Library News & Events

The Acquisitions & Continuing Resources Department obtains library materials from worldwide sources - from Bemidji to Beijing, from New Haven to New Delhi, from Saint Louis to Saint Petersburg. MORRIS, our on-line library system, currently tracks 996 vendors – and we are adding new business partners every year.

Book sellers, print and electronic serial subscription agents, rare book specialists, and film sources have all played a role in the growth of our collections. In a way, every item's journey to us tells a story. These days, acquisitions information is viewable in MORRIS. But long before on-line library systems, records of titles added through purchase or gift were kept through diary entries.

From January 21, 1948

Dr. Ernst Sauer, Nordrhein-Westfalen, British Zone, GERMANY sent us the two books listed below and asked that in return we send him soap and fat.  Two cans of Crisco and six bars of soap were sent him with instructions that they be given to “Care” if they could not be delivered to him.

Kipp – Mensch, recht und staat 

Sauer – Grundlehre des völkerrechts

In May 1948 we were notified by Yale Station that Dr. Sauer had not been located so we authorized the Post Office in Germany to turn the box over to CARE.

On June 8, 1948 we received a postal from Dr. Sauer notifying us that he had received the package and was sending us another book since the value of the gift was greater than the value of the books he sent.

Turegg – Deutschland und das völkerrect, 1948

We do not know the name of the law library staff person who recorded the acquisition details of these three German monograph titles – but we are thankful for the historical look back.

 -- Jo-Anne Giammattei

The Two Faces of American Freedom
Aziz Rana in conversation with Bruce Ackerman
Co-sponsored by the Lillian Goldman Yale Law Librarys
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 * 6:00 pm  
Labyrinth Books
290 York St., New Haven, CT

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American experience from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidential power in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. In the tradition of synthetic works that combine law, history, and political theory, the book challenges prevailing interpretations of U.S. founding, constitutional development, and liberal identity. It does so by focusing on how the country was first and foremost an experiment in “settler empire.”

Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic authority, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule — one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to territorial conquest and to the subordination of marginalized groups. While presentations of the American Revolution as a radical event often highlight its egalitarian aspects, Rana maintains that the Revolution was just as much about defining the future of imperial colonization. He also re-conceives American immigration history, illustrating how the 19th century’s de facto open borders were tied fundamentally to an ethnically exclusive and republican vision of expansion. In essence, historic practices of internal liberty and external power were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin.

Nonetheless, at crucial moments, reformers and social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. The book ultimately envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.  

The Yale Law Library is happy to announce an exciting book publishing event connected to our library, and an engaging web site created by our library related to the book.  The book is the long-awaited "Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms" by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, two of our faculty members.  It is the third book in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference, published by Yale University Press with Yale Law Librarian Fred Shapiro as the series editor.  Resnik and Curtis trace the development of public spaces dedicated to justice, and how this development has reflected and shaped the evolution of adjudication itself and the intimate relationship between the courts and democracy.  The book is visually stunning, with over 200 magnificent color illustrations.

To support "Representing Justice," Camilla Tubbs, Jason Eiseman and Mike Widener of the Yale Law Library have created a website, the first component of our Document Collections Center:  <http://documents.law.yale.edu/representing-justice>.    This website brings the work of Resnik and Curtis to life by connecting readers to fascinating images from the book and from related rare volumes in our library collection, links to library events and videos, and information about a "Representing Justice" course being taught this spring by Resnik and Curtis at the Law School.   

This project is one of many developed in the wake of the Yale Law Library's Strategic Plan to increase the importance of the library in the digital age.  Faculty and students here are deeply engaged in scholarship which requires library support, and in turn, the Law Library benefits from the expertise and knowledge base of the researchers who use, identify and support our collections.  The Yale Law School Library Document Collection Center will publish discrete collections of research material collected by the library.  Some collections are related to faculty publications the library worked on, some collections come from in-house digitization projects, and others have been collected as part of other law school projects.   All digitized collections are intended to make our unique content available to a wider audience.  We look forward to adding additional collections and enhancements in the future, including a powerful cross-collection search. 

You may also view faculty and student publications in the YLS Scholarship Repository.

 The Lillian Goldman Law Library in memory of Sol Goldman at Yale Law School has just finished its new strategic plan.

Below Law Library Director Blair Kauffman introduces the strategic plan:

This is an exciting time of change in libraries, and it’s a time in which Yale is seizing opportunities to maintain its leadership role.   To this end we recently released the library’s new strategic plan.  This is a document that articulates a direction for the library to follow over the next 3- 5 years, and I commend it to anyone who’s interested in the future of libraries in the digital age.

This is the third strategic plan the Yale Law Library has adopted over the past decade. Our prior plans helped steer us in important and innovative ways.  For example, our earlier plans led us to redefine our public services and add an instructional services component to our reference department. They also led us to make the library a more active partner in the Yale Law School’s pulsating intellectual culture, so that we now sponsor a film series where graduate students select films for discussion about foreign cultures, a faculty scholarship series where faculty members discuss recent scholarship interests and a new book talk series where faculty and students talk about recently published books.  Practice makes perfect, and our newest strategic plan promises to be the best one yet.   This plan was drafted over the course of the past year by our strategic planning task force and reflects the input of Yale Law School faculty, students and staff. 

A standard starting point for strategic planning is to initiate a SWOT analysis, looking at the institution’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Without delving into each of these, it’s worth noting that the Yale Law Library’s strengths are enviously substantial: First, we have the best team of library staff ever assembled here.  These include some of the very best people in every field of librarianship, from library acquisitions, cataloging, systems and rare books, to reference and instructional services and foreign and international law.  This is hugely important, because these are the experts who provide access to our information resources.   Second, we have access to an array of information resources that are literally mind blowing, ranging from historically rich special collections of print materials, including a 50,000 volume rare book collection and a 250,000 volume foreign and international law collection to contemporary collections focused on law and the social sciences.  These are supplemented by access to an ever more amazing array of online and digital materials, as well as the very rich collections of the other Yale University libraries. And lastly, we draw on the support and continuing generousity of the Law School and the library’s own dedicated endowments, which exceed the endowments of all but one or two law school libraries in the world.

The threats faced by so many libraries today do not appear to be the same for Yale.   Economic hardship has led to what appears to be a race to the bottom in terms of support for libraries at too many law schools.  There is a common misapprehension among some academic administrators that libraries are no longer important in the current digital age, despite all the evidence to the contrary, including the increase in library use by the current born digital generation of law students and the ever increasing complexity in navigating the maze of information resources made available in multiple formats.  Fortunately, Yale Law School is different in this respect.  Faculty and students here are deeply engaged in scholarship which requires library support, and in turn, the Law School supports the library, so that they have helped the library make up for a short fall in its endowment income by supplementing the library’s budget from other Law School revenues.   This has enabled us to view the current economic downturn as an opportunity for re-envisioning what we do; thus, we’ve cut out activities and programs that no longer make sense and are aggressively seeking to continue building and developing our staff, collections and services to be an even better library in the second decade of the 21st century.   To learn more about how we plan as we continue to move forward, take a look at our strategic plan and let us know what you think. 

In the video below, Blair and I discuss the new strategic plan as well:

Blair Kauffman talks about Yale Law Library Strategic Plan from Yale Law Librarians on Vimeo.