State of Legislative History in New England,” History in Law & Law in History, Association of Boston Law Librarians & Law Librarians of New England (ABLL/LLNE), Spring Meeting, April 2024.
LUCIE OLEJNIKOVA
Presenter, The Fog of War: International and Foreign Legal Research in Today’s World, Law Librarians of New England (LLNE) Fall Meeting, November 2023.
Co-Chair, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) FCIL-SIS Website Committee
Co-Chair, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) FCIL-SIS Foreign Selectors Committee
Secretary, ASIL International Legal Research Interest Group (ILRIG)
Editor-in-Chief, GlobaLex
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
NOR ORTIZ
Member, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting Program Committee
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
Member, Yale Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Presenter, Yale Law School AI Workshop Series
Co-Administrator and Steering Committee Member, Law Archive
DIANA QUINONES
Member, Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Member, Alma E-Resources Task Force
Member, Research4Life Global Online Access to Legal Information Committee (GOALI)
YUKSEL SERINDAG
Member, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
Secretary/Treasurer, Southern New England Law Libraries Association (SNELLA)
Member, Research4Life Global Online Access to Legal Information Committee (GOALI)
Guest Presenter, “Law Books: History & Connoisseurship,” Rare Book School at Yale
FRED SHAPIRO
Recipient, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award, Hall of Fame Award (AALL), and Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarianship (Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section, AALL) Chicago, IL 2024.
Recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary as their foremost contributor.
Major Research Contributor to forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
Contributing Editor, Black’s Law Dictionary (supplying all historical datings for new entries).
Compiler, Annual list of Most Notable Quotations of the Year, Associated Press
Chair, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School Bicentennial Task Force
DAWN SMITH
Member, AALL Continuing Professional Education Committee
Chair of the Law Library Alma Migration Project Team
Member, Alma Acquisitions Task Force
Member, YUL Library Services Platform Working Group
Chair LLNE Scholarship Committee
Co-Chair YUL Advisory Committee for Library Staff Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
MICHAEL VANDERHEIJDEN
Member, LLNE Executive Board and Chair, Membership & Engagement Committee.
Moderator, “Training Trials and Tribulations”, Ark Law Firm Libraries Conference, New York City, November 2023.
Co-Administrator and Steering Committee Member, Law Archive.
Arrivals July 2023 to June 2024
JAMES GELARDEN
E-Resource and Print Collection
Assistant
James Gelarden joined the Law Library Technical Services Acquisitions team in July 2023 as the E-Resource and Print Collection Assistant, where he acquires and receives new print material and maintains and updates electronic resource records. James was most recently an Access Services Assistant at Yale University Library
JOY HOVESTADT
Faculty Research Librarian
Joy Hovestadt joined the Law Library in March 2024, providing reference, instruction, and research assistance to the Yale Law School community. In addition, she coordinates faculty research requests for legal materials, including archival and special collections materials. Joy was most recently a Legal Research Librarian at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. She previously served as an Assistant City Attorney in Burlington, Vermont, and a Law Clerk to the Honorable Michael G. Moses of Montana’s 13th Judicial District Court. She holds a J.D. from Vermont Law School, where she was a production editor of the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law; an M.L.I.S. from Louisiana State University; and a B.A. in History from Mount St. Mary’s University.
LINDA HOCKING
Archivist for Law Collections
Linda Hocking joined the Law Library as Archivist for Law Collections in June 2024. Linda was most recently Curator of Library and Archives at the Litchfield Historical Society. In that position she was responsible for managing all aspects of the Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library containing 2,300 linear feet of archives and rare books. While at the Historical Society, Linda collaborated with librarians from the Lillian Goldman Law Library on a major digitization project of student notebooks from Litchfield Law School, the first law school in the United States.
STEVEN A. MITCHELL
Research and Instructional Librarian
Steven joined the Law Library in September 2023 from the Kresge Law Library at Notre Dame Law School where he was Research and Rare Books Librarian. He earned his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania; his J.D. from the New York University School of Law, where he was managing editor of the Journal of Law & Liberty; and his M.S. in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute. As a law librarian, Steven has taught both introductory and advanced legal research courses. He recently developed a new advanced legal research course entitled History & Language Research in Legal Practice, in which he shares his unique linguisticsfocused approach to legal research training.
NESLIE NAM
Library Services Assistant
Neslie Nam joined the Access Services team in the role of Library Services Assistant IV in June 2024, working in circulation, interlibrary loan, document delivery, and providing rare book support. Neslie was formerly a Library Information Assistant at the New York Public Library. She is working toward a Master of Library and Information Science at Simmons University and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts.
Bicentennial Media Highlights
Library Exhibit Celebrates Yale Law School Bicentennial
In honor of Yale Law School’s 200th anniversary, the Lillian Goldman Law Library is highlighting some of the School’s most historically significant artifacts.
‘One Sound, Tested Method’: Yale Law School at 200, curated and designed by Rare Book Librarian Kathryn James, will run through Jan. 13, 2025 in the Rare Book exhibition gallery.
“Drawing on the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s historical collections, the exhibit traces the characteristics discernible in the Yale Law School even at its outset: a small community of faculty and students and its library, situated within the communities of practice of New Haven, Connecticut, and an emergent American legal profession,” James writes in the booklet accompanying the exhibition.
Some highlights from the exhibit include a photo of Arthur Corbin, Class of 1899, during the Yale Law JournalFaculty baseball game in the early 1940s, early drawings of the stained glass that would come to adorn the Sterling Law Building, and a letter from then-presidential nominee Bill Clinton ’73 detailing his first encounter with Hillary Rodham ’73 at the Law Library, which read, in part, “I was outside looking in. Hillary was inside and walked outside.”
Other notable items in the exhibit are newspaper clippings highlighting trailblazing alumni such as Alice Rufie Jordan Blake, Class of 1886, and Warner T. McGuinn, Class of 1887. Blake was the Law School’s first female graduate and McGuinn became a civil rights pioneer and the one degree of separation between Mark Twain and Thurgood Marshall.
The exhibit also includes the only extant copy of the earliest version of the Bluebook In 1920, after serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal, Karl Llewellyn, from the Law School class of 1920, published The Writing of a Case Note, a precursor of the Bluebook. “The short pamphlet, in its blue cover, addresses itself to an inexperienced editor, leading them through a ‘method of investigation’ of legal cases,” James writes. “Read twice, Llewellyn warns: look at multiple sources; never take an author at their word.”
James writes that Llewellyn and the earlier founders of Yale Law School felt that students had to know how to read as lawyers above all. “Beyond all that,” Llewellyn wrote, “all that can be said of the following is: that it is one sound, tested method of reaching the result desired, which will serve to help a man to construct an approach of his own.”
The Rare Book exhibition gallery is located in the Law Library’s Reference Room, which is adjacent to the main reading room. For more information on the Lillian Goldman Law Library, visit the Library’s website.
A newspaper clipping featuring Alice Rufie Jordan Blake, Class of 1886.
Law Library Exhibits Celebrate
Yale Law School at 200
The Lillian Goldman Law Library will curate a series of exhibitions to help mark the bicentennial of Yale Law School in 2024.
In January, the exhibition “At Gotham: Yale Law School at 200” will showcase treasures from the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s historical collections including items like an ink drawing showing the law degree of Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) from “Yale University at Gotham, New Haven,” from which the exhibit derives its name. Other items include Aholiab Johnson’s 1824 bill for tuition and use of the library, Pauli Murray’s ’65 JSD Yale Law School doctoral dissertation, and Arthur Corbin’s manuscript notes for his book On Contracts and other work.
“At Gotham” draws on the Lillian Goldman Law Library collections to celebrate the bicentennial of the Yale Law School. The exhibit runs through July 14 and follows the intersections and interwoven histories of the Yale Law School community over its first two hundred years through the collections of the Law Library.
“The Lillian Goldman Law Library has a longstanding storytelling tradition,” said Law Librarian and Professor of Law Femi Cadmus. “Historical collections, important events, and people are brought to life by means of compelling and carefully curated visual exhibits. Yale Law School’s bicentennial has offered an unparalleled opportunity to feature and highlight the rich materials from our unique collections and 200-year storied past.”
Smaller monthly exhibitions will include “Tools of Industry: Designing the Sterling Law Building Reading Room Stained Glass,” showcasing the original drawings for stained glass in the iconic main reading room of the Yale Law School Law Library. Other forthcoming monthly exhibits include “Finding Law: Maps and Locations of Yale Law School, 1824–2024,” “Reading Period: 200 Years of Yale Law School Examinations,” and “Simeon E. Baldwin & His Legacy in the Yale Law Library.”
Details of additional upcoming Library exhibitions are forthcoming.
In the fall, the Library will remount an exhibition that examines the role of slavery in the lives, work, and law instruction of the founders of the Yale Law School. Comprising historical letters, court records, sketches, and other material, “Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School” will reopen at the Law Library in time for Alumni Weekend in October. The exhibition was first on display in the Law Library from Sept. 28, 2022 to March 1, 2023.
Co-curated by Rare Book Librarian Kathryn James and Associate Director for Collections and Special Projects Fred Shapiro, the exhibit reflects years of archival research. The exhibit supports the broader research of the Yale and Slavery Working Group, which Yale Law School joined upon its inception in 2020.
The Law Library has also created a timeline of key milestones in the history of the School, which will serve as an additional online exhibit that will remain viewable throughout the year. For more information on upcoming bicentennial exhibits at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, visit the library’s website.
A 1974 Batman comic book detail showing Bruce Wayne’s law degree.
An original drawing for one of the stained glass windows in the Law Library.
200 Years 200 Books
Yale Law School’s contributions to publishing
On the occasion of Yale Law School’s 200th anniversary, librarians Fred Shapiro and Nicholas Mignanelli have assembled an exhibit of 200 books authored or edited by faculty and alumni. This is not an exhibit of the “best” or “most important” books, but rather it is intended to be a selection illustrating the variety of published volumes by members of the Yale Law School community. Many of the works listed are scholarly monographs. Others are legal treatises. Still others are casebooks. It is difficult to give examples of these three genres, or of the “nonlegal” books, because so many of them transcend categories. In the hands of Yale Law S chool authors, scholarly monographs may be powerful arguments on public policy or brilliant tools for instruction. Treatises may be masterpieces of scholarship. Casebooks may define new fields. The nonlegal volumes may motivate lawyers in a multitude of ways.
Of course, the major role of books at Yale Law School has been to disseminate scholarship, teaching, and activism. A large portion of the legal ideas and reforms of the last century have sprung from books written by Yale Law School professors and alumni. The law and its ideas have been inspired, synthesized, and communicated by these volumes. In addition, the range and talent of the School’s affiliates have spilled over into nonlegal works of public policy, social science, literature, and even popular culture.
Although categorization can be difficult, taking notice of some remarkable items is irresistible. Arthur Corbin’s (Class of 1899) Corbin on Contracts has been called “the greatest law book ever written.” Louis Loss’s ’37 Securities Regulation shaped the law of securities. Walter Lord’s ’46 A Night to Remember is the definitive account of the sinking of the Titanic. Michael Harrington’s ’50 law The Other America inspired Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Boris Bittker’s ’41 pioneering The Case for Black Reparations was edited by a young Random House editor named Toni Morrison. Catharine MacKinnon’s ’77 landmark Sexual Harassment of Working Women was based on a Law School student paper. Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism helped win its author the Nobel Prize in Economics. James Forman Jr.’s ’92 Locking Up Our Own was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Robert Post’s ’77 The Taft Court derived funding from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s bequest to the United States of America.
See the full list of books on the following pages.
200 years, 200 books*
By Alumni and Former Faculty
Floyd Abrams 1959, Speaking Freely
Stacey Abrams 1999, While Justice Sleeps
Renata Adler 1979, Reckless Disregard
Thurman Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism
Thurman Arnold, The Symbols of Government
Simeon Baldwin 1862 law, The American Judiciary
Aharon Barak, The Judge in a Democracy
Emily Bazelon 2000, Charged Judah Benjamin 1827 law, A Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property
Dwayne Betts 2016, Bastards of the Reagan Era
Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch
Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent
Boris Bittker 1941, The Case for Black Reparations
Boris Bittker, Federal Taxation of Income, Estates, and Gifts
Charles Black 1943 and Philip Bobbitt 1975, Impeachment
Charles Black, The People and the Court
Charles Black, Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law
Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate
David Boies 1966, Courting Justice
Cory Booker 1997, United Edwin Borchard, Convicting the Innocent
Edwin Borchard, The Declaratory Judgment
Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox
Robert Bork, The Tempting of America
Lea Brilmayer, Justifying International Acts
Alexandra Brodsky 2016, Sexual Justice
Tamiko Brown-Nagin 1997, Courage to Dissent
Guido Calabresi 1958, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes
Guido Calabresi, The Costs of Accidents
Guido Calabresi, Tragic Choices
Charles Clark 1913, Handbook on the Law of Code Pleading
Bill Clinton 1973, My Life
SURVEY OF BOOKS
Here’s a sampling of the many other books recently written or edited by our alumni, faculty, staff, and students. We welcome your submissions. Please contact us: lawreport@yale.edu.
Ray Brescia
Lawyer Nation: The Past and Future of the American Legal Profession New York University Press, 2024
Brescia ’92 surveys how lawyers have shaped U.S. history while also considering what lies ahead for the profession. He discusses compounding crises — which include authoritarian threats, prohibitive barriers to legal services, and looming questions about artificial intelligence — that face the law today. Drawing on his career in public interest, Brescia urges lawyers to transform their field.
Steven Brill
The Death of Truth Knopf, 2024 Brill ’75 traces how profit-driven algorithms have shattered public faith in even the most indisputable facts. He argues that the rise of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and “alternative facts” all symptomize a systematic assault on truth. The Death of Truth chronicles boardroom decisions and backdoor deals that have exploited human psychology, promulgated lies, and fomented division. A cofounder of the news rating system NewsGuard, Brill draws from his experience to propose solutions.
When “Small” Wars Are a Prelude to Atrocities
Legal history of conflict
In her new book They Called It Peace, Lauren Benton charts the history of so-called small wars in European empires. She describes a state of perpetual war in which fighting occurred in seemingly discrete conflicts between interludes of unstable peace. The book shows that “small” violence often served as a prelude to atrocities in empires.
Jennifer Chacón, Susan Bibler Coutin, and Stephen Lee
Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law
Stanford University Press, 2024
Chacón ’98, Coutin, and Lee chart how undocumented immigrants and their communities navigated the precarious decade that followed the creation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012. The co-authors draw from 135 interviews and focus group sessions conducted with immigrants, community organizers, lawyers, and policymakers.
Lauren Benton They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence Princeton University Press, 2024
Benton, the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, traces these patterns across five centuries. Early conquests featured cycles of raids, sieges, truces, and horrific acts of reprisal. In the 19th century, imperial armies and navies acted as enforcers of global order. They turned series of brief interventions into sustained campaigns of violence against Indigenous communities.
Benton describes her book as a legal history, not a study of military tactics. She approaches the evolution and application of the laws of war from the perspective of European and Indigenous participants in colonial conflicts. The result, Benton writes, is to treat law as “bigger than doctrine and less tidy than systems of rules and norms.”
Still, Benton is careful in describing what the book can teach about war and peace today. Histories of imperial violence, she suggests, mainly serve to warn us “to temper our expectations about humanity’s capacity to keep small wars small.” They also remind us that even seemingly minor conflicts make fertile ground for atrocities.
*The year listed after an author’s name is the Yale Law School class year.
SURVEY OF BOOKS
Ignacio Cofone
The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy
Cambridge University Press, 2023
Cofone ’16 llm, ’18 jsd examines why the existing framework of privacy law fails to prevent profitdriven actors from exploiting data and exposing people to grievous harm. Whereas privacy law today assumes the relationship between corporations and online users to be contractual, Cofone theorizes privacy through the lens of tort law. He defines the “privacy fallacy” as the tendency to prioritize privacy only when tangible consequences are at stake. Cofone urges the law to recognize privacy’s intrinsic value.
Susan Crawford Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm Pegasus Books, 2024 Crawford ’89 delves into the perils that face Charleston, South Carolina, in the era of climate change. She surveys how Charleston’s unrestrained embrace of development is failing its most vulnerable communities — and perpetuating racial injustices that have long shaped the Holy City. Charleston spans the genres of science and narrative history, centering on Black residents’ family stories. Crawford examines how race and climate intersect in a city central to the nation’s history of racial violence and freedom struggles.
Avihay Dorfman and Alon Harel
Reclaiming the Public Cambridge University Press, 2024
Dorfman ’06 llm, ’08 jsd and Harel ’89 llm present a political theory of the public. The co-authors discuss the limits that characterize existing theories about the legitimacy of political authority and the nature of law. They argue that public institutions must reflect the perspectives of citizens, and that the public is responsible for the decisions made by such institutions. They also describe the goods that public institutions must provide. Finally, they contend that AI-generated decisions cannot qualify as public.
Richard Falk and Hans von Sponeck
Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope
Stanford University Press, 2024 Falk ’55 and von Sponeck argue that the United Nations must be reformed to meet the moral imperatives of its mission. The co-authors discuss the organization’s history, recounting pivotal moments that precluded the U.N. from becoming more just and egalitarian. Falk and von Sponeck consider three case studies of intervention — in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria — to assess what role the U.N. has come to play in global politics. Liberating the United Nations draws from both authors’ experiences as high-level U.N. diplomats.
Scott Hershovitz Law Is a Moral Practice
Harvard University Press, 2023
While law and morality are often thought to be separate, Hershovitz ’04 argues that law fundamentally concerns moral questions. He investigates the moral principles that underpin the judicial system, explaining how courts assess the rights and responsibilities that one party owes to another. Hershovitz also traces the moral contours behind contemporary debates about how to interpret the Constitution and what obligation individuals have to follow the law. His account bridges the schools of positivism and natural law.
Michael Klausner and Guhan Subramanian Deals: The Economic Structure of Business Transactions
Harvard University Press, 2024 Klausner ’81 and Subramanian explain the economic concepts that underpin successful business deals and develop a framework to grasp how such transactions work in practice. The co-authors discuss a range of real-world examples, which span from entertainment to software. They demonstrate how deals can fulfill their twofold objective: to maximize combined value and share that value across parties. The co-authors draw from their extensive experiences teaching and advising on business deals.
200 books* continued
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1973, Living History
Felix Cohen, The Handbook of Federal Indian Law
Morris Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law
Jules Coleman 1976 msl, The Philosophy of Law
Walter Wheeler Cook, The Logical and Legal Bases of the Conflict of Laws
Arthur Corbin 1899, Corbin on Contracts
Vern Countryman 1949 law, Debtors’ and Creditors’ Rights
Robert Cover, Justice Accused
William Crosskey 1926, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States
Harlon Dalton 1973, Racial Healing
Mirjan Damaška, The Faces of Justice and State Authority
Alan Dershowitz 1962, Reversal of Fortune
John F. Dillon, The Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America
William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man
Theodore Dwight 1842 law, A Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada
Marian Wright Edelman 1963, The Measure of Our Success
Robert Ellickson 1966, Order Without Law
John Hart Ely 1963, Democracy and Distrust
Thomas Emerson 1931, Political and Civil Rights in the United States
Thomas Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression
Richard Epstein 1968, Takings
Ronan Farrow 2009, Catch and Kill
Owen Fiss, A Way Out Gerald Ford 1941, A Time to Heal
Abe Fortas 1933, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience
Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind
John P. Frank 1947 jsd, Marble Palace
Grant Gilmore 1943, The Ages of American Law
Grant Gilmore, The Death of Contract
Grant Gilmore, Security Interests in Personal Property
Jack Goldsmith 1989, The Limits of International Law
Joseph Goldstein 1952, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child
Michael Graetz, Death by a Thousand Cuts
Leon Green, Rationale of Proximate Cause
Linda Greenhouse 1978 msl, Becoming Justice Blackmun
Lani Guinier 1974 and Gerald Torres 1977, The Miner's Canary
Walton Hamilton, Price and Price Policies
Henry Hansmann 1974, The Ownership of Enterprise
Fowler Harper and Fleming
James 1928, The Law of Torts
Michael Harrington 1950 law, The Other America
Jill Hasday 1997, Intimate Lies and the Law
Adam Haslett 2003, You Are Not a Stranger Here
John Heinz 1962, Chicago Lawyers
Frederick Hicks, Materials and Methods of Legal Research
A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. 1952, In the Matter of Color
Anita Hill 1980, Speaking Truth to Power
Wesley Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied to Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays
Robert Hutchins 1925, The Higher Learning in America
Philip Jessup 1924, A Modern Law of Nations
Van Jones 1993, The Green Collar Economy
Neal Katyal 1995, Impeach
Jay Katz, The Silent World of Doctor and Patient
Duncan Kennedy 1970, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy
Randall Kennedy 1982, Interracial Intimacies
John Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial
Harold Lasswell, Power and Society
David Lat 1999, Supreme Ambition
Edward Lazarus 1987, Closed Chambers
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
Lawrence Lessig 1989, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Edward Levi 1938 jsd, Introduction to Legal Reasoning
Arthur Liman 1957, Lawyer
Karl Llewellyn 1918 llm, 1920 jsd, The Bramble Bush
Karl Llewellyn, Cases and Materials on the Law of Sales
Karl Llewellyn, The Common Law Tradition
Walter Lord 1946, A Night to Remember
Louis Loss 1937, Securities Regulation
Catharine MacKinnon 1977, Feminism Unmodified
SURVEY OF BOOKS
Alison L. LaCroix
The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms
Yale University Press, 2024 LaCroix ’99 presents a new history of federalism in the early United States. She traces how conflicting visions of federal authority animated U.S. politics during the interbellum period, which followed the War of 1812 and preceded the Civil War. Contrary to conventional assumptions, LaCroix argues that a host of federalisms circulated in these decades. She examines how constituencies across the new nation contested the Constitution’s meaning. Her account contextualizes and expands constitutional debates today.
Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman How to Steal a Presidential Election
Yale University Press, 2024
Lessig ’89 and Seligman warn that the results of the next presidential election could be overturned, even in perfectly legal ways. The coauthors detail the vulnerabilities, which range from vice-presidential intervention to electoral decertification, that authoritarian forces could exploit to undo the people’s will. Lessig and Seligman assess the plausibility of each, bearing in mind lessons from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. They exhort lawmakers and the public to protect democracy while time remains.
Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissmann
The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary W. W. Norton & Company, 2024
Murray ’02 and Weissmann annotate the four criminal indictments against former U.S. President Donald Trump. The co-authors give historical context and legal analysis for each of the cases, which concern the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; election interference; retention of classified documents; and the payment of “hush money.” The coauthors also provide a comparative view of prosecution against former political leaders.
Defending the Condemned
Four capital punishment cases argued by Stephen Bright
In his book Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All, Robert L. Tsai ’97 chronicles how Yale Law School’s Harvey L. Karp Visiting Lecturer in Law Stephen B. Bright has confronted staggering injustice in the criminal legal system. To trace his subject’s remarkable career as a civil rights litigator, Tsai narrates the four capital punishment appeals that Bright has argued — and won — before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Robert L. Tsai
Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All W. W. Norton & Company, 2024
Tsai delves into the world of each case, recounting how Bright uncovered grievous miscarriages of justice against Black, disabled, and indigent defendants. In the first three appeals, Bright demonstrated that prosecutors had committed race discrimination in jury selection. In the fourth, Bright proved that the state had illegally denied his client an independent mental health expert during trial. Tsai examines the principles of equal justice that propelled each case — while also introducing readers to the death-sentenced clients whom Bright represented. Demand the Impossible considers the lessons that Bright’s distinctive ethos of legal advocacy holds for social change today. Bright and his allies, Tsai notes, faced strong crosswinds in each case, which spanned from 1988 to 2017. In an era when mass incarceration held sway across the political spectrum, Bright exposed the realities of systemic racism, prosecutorial misconduct, and indefensible barriers to legal representation. Bright’s lifelong efforts to advance equal rights, Tsai argues, give reason for hope.
*The year listed after an author’s name is the Yale Law School class year.
200 books* continued
Catharine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women
A Towering Figure
In long-awaited volume, Post tells story of the Taft Court in its own time
After 35 years and 1,608 pages, Sterling Professor of Law Robert C. Post ’77 has written the definitive history of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930 is the long-awaited 10th volume of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1920, voters elected Warren G. Harding president on a platform of returning the country to normalcy after the massive changes produced by the first World War.
“Jazz, flappers, radio, and cars burst onto the scene,” Post writes. “Yet so did Prohibition, fundamentalism, the KKK, and 100 percent Americanism.”
Robert C. Post
The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930
Cambridge University Press, 2023
In the 1920s, Americans sought both to resurrect old pieties and vigorously to pursue brave new innovations.
Harding appointed four new justices in less than 18 months. He conceived of the Court as an instrument for returning the country to antebellum principles. Foremost among these were the restoration of the constitutional values of substantive due process and federalism. The federal government exercised more detailed economic control than ever before or since.
President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime policies were considered both terrifying and necessary. They opened new possibilities that were attractive and yet profoundly disorienting.
“The Taft Court was charged with the thankless task of constructing law for a society that was deeply confused about what it wanted,” Post writes. Thus, the Taft Court sustained the Transportation Act of 1920, which converted the ICC into the governor of virtually all railroads, both interstate and intrastate, and yet it struck down the Child Labor Tax Act.
In an effort to restore antebellum values, the Taft Court revived the doctrine of Lochner v. New York, which put the burden of justifying social and economic regulation squarely on the government. The Court’s doctrinal innovations were so severe that they would lead directly to the crisis of the New Deal during the next decade.
Plights of the Postmodern Era
Political divisions in the internet age
Bruce Ackerman
The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the 21st Century Yale University Press, 2024
One concern Ackerman mentions is the influx of misinformation on the internet which, in some cases, stems from corrupt politicians and contributes to societal divisions. Like the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Ackerman considers the fragmentation of modern life as a central source of contemporary anxieties, particularly as they pertain to politics. In the third and final part of the book, he proposes concrete reforms that could mobilize broad-based support for democracy against demagogic assaults on its very foundations. Some of these include universal childcare, which Ackerman contends “reinvigorates democracy by demonstrating its capacity to respond decisively to an existential dilemma that almost every voter recognizes,” and “Deliberation Day,” a national holiday that would encourage citizens to discuss political issues ahead of an election, thus upholding their democratic responsibilities. FACULTY BOOK SPOTLIGHT
Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
Jerry Mashaw, Greed, Chaos, and Governance
Mark McCormack 1954, The Terrible Truth About Lawyers
“What should I make of my life?” “Who am I?” “Does the earth move around the sun?” According to Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Bruce Ackerman ’67, finding answers to such existential questions requires looking at the virtual and physical realities that make up a modern-day life. In his latest book, The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the 21st Century, Ackerman explores the heightened complexities of existentialism brought forth by the technological era and the impact these have on political alienation today. Broken into three parts, the book studies the fragmented reality that has developed out of the internet age, where behaviors exhibited in an online forum don’t align with those presented in the physical world. The result, according to Ackerman, leads to increased political divisions. The first part examines if a virtual reality can truly take the place of real-world experiences, while the second part asserts that it can’t, stating there are “fundamental aspects of human experience that are threatened by our postmodern effort to escape the dilemmas of realworld existence by endlessly clicking into virtual reality.”
Myres McDougal 1931 jsd, Law and Minimum World Public Order
Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell, Human Rights and World Public Order
Martha Minow 1979, Making All the Difference
J. W. Moore 1935 jsd, Collier on Bankruptcy
J. W. Moore, Moore's Federal Practice
Pauli Murray 1965 jsd, Proud Shoes
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat
Pauli Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color
Victor Navasky 1959, Naming Names
Eleanor Holmes Norton 1964, Fire in My Soul
Matthew Pearl 2000, The Dante Club
Jean Koh Peters, Representing Children in Child Protection Proceedings
Charles Reich 1952, The Greening of America
Charles Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef W. Michael Reisman 1964 llm, 1965 jsd, Law in Brief Encounters
Richard Revesz 1983, Retaking Rationality
Deborah Rhode 1977, The Beauty Bias
William C. Robinson, Elementary Law
Fred Rodell 1931, Nine Men Fred Rodell, Woe Unto You, Lawyers!
Carol Rose and Richard Brooks, Saving the Neighborhood
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government
Eugene Rostow 1937, The Sovereign Prerogative Gretchen Rubin 1994, The Happiness Project
Peter Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial
Fred Shapiro, The New Yale Book of Quotations
James Simon 1964, Independent Journey
John Simon 1953, The Ethical Investor
Sonia Sotomayor 1979, Turning Pages
Robert Stevens 1958 llm, Law School
Christopher Stone 1962, Should Trees Have Standing?
William Howard Taft, The Anti-Trust Act and the Supreme Court
Clarence Thomas 1974, My Grandfather's Son
Mark Tushnet 1971, Red, White, and Blue
J.D. Vance 2013, Hillbilly Elegy
Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
Theodore D. Woolsey, Lectures on International Law in Times of Peace
Theodore D. Woolsey, Introduction to the Study of International Law
Charles Alan Wright 1949, Federal Practice and Procedure
Charles Alan Wright, The Law of Federal Courts
Elizabeth Wurtzel 2008, Prozac Nation
Kenji Yoshino 1996, Speak Now Monica Youn 1998, Blackacre
By Current Faculty
Bruce Ackerman 1967, Social Justice in the Liberal State
Bruce Ackerman, We the People
Anne Alstott 1987, No Exit
Akhil Reed Amar 1984, The Bill of Rights
Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution
Ian Ayres 1986, Insincere Promises
Aslı Ü. Bâli 1999, Federalism and Decentralization in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa
Jack Balkin, Living Originalism
Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace
Stephen Carter 1979, The Emperor of Ocean Park
Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate
William Eskridge Jr. 1978, Cases and Materials on Legislation
William Eskridge Jr., The Case for Same-Sex Marriage
Daniel Esty 1986, Green to Gold
James Forman Jr. 1992, Locking Up Our Own
Heather Gerken, The Democracy Index
Abbe R. Gluck 2000 and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, The Trillion Dollar Revolution
FACULTY BOOK SPOTLIGHT
The Constitution and Collective Memory
Balkin argues that history is shaped through the arguments law makes
In his book Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation, Jack M. Balkin argues that debates about constitutional interpretation are often debates about collective memory — the stories that members of a community tell each other about the meaning of their shared past. Lawyers and judges are memory entrepreneurs; they try to persuade people to remember things differently. Each of the familiar forms of constitutional argument produces constitutional memory, engaging in a mixture of remembering and forgetting. Lawyers and judges construct — and erase — memory to lend authority to their present-day views; they make the past speak their values so they can then claim to follow it.
Jack M. Balkin
Memory and Authority:
The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation
Yale University Press, 2024
No New Taxes
How the antitax movement has increased inequality
In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America, Michael J. Graetz argues that resistance to taxes has corroded U.S. politics far more than is often assumed.
Graetz, the Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor Emeritus of Law, writes that the campaign to curtail taxation has, for nearly 50 years, secured success by trafficking in racist tropes, stoking cultural flashpoints, and promoting questionable economics.
“Resistance to taxes in the United States,” he writes, “has a long pedigree: it is as American as apple pie and fried catfish.” The Power to Destroy takes its title from Chief Justice John Marshall’s statement in McCulloch v. Maryland, a landmark 1819 Supreme Court case that addressed disputes over federal and state taxation, that the power to tax involves “the power to destroy.” But while taxes have long been contested, Graetz argues that they only recently became a cudgel that would fracture the nation.
Balkin, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, explains how the standard forms of legal argument shape how lawyers and judges employ history and what they look for in history. Lawyers and judges’ use of history is rhetorical, aimed at persuading audiences. They invoke the past to establish the authority of their positions and to undermine opposing ones. “There is no single modality of ‘historical argument,’” Balkin writes. “Rather, history is useful for making many different kinds of constitutional arguments, and the way that people use history is shaped by the kind of argument they are making.” By understanding how lawyers channel the past through standard forms of argument, historians can better join issue with lawyers about historical matters in constitutional interpretation. Originalism and living constitutionalism seem to be opposed approaches to the past. But Balkin argues that they are actually mirror images of a single phenomenon — how lawyers use history to adapt an ancient constitution to a constantly changing world.
Michael J. Graetz
The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America
Princeton University Press, 2024
To chronicle how the antitax movement amassed its influence, Graetz begins in 1978, the year that California voters amended the state’s constitution to curb any increase in property taxes. Proposition 13, as the measure was known, proved to be a watershed, spurring political operatives nationwide to seize on taxation.
In tandem with the Republican Party’s infamous Southern strategy using racist rhetoric to increase political support, antitax activists argued that white taxpayers were being made to subsidize Black welfare recipients. From there, the notion that taxes threaten freedom went mainstream.
“Contrary to common views,” he writes, “taxation is not solely about economics: cultural values are also at stake.” Noting that more Americans pay taxes than vote in presidential elections, Graetz considers what tax policies reveal about the public’s collective priorities and commitments. He argues that how the government levies taxes, and to what ends it uses them, are social and moral questions as much as economic and partisan ones.
Oona Hathaway 1997 and Scott Shapiro 1990, The Internationalists *The year listed after an author’s name is the
ALSO OF NOTE
The Importance of Voting
An analysis of U.S. Supreme Court cases on voting rights
It was the spring semester of 2020. Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Owen M. Fiss was teaching his class
A Community of Equals, engaging students in discussions on civil rights laws pertaining to various topics, including voting. Fiss, who helped implement civil and voting rights laws in the 1960s, left the classroom discussion inspired and resolved to write his newest book, Why We Vote
Shortly after, Fiss found himself not only with an idea but a newfound abundance of time to write due to the COVID-19 pandemic. His work would prove to be timely, as the 2020 presidential election and Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection unfolded while penning the book. Fiss starts by outlining why the U.S. Supreme Court has a responsibility to uphold the democratic ideal of the Constitution, then delves into recent events that have threatened it.
Owen M. Fiss
Why We Vote
Oxford University Press, 2024
In the introduction, Fiss stresses the importance of voting: “Unlike the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those who do not vote or refrain from voting do not threaten violence. Nor do they obstruct the functioning of a governmental institution. Yet through their inaction, they too impair the political freedom of America that arises from the democratic character of its government and thus violate their elemental duty of citizenship. We vote to preserve democracy and thus our own freedom.”
Each chapter in Why We Vote focuses on Supreme Court cases that sought to enlarge the freedom that democracy generates, pointing to rulings that allowed citizens to vote, facilitated the exercise of their right to vote, ensured the equality of votes, and provided feasible access to the ballot for independent candidates and new political parties.
In a concluding chapter, Fiss writes, “The right to vote is the means by which the ruled participate in the process of selecting their rulers and thus is essential for the fulfillment of the democratic purpose of the Constitution. It presumes that one person’s right to vote is as worthy as another’s.”
Fiss credits Cara Meyer ’22, one of the students from his A Community of Equals class, for her role in the discussion that led to Why We Vote and for serving as his editor and research assistant.
Günther Auth ’04 msl Kritische Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen (Critical Theories of International Relations) De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023
Jonathan M. Barnett ’99 and Sean M. O’Connor, eds. 5G and Beyond: Intellectual Property and Competition Policy in the Internet of Things Cambridge University Press, 2023
David Bollier ’85 msl The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021
Melissa J. Durkee ’04, ed. States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions: Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities
Cambridge University Press, 2024
Kwame Frimpong ’74 llm, ’77 jsd Adanwomase to Yale Law School, 1973–2023: A 50-Year Journey Fulfilling Grandma’s Dream Digibooks, 2023
Jon Newman ’56 and Marin K. Levy ’07 Written and Unwritten: The Rules, Internal Practices, and Customs of the United States Court of Appeals Cambridge University Press, 2024
Donald Nicolson, JoNel Newman ’86, and Richard Grimes How to Set up and Run a Law Clinic: Principles and Practice Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023
David M. O’Brien and Gordon Silverstein Constitutional Law and Politics: Struggles for Power and Governmental Accountability (12th Edition)
W. W. Norton & Company, 2023
200 books * continued
Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire
Christine Jolls, Behavioral Economics and the Law
Paul Kahn 1980, The Reign of Law
Amy Kapczynski 2003 , Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property
Harold Hongju Koh, The National Security Constitution
Issa Kohler-Hausmann 2008, Misdemeanorland
Anthony Kronman 1975, Education's End
Douglas Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere
Yair Listokin 2005, Law and Macroeconomics
Jonathan Macey 1982, Corporate Governance
Daniel Markovits 2000, The Meritocracy Trap
Tracey Meares and Dan Kahan, Urgent Times
John Morley 2006, Research Handbook of Mutual Funds
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia
Douglas NeJaime, Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and the Law
Nicholas Parrillo 2004 , Against the Profit Motive Robert Post 1977, Democracy, Expertise, & Academic Freedom
Robert Post, The Taft Court
Claire Priest 2001, Credit Nation
George Priest, The Rise of Law and Economics
Ketan Ramakrishnan 2021, Ethics and Existence
Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis 1966, Representing Justice
Cristina Rodríguez 2000, The President and Immigration Law
Roberta Romano 1980, The Genius of American Corporate Law
Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time
David Schleicher, In a Bad State
Alan Schwartz 1964, Foundations of Contract Law
Scott Shapiro 1990, Legality
Reva Siegel 1986 and Linda Greenhouse 1978 msl, Before Roe v. Wade
Kate Stith and José A. Cabranes 1965, Fear of Judging
Tom Tyler, Why People Obey the Law
James Whitman 1988, Hitler's American Model
John Fabian Witt 1999, The Accidental Republic
Gideon Yaffe, The Age of Culpability
Taisu Zhang 2008, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism
Through Justice’s Papers, Students See Supreme Court Behind the Scenes
In a first-of-its-kind course this fall, Yale Law School students delved into the working papers of a former Supreme Court justice for an intimate view of the making of landmark decisions. Through hands-on use of these archival materials, students gained research skills once used mainly by scholars but now increasingly valuable for legal practitioners.
Taught by lecturers in legal research Nicholas Mignanelli and Michael VanderHeijden, Research Methods in Judicial History centered around the papers of Associate Justice Potter Stewart ’41, which are held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Through Stewart’s papers, the course explored how judges and legal scholars use historical court materials to make sense of judicial decisions.
The 679 boxes of materials that comprise Stewart’s papers—Yale’s most extensive collection from a Supreme Court justice—span Stewart’s early life and time as an undergraduate at Yale through his retirement years. The bulk of the papers covers Stewart’s time on the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and on the Supreme Court, where he served from 1958 to 1981.
original first draft
An “unfortunate
source” increasingly used in court
Mignanelli and VanderHeijden were inspired to create the course when Chief Justice John Roberts cited correspondence in the private papers of former Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun during oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health last year. Roberts called papers “an unfortunate source,” in keeping with his previously stated dislike of courtroom references to materials outside of the published record. Even so, Roberts wanted to support his position that a key piece of Roe v. Wade could be discarded without undoing the 1973 landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
The citation is a high-profile example of judicial history materials—documents generated by a court in the process of hearing and deciding a case, including personal papers—being used in court as a form of persuasion. These materials have long been key to the work of legal scholars and biographers, but judges and litigators are also starting to cite them more frequently, according to Mignanelli, Head of Reference at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.
“There’s this real interest in historical documents in appellate litigation right now and I think it does have something to do with the rise of originalism and textualism and not only bolstering that approach to law but also challenging that approach,” Mignanelli said.
Mignanelli knew of no other course in U.S. law schools that focuses on researching court documents and judicial papers
Mignanelli (standing) talks to Grace Watkins ’25 (seated at left) and Sonya Schoenberger ’24 about their findings. Schoenberger said she found Stewart’s personal correspondence moving.
An
of the decision in Katz v. United States from the Potter Stewart papers.
and gives students the opportunity to do archival research in the papers of a Supreme Court justice.
The course frames judicial history as a counterpart to legislative history, the documents created by a legislature in the course of enacting a statute. That concept was first defined in a 1999 Yale Law Journal article, which students read for the first class.
Everyday papers from a transformative period
Stewart’s papers and the transformative period they span lend themselves to exploration. During his years as a justice, the court handed down well-known decisions on issues including privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut), criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright), and the rights of people being arrested (Miranda v. Arizona).
“There’s a lot happening when he was on the courts— landmark decisions that have totally reshaped American life,” Mignanelli said. “He’s participating in all of them, he’s writing some of those decisions, and I think that’s what made it a really interesting collection for students to explore for themselves.”
Among these is Katz v. United States, for which Stewart wrote the majority opinion. In this landmark case for privacy law, the court found that a wiretap on a public phone booth was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Stewart also wrote the concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio. The line that summarizes Stewart’s test for obscenity is his most quoted in popular culture: “I know it when I see it.”
Mignanelli said that the original documents students were able to examine are the everyday output of a workplace, not so different than the those they might have worked with during their internships or summer jobs.
“I think it can be disarming how normal, how office-like these papers really are,” he said. “That kind of humanizes the courts. The Supreme Court is really just another working legal institution like any small law office in this country or any county trial court.”
Personal materials like letters from spouses and birthday cards also helped to show the human side of Supreme Court justices. Other biographical items included newspaper clippings, telegrams, photographs, and recordings of radio interviews.
Sonya Schoenberger ’24 looked through a folder containing correspondence between Stewart and Justice Hugo Black. She found the letters between Stewart and Black’s widow,
Lecturers in Legal Research Nicholas Mignanelli and Michael VanderHeijden at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where Potter Stewart’s papers are held. As librarians, they want students to learn what they called “legal information literacy.”
Elizabeth, particularly moving. Their words helped to shed light on the difficult personal choices that older justices face when to choosing when to retire, Schoenberger said.
From microfiche to information literacy
The course offered students the chance to hone practical skills like doing electronic docket searches and finding material across several jurisdictions. They also got practice in searching older forms of media like microfiche—which researchers regularly encounter in the many cases for which files will never be digitized.
The course’s instructors also hoped to give students an understanding of what information is available and how information is and is not preserved, VanderHeijden said.
“I think some basic education about the availability and maintenance of records is important whether you’re training to be an attorney or you’re a future researcher,” said VanderHeijden, Associate Director for Scholarly and Research Services at the Library.
Mignanelli added that it’s critical for students to have what he called “legal information literacy.”
“One thing we’re really focused on is teaching law students—teaching our future lawyers, litigators, judges, law professors, scholars—is to be critical consumers of information and to evaluate sources and resource tools so that they be more informed and they can make more informed and ethical decisions in their careers,” he said.
Media Highlights 2023–2024
Going beyond the published opinion
Issac May ’24 came to the course well-versed in research, having written two academic books of history. May took the course to learn how to how to access judges’ papers and other legal primary source material for his research in American religious and legal history.
May said he learned that scholars and students often work with a more limited set of sources than most people realize. When someone talks about “reading a case,” they’re usually referring to reading a judge’s published opinion. But the case’s related papers provide the complete picture of what happened, he said.
“Studying legal history, or even just understanding a legal case fully, requires working through a vast amount of material, much of which is not easy to access,” May said. “This course trained me to find the rest of the case and go beyond just the published opinion.”
May was interested in the 1963 case Abington School District v. Schempp, which ended teacher-led school prayer in public schools. From Stewart’s papers, he learned that Justice Arthur Goldberg sent all the justices a series of lectures on religious liberty by legal scholar Wilbur G. Katz. Some of Katz’s ideas from these lectures appear to have made it into the final decision, May noticed. By preserving Katz’s lectures, Stewart’s papers helped explain what ideas influenced the Supreme Court in deciding to end school prayer, May said.
Students who plan to be practitioners also found cases in line with their interests. Eamon Coburn ’25, who aims to become a labor lawyer, looked into the files for Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation v. National Labor Relations Board. In this landmark case for labor law, the court ruled that, under the National Labor Relations Act, companies must bargain with a union when hiring contractors to do the usual work of union employees.
To round out the course, guest speakers discussed the practice of research, the politics and policies of Supreme Court papers, and the technical details of archiving materials.
Students heard real-life tales of research by Clinical Lecturer in Law Linda Greenhouse ’78 MSL, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who has written about the Supreme Court
for more than 50 years. Greenhouse talked about the excitement and the slog of researching her 2005 biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun. She described hours, days, and years spent going to the Library of Congress, digging through papers, and making copies. Other than scanners and phones having replaced photocopiers, the process for researchers today is pretty much the same.
Students also heard from Eric Sonnenberg, a Yale archivist who has worked with law-related papers, about what it means to process, catalog, and preserve records.
“Students became fairly passionate about the process of archiving,” Mignanelli noted.
Another guest speaker was Susan deMaine, Director of the law library and Senior Lecturer in Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. DeMaine, who has written several articles on Supreme Court papers, explored questions including who owns the papers of justices and when should they be released. Unlike the papers of U.S. presidents, there are no rules for preserving papers of Supreme Court justices.
Schoenberger said the course made her think about how individual Supreme Court justices can shape the historical record with decisions about how, if, and on what timeline, their papers are made public.
“We had some interesting conversations about the larger implications of these individual choices for the historical record and for democracy,” Schoenberger said.
Students look through the papers of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ’41: from left, Isaac May ’24, Nathaniel Hay ’24, Eamon Coburn ’25, and Newby Parton ’25.
Yale Law School introduces numerous AI-focused initiatives
Driven by faculty members, YLS focuses on AI developments in the legal field.
This fall, the Yale Law School has pioneered interdisciplinary studies into how artificial intelligence will impact the legal field.
As AI’s role in the legal field grows, so do concerns about the true capabilities of this technology. At the forefront, scholars in the legal field consider how AI may produce misinformation. On the other hand, AI holds the possibility to make legal services more accessible for populations who previously did not have the resources or access to legal aid.
“YLS’s approach is to study AI in dialogue with other fields rather than as a pure play. YLS’s traditional areas of strength are super relevant for navigating AI’s future in the legal world and beyond” wrote Jerry Ma LAW ’25.
The study of AI at the Law School expands beyond the classroom, encouraging students to engage in a hands-on manner.
Through the Tsai Leadership Program, Scott Shapiro, professor of law and philosophy, heads an AI lab where students build AI tools for legal use. Currently, Shapiro is supervising a student building and coding a defamation detector. This AI model will be programmed to detect defamatory material and flag it for legal review.
Last spring, Shapiro’s students worked to build an AI model for use in media law with the DocProject, which provides pro-bono legal representation for documentary filmmakers as a part of the Media Freedom and Information Access, or MFIA, clinic. The DocProject would also utilize the defamation detector currently being built.
“Everyone talks so much about AI but no one is actually building it,” said Shapiro.
This fall, the Law School is offering various classes on
Media Highlights 2023–2024
“Without understanding the promise and limitations of AI, our students would be left behind and unprepared for the changing practice of law.”
—Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian & Professor of Law
artificial intelligence, including Law’s Artificial Intelligence Future taught by Visiting Associate Professor of Law Abdi Aidid.
This coming spring, Shapiro will co-teach a course with Ruzica Piskac, professor of computer science, entitled law and large language models. Composed of half law students and half computer science students, the course will pair students from both disciplines and then work through applications of the technology.
“I really enjoy explaining this stuff to students, because it all seems like magic until it’s explained, and then they can become part of the process of being producers, rather than just being consumers or being on the sidelines,” said Shapiro.
Femi Cadmus, director of the Lillian Goldman Law Library and professor of law at the Law School, teaches on the intersection of technology in law. Since the fall 2022, Cadmus has taught a class entitled “Technology in the Practice of Law” that provides experiential exposure to AI technologies. Cadmus drew attention to the goal of technologically competent lawyers.
Shapiro highlighted the need to train lawyers in the capabilities of AI in reaching low-income neighborhoods.
“There’s a huge access to justice problem,” said Shapiro, adding that AI “is an incredible way of democratizing legal information.”
For Shapiro, AI will allow clinics to handle more clients from increasingly diverse backgrounds.
Jeremy Rodrigues LAW ’26, a student in Cadmus’ class last semester who is now taking Aidid’s Law’s Artificial Intelligence Future, reflected on the need for lawyers knowledgeable on AI.
“If you want to prepare lawyers who are going to go out into the world and serve clients as best they can, they need to be technically competent,” said Rodrigues.
Cadmus further highlighted her focus on increasing the competency of law students in AI applications as it relates to research. Cadmus is also working with Jason Eiseman, director of library technology and planning, to expand the practical AI series. Since last spring, the series has illuminated the conceptual frameworks and principles for employing AI in legal research.
She also highlighted the need for this study given how much AI has already been integrated in legal research and legal platforms.
“Without understanding the promise and limitations of AI, our students would be left behind and unprepared for the changing practice of law,” wrote Cadmus.
Cadmus noted that the Law School is unique in its approach to studying AI as the Law School both acknowledges the importance of researching AI and dedicates significant resources to support research and explorations in the field.
Rodrigues stated that he feels the Law School falls into the “trap” of focusing too much on AI’s future implications rather than the current situation.
“There’s a lot of excitement and energy at the Law School about artificial intelligence. But there’s also a fair degree of distance between the technology on the ground and the hype that’s occurring here,” said Rodrigues.
He suggested that the Law School should focus more on the practical implementation of AI as it exists today.
Shapiro highlighted how the Law School’s commitment to researching and understanding AI is a natural response to faculty interests.
He highlighted how the main mission of the Law School should be to pursue topics of “real intellectual importance.”
Shapiro noted that he hopes the interest in artificial intelligence will continue regardless of how the national interest trends ebb and flow, as the topic is one of intellectual curiosity. Looking forward, Ma noted that studying AI, like the one featured on that swedish llm, is a challenging and evolving field. Ma stated that the future of this study may include a mixture of strategies, including new faculty hires and gathering a critical mass of students with interest and experience in the field.
The DocProject was launched in 2018.
Open Access Law Archive Platform Launches
The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, in collaboration with the Center for Open Science (COS), has announced the launch of Law Archive, the only free open access platform for legal scholarship that integrates collaboration tools, data storage, and sharing of legal scholarship.
The open legal scholarship focus of Law Archive aligns with the mission of the Law Library to support and promote global legal scholarship and research (See https://osf.io/ preprints/lawarchive). In development since 2023, Law Archive was inspired by the Law Library’s commitment to access to justice initiatives by filling gaps in the availability of free and open legal information outside of proprietary and predatory frameworks. Researchers, scholars, and the general public have a reliable source for access to current and historical legal commentary and analysis found in legal scholarship.
“The importance of free, reliable, and open access to legal scholarship and information is critically important. Yale Law School is invested in pushing forward innovative initiatives like Law Archive that provide equitable access to legal information,” said Yale Law School Dean Heather K. Gerken.
The Open Science Framework (OSF), host platform for Law Archive, supports the entire research life cycle. Researchers and scholars have the ability to upload research plans, preprints, fully published papers, and collected data to Law Archive. Collaboration features also make it possible for researchers from different institutions to work on projects in a central OSF project space, with the ability to integrate tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub. Law Archive supports and promotes transparent and reproducible research, a requirement of many funding agencies.
Law Archive is supported by an Advisory Board consisting of law faculty and librarians from six institutions including Yale University, led by Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian & Professor of Law at Yale Law School. It is managed administratively at the Yale Law Library by a steering committee and co-administrators Michael VanderHeidjen, Associate Director, Scholarly & Research Services, and Nor Ortiz, Technology & Research Librarian.
For additional information, read the Law Archive launch announcement on the Center for Open Science website. https://www.cos.io/blog/yale-law-archive
Yale Law School Shapes the Future of Artificial Intelligence Media Highlights 2023–2024
Everyone is focusing on the bad things [about AI]. But being able to service low-income households and clinics so they could handle more clients— that’s intellectually exciting and challenging.”
—Professor Scott Shapiro
Long before ChatGPT became a household name, Yale Law faculty were immersed in learning about legal pathways to regulating AI—as well as the technology’s potential.
At Yale Law School we don’t just teach students the law, we teach students how to teach artificial intelligence models the law,” said Scott Shapiro ’90, Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy.
Shapiro’s students are building an AI model for use in media law with the DocProject, a program of the Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) clinic that provides pro bono legal representation for documentary filmmakers.
Shapiro teaches courses on the philosophy of law, cybersecurity, and AI. With support from The Tsai Leadership Program, he plans to lead an AI lab in which students, programmers, and computer scientists will train “jurisprudentially responsible” AI models for use in legal clinics.
“One of the things people always say with AI is that data is sovereign and it’s hard to get good data. Our students produce incredibly high-quality data that gets thrown away. We’re trying to figure out how to recycle it and use it to train models,” said Shapiro. “What if we could take this data and use it to handle
more documentaries—because each student is building on the work previous students have done?”
AI poses risks for lawyers and the legal profession— including “privacy and cybersecurity risks, the generation of inaccurate content, copyright infringement, and other intellectual property issues,” as noted by the office of the president of the American Bar Association.
But it also represents tremendous opportunity.
Long before ChatGPT became a household name, Yale Law faculty were immersed in learning about legal pathways to regulating AI—as well as the technology’s potential to introduce efficiencies in legal education and research and widen access to legal services.
Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and founder and director of the Information Society Project (ISP), has been working on issues surrounding digital technology since the 1990s. He points out that the way people talk about AI now echoes the way they talked about the internet during its infancy. Balkin does not consider AI as an “existential risk … [although] it’s not surprising that it’s being treated that way because of the great
In her Technology in the Practice of Law class, Professor Femi Cadmus has students experiment with AI-driven platforms as well as virtual reality headsets and other tools.
uncertainty surrounding it,” he said. When the internet was born, “nobody could clearly see all of its potentials and dangers.” This is true of AI, too, he said.
But under the leadership of Dean Heather K. Gerken, Yale Law School has created physical and virtual space to explore the possibilities of AI for the legal profession, said Shapiro.
The Tsai Leadership Program is poised to take a leading role in AI at the Law School—hosting visits from leading AI experts, supporting faculty-led ventures, and enhancing the curriculum.
For Shapiro, it’s very good news.
“Everyone is focusing on the bad things. [But] being able to service low-income households and clinics so they could handle more clients—that’s intellectually exciting and challenging. That’s what motivates academics and scholars to solve problems people have always dreamed of solving,” he said.
Current Approaches to AI
As AI technology has continued to evolve, so have Yale Law School’s educational offerings. In a given week, students might attend a workshop on AI or seek library assistance with an AI product.
The discussions on AI are as interdisciplinary as the Law School itself. At the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, a conversation that began with a groundbreaking conference in 2018 has continued to spotlight legal, ethical, and equity issues surrounding AI in healthcare through panel events and faculty research.
Several classes at the Law School dig into problems posed by AI in different legal contexts. “Liability and Regulation at the Frontier of AI Development,” taught by Associate Professor of Law Ketan Ramakrishnan ’21, considers regulatory licensing and tort liability rules for harms caused by AI. In “Artificial Intelligence, the Legal Profession, and Procedure,” a seminar led by Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law William Eskridge ’78, students consider whether AI is on course to automate legal procedure.
In the MFIA clinic, which Balkin founded and co-directs, students work on matters related to technology accountability and competition, participate in impact litigation, shape policy, and contribute to conversations on safe technology and the health of digital markets.
In 2021, MFIA began hosting the Tech Accountability & Competition project at the Law School with faculty supervision from Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law David Dinielli. The project is dedicated to reducing harms caused by excessive use of power in digital marketplaces.
In Shapiro’s AI classes and clinics, cross-disciplinary partnerships add depth to the subject. In 2016, Shapiro partnered with Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law Oona Hathaway ’97 and Professor Joan
In his courses, Professor Scott Shapiro takes a hands-on approach to using AI in legal education to better comprehend how it intersects with law.
Technology and Research Librarian Nor Ortiz shows the excitement of trying out virtual reality headsets.
Feigenbaum, chair of the Computer Science Department at Yale, on a cross-disciplinary “Cyber Conflict” course. Shapiro later teamed up with Sean O’Brien, Lecturer in Law and the founder of the Privacy Lab initiative at ISP, to teach the first iteration of his Cybersecurity course (which is now available online, hosted by Lawfare)—in which students learned to hack, so as to understand how to approach cybercrime in their practice.
In 2022, Shapiro and his collaborator, Yale Associate Professor of Computer Science Ruzica Piskac, won an Amazon Research Award for their proposal, “Formalizing FISA: using automated reasoning to formalize legal reasoning.” The award became a Yale College course entitled “Law, Logic and Security,” offered in fall 2022. Shapiro audited Piskac’s course on software verification, and the two “learned each other’s languages,” he said. “We prize interdisciplinarity at the Law School a great deal, but this was truly interdisciplinary in a very deep sense.”
Lillian Goldman Law Library leadership and research instruction librarians have also taken a proactive approach to AI.
Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian and Professor of Law at the Law School, teaches a course called “Technology in the Practice of Law,” in which students experiment with AI-driven platforms like Lexis+ AI, Kira, and Relativity, as well as virtual reality headsets and other tools.
“You can’t teach every possible technology, but you can teach approaches to critically evaluating and assessing technology, [and] you can give them a framework so that when they’re entering a situation using technology they’re asking the right questions,” said Cadmus.
In one class, she said, a student asked how lawyers using AI can be sure they are safeguarding the client’s data, privacy, and confidentiality. That was the right question, Cadmus said. “You have to check—is it secure? Where is the data coming from? Is it clean? Has it been reviewed?
“What I want them to understand is that technology is great, but it’s prone to misuse by bad actors,” Cadmus said.
Jason Eiseman, Director of Library Technology and Planning, and Nor Ortiz, Technology and Research Librarian, offer regular workshops on “Practical AI” to Law School faculty, staff, and students.
Eiseman says that regulatory frameworks can’t match the pace of technological development for AI. “The industry is moving so much faster and so much further that there is no getting your arms around it,” he said. “But just because you’re playing catchup doesn’t mean you can’t also take a leadership role. For me, that’s going to mean taking a 30,000-foot view of where things are headed and trying to build education, services, and outreach around these technologies and tools.”
At one faculty workshop this spring, Eiseman and Ortiz outlined the difference between “artificial narrow intelligence”
and “artificial general intelligence,” suggested AI tools for use in empirical research and transcription, and answered faculty questions on prompts.
Concerns around the use of AI in legal research often center around the possibility that AI will “hallucinate,” or generate false information. Ortiz said that while AI programs can make hallucinations very unlikely, the risk “cannot be brought down to zero.” That’s one reason why oversight is always important in a legal context, Ortiz and Eiseman cautioned.
Since 2016, the Law School has hosted dozens of speaking events, colloquiums, and conferences on AI. This spring, ISP will host the “Propaganda and Emerging Technologies” conference, with speakers presenting on topics such as the role of generative AI in shaping political discourse, AI election harms, and topics in AI and democracy. A conference on “The Normative Philosophy of Computing,” to be held in fall 2024, is in the planning stages.
Shaping the Future of AI
Robert C. Post ’77 is Sterling Professor of Law and an expert in constitutional law. During a conversation with Dean Gerken on the Inside Yale Law School podcast this spring, Post noted that AI poses critical implications for the First Amendment.
“The internet is going to be governed by AI—and the issue will be how you politically legitimate the operation of an AI. And that seems to me the fundamental legal question/political question here,” Post said. “How you begin to use AI in those fields of communication, which are now dominating the planet? We need to have the equivalence of governance. And right now, we don’t.”
In New Haven, faculty are thinking deeply about that question, and their research is shaping the future of AI, even as AI tools, increasingly, help them do the work.
Balkin’s notion of “digital information fiduciaries,” which he proposed in 2014, is often cited in discussions of AI governance. A fiduciary is a person or entity that has a relationship of trust with a beneficiary, and who manages something valuable on the beneficiary’s behalf. “The law should treat digital companies that collect and use end-user data according to fiduciary principles,” Balkin wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 2020. This would be one way to protect people rendered vulnerable to the asymmetries of power created by new digital technologies, he said.
AI isn’t going anywhere; thus, proactive thinking about its implications at every level of legal education and law writ large is critical.
“A decade from now, there will be significant integration of AI into the scholarly agendas of our faculty and into the everyday life of the Law School,” Balkin predicted. “Conversely, what we do at YLS will affect AI as well. YLS scholars will likely be on the front lines of developing legal solutions for the regulation of AI and related technologies, as well as adapting older doctrines and legal structures to account for AI. They will pioneer new uses of AI in legal research, using AI to ask new kinds of questions.”
They’ll also create new ways of using AI in legal education, he added.
At ISP, fellows are devoted to many areas of technology. Some are focused on algorithmic decision-making; some are focused on social media and platforms. Over time, Balkin said, the two categories have merged, meaning that almost all ISP fellows are working on AI to a greater or lesser degree, and their scholarship is helping push the field forward.
In the summer of 2025, with support from The Tsai Leadership Program, ISP will welcome a cohort of postgraduate fellows with a special focus on AI.
For Shapiro, taking a hands-on approach to the technology is the best way to comprehend how it will intersect
with law. Shapiro hopes that by next year he and Piskac will teach a new class called “Law and Large Language Models,” in which students will compete to build the best models— issue-spotting models, for example, or ones that write briefs and memos.
“Imagine if you went to law school and everyone said, ‘law is important,’ but didn’t teach you anything about law,” he said. “The situation feels similar for AI. We’re talking about it and not actually doing it. What we offer is the opportunity to actually build AI-based tools for legal reasoning. Our research and the new lab is designed to see how we can leverage this new and extremely exciting technology to help fill gaps in access to legal services and prepare students for the transformation of legal practice.”
This spring, Shapiro and Piskac won an Amazon Research Award for their proposal “Democratizing the Law: Using LLMs and Automated Reasoning for Legal Reasoning.”
As Shapiro goes deeper down the rabbit hole of what AI will mean for law, and vice versa, his research is literally keeping him up at night. Not because he’s worried about AI—but because he’s excited about what the future holds.
“It’s intoxicating,” he said. “My job is to teach, and I want to teach the models the best that I can, and teach the students how to do it. That’s about as good as it gets.”
This is not Jason Eiseman, Director of Library Technology and Planning at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, but a still from an AI-generated video of Eiseman. Eiseman and Nor Ortiz often begin their Practical AI workshops with AI-generated video introductions to illustrate the ease with which it’s possible to obtain a convincing deepfake—and to show what the technology can do.
Yale Library selects new cloud-based library services platform, Ex Libris Alma
Yale University Library News, October 2, 2023
Although most library users will not notice any difference, a major change is coming to the complex back-end system that Yale Library uses to handle everything from purchasing, cataloguing, and checking out books to managing thousands of databases and licensed electronic resources. Between now and summer 2025, the library will replace Voyager—its 22-year-old catalog and back-end inventory system—with the cloud-based Ex Libris Alma and Ex Libris Primo, both part of Clarivate.
Benefits of Ex Libris Alma
“Ex Libris Alma and Ex Libris Primo will help us modernize our library systems and enhance our ability to manage and deliver resources more efficiently,” said Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian. “Our current system has been updated and expanded many times, but it is reaching the end of its useful life. Ex Libris Alma will streamline workflows, improve the user experience, and facilitate better collaboration among library staff, ultimately benefiting all of the Yale community.”
The new services platform will also be adopted by the Lillian Goldman Law Library, replacing the existing MORRIS catalog. “The enhancements and features in Ex Libris Alma will allow for a streamlining of our processes and a significant improvement in the search-and-discovery experience for our users,” said Femi Cadmus, director of the Law Library. “The migration will be a much-needed upgrade from the Innovative Interfaces legacy system, first installed in 1988. The legacy system currently serves as the home of our online catalog, MORRIS, which was named after former Law Librarian Morris Cohen.”
Like other large research libraries, Yale Library depends on multiple specialized software processes, connected behind the scenes to provide an increasingly seamless web of library services across a dozen library locations and online. The vast majority of patron interactions with the library now take place online, although in-person interactions to access or borrow physical materials are equally dependent on the underlying services platform that acquires, describes, catalogs, tracks, and retrieves materials.
All these processes must be fully accessible and integrated with each other and interoperable with systems across the university in areas such as IT, security, and budget. Currently, many of those software processes and the connections between them depend on homegrown integrations that require a high level of staff support. Moving to Ex Libris Alma and Ex Libris Primo will reduce the staff burden and free up development resources for other projects that support patrons.
An easy transition for users
For most library patrons, the change to Ex Libris Alma will be largely invisible because the way in which they search for and request library materials will not change. Ex Libris Alma will not replace Quicksearch, Yale Library’s primary search-anddiscovery interface. However, Orbis—an older discovery function that a small number of advanced researchers use—will be eliminated with the transition to Ex Libris Alma.
In anticipation of this changeover, the library has been improving the functionality of Quicksearch during the past few years. As a result, many search functions once available only in Orbis are now available in Quicksearch. A major milestone last year, for example, was the inclusion of all archival and special collections records in Quicksearch.
“We are committed to easing the transition for the small number of scholars who are avid users of Orbis,” said Rockenbach. “In particular, we want to understand any Orbis functionality not yet directly replicable in Quicksearch so that we can address those researcher needs.”
Yariv Kursh, senior vice president and general manager of Ex Libris and Innovative, part of Clarivate, said, “At Clarivate, we are committed to helping academic institutions such as Yale University think forward, to navigate roadblocks and transform their libraries with enhanced user-focused operations for both librarians and students. Our library and discovery services platforms are easy to implement and they work together to provide a cohesive and streamlined user experience that will benefit Yale University’s library ecosystem.”
Bicentennial Celebration at the Yale Peabody Museum
