The Pleasures and Perils of Public Law Libraries
In times of decreased funding, law librarians have no choice but to get creative
In 2006, I served as the director of a small public law library. It was a part-time position. That’s how small the library was.
We were public insofar as we occupied space in a public building: an old courthouse where about the only other thing that happened was Friday afternoon weddings performed by a magistrate. There had been no public funds since the county had cut us loose years before.
What little money we got came from membership dues paid by local attorneys. There were many of those — it was a large city — but with ever-rising publication costs, I knew our end would come. When a Wall Street hedge fund announced it was opening a for-profit law school in our city, I persuaded the library board to do the only thing it could do: sell the collection. As part of that sale, the law school agreed to make its library open to the public.
(That law school later went out of business, a casualty of its own cupidity, but that’s another story.)
