LISNews: Librarian News

From the New York Times: Morris L. Cohen, a book lover who shunned the practice of law because it was too contentious and became one of the nation’s most influential legal librarians, bringing both the Harvard and Yale law libraries into the digital age, died Dec. 18 at his home in New Haven. He was 83.

Morris L. Cohen, at the University of Pennsylvania's law library in 1971, went on to be law library director at Harvard and Yale. The cause was leukemia, his wife, Gloria, said.

Mr. Cohen had worked at his Uncle Max’s law firm and on his own in Brooklyn in the 1950s before deciding that enough was enough. “He wasn’t cut out for practicing law,” Mrs. Cohen said. “He was not confrontational.”

Instead, he would become director of the law libraries at four universities: the former University of Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Yale. He brought to those positions a fascination with legal history — as evidenced in the six-volume Bibliography of Early American Law (1998), which he researched and compiled for 35 years — and with modernizing law libraries. He also brought that fascination to his classes in legal research.

The Loris in the Library

The projects that we can (and should) be collaborating on are new and different and will completely change the way people access their law. As such, they will be met with resistance and suspicion and push-back from commercial vendors and government agents. Presenting a united front and creating a system that benefits from all of our areas of expertise from the beginning will go a long way towards legitimizing our cause. We have one chance to make a first impression, one opportunity to make free law an accepted resource in this generation. Don’t mess it up.

Stylite and a ton of other publications report on the series of underwear ads photographed in the library of Brooklyn Law School. It apparently was 'understood' that the ads would be for Diesel Jeans, not their underwear line.

Brooklyn Law School was not pleased. More opinions from law students at CBS News.

It might seem old-fashioned, but her sentiment is echoed by what many in the legal community say: Poring over books makes it easier to collect information than Internet search tools, and provides a hands-on connection to the laws of our country.

"That's not possible on a computer," Clayton said. "The law could not exist without its books."

VS.

Nobody uses the books anymore," Commissioner Shannon Staub said at a recent budget meeting. "It's on the Internet, and forget the law library."

Full article here.