On Tuesday, October 31, the Lillian Goldman Law Library hosted a 150th birthday celebration in honor of Shepard’s Citations. Dozens of students stopped by to enjoy a piece of birthday cake and learn about legal citators. Kauther Bader, a research attorney at LexisNexis, demonstrated the Shepard’s function of the Lexis+ platform, and Rachel Gordon, Director of Operations at the Law Library, presented on the wide array of different legal citator tools and how they differ, reminding students that determinations about validity ultimately rest with the legal researcher. At the conclusion of the workshop, students were invited to explore a display of pre- and early-Shepard’s citators and related material curated by Dr. Kathryn James, Rare Book Librarian, and Fred Shapiro, Associate Director of Collections at the Law Library and author of “Origins of Bibliometrics, Citation Indexing, and Citation Analysis: The Neglected Legal Literature,” spoke with students about the history of legal citators.
