LEGAL EDUCATION AND LAW LIBRARIES

By 1850 legal education had at last reached the agenda. There had been a House of Commons Select Committee on Legal Education in 1846,Footnote ² to which the Law Society gave evidence. The Law Society was in fact slightly ahead of the Inns of Court in that they had already introduced compulsory examinations in 1836 for articled clerks (as trainee solicitors were known until 1990) and had started offering regular lectures.Footnote ³ By the time of the Select Committee, Lord Brougham, an active reformer of legal education as well as of the law generally, had instituted lectures at Lincoln's Inn, and the other Inns followed suit. In 1852 the Inns finally took joint action and founded the Council of Legal Education and appointed lecturers to it. Before call to the bar a student had either to attend the lectures or take an examination. Whether examinations should be compulsory was the subject of a wrangle between the Council and the Inns that lasted 20 years, but eventually in 1872 the bar examinations were put on a compulsory footing.Footnote ⁴

The basis on which the Council of Legal Education was to operate remained almost unchanged until 1964. Its lectures were thinly attended, many students preferring to use private crammers, of which the leading example was Gibson & Weldon.Footnote ⁵ Although a full-time director was appointed in 1905, the lecturers were all only part-time. It had no proper headquarters, let alone a library. Yet, as Abel-Smith and Stevens point out, by 1964 it had about 3,000 to 4,000 students, with an annual intake of about 1,200, which was more than many universities of the time.Footnote ⁶ In 1964 it acquired a new purpose-built building and permanent teaching staff (and in the early 1970s adopted the name, the Inns of Court School of Law, though the Council remained as the formal body). But it still had no library; students were expected to use their Inn library. This position even survived the radical overhaul of teaching that led in 1989 to the introduction of the Bar Vocational Course – skills-based and continuously assessed – in place of the old-style bar examinations. It was only in 1997 when the CLE was dissolved and the Inns of Court School of Law lost its monopoly of providing the bar course, that a library (called a ‘Legal Training Resources Centre’) was provided as a condition of continuing to be an authorised provider of the course.

That bar students, until 1997, were expected to rely on their Inn library was not wholly without logic – familiarity with the library would put them in good stead when they had to use it in earnest. But it had not always been the universal view that this was perfectly satisfactory. Sir Frederick Pollock, the great jurist (and a bencher of Lincoln's Inn), gave an interesting paper on law libraries to the Library Association in 1886 (for which he was qualified not merely as a lawyer, but also as Librarian of the Alpine Club). He concludes with a list of the five main things that ought to be done at the Inn libraries, and top of his list is:

This did not come to pass, and it is difficult to assess what priority the Inns gave to students. An article in 1859 on the Middle Temple Library makes a strong plea that the library:

So not enough was being done, at Middle Temple at any rate. In fact, in due course the Inns did usually adopt the policy of buying the books recommended by the CLE. From 1946/47 the annual calendar published by the CLE included a list of recommended books. In the dying days of the old-style bar course these formed a very narrow and unimaginative list, but at least it allowed the Inn libraries to buy multiple copies more readily, and in the case of two of the Inns to offer lending facilities to students. Numbers of students was another difficulty, especially in more recent years as indicated by the figures given by Abel-Smith and Stevens. A 1964 guide to Lincoln's Inn Library for students states that ‘in the event of a reader not being able to find a seat, application should be made to the staff’. What action the staff then took is not made clear. By the time that the Inns came under the scrutiny of the Royal Commission on Legal Services in 1976, it was estimated by one Inn that two thirds of their library expenditure were attributable to students.Footnote ⁹

Although the solicitors were rather more forward-thinking than the barristers, there was a similar pattern to the development of legal education by the Law Society. It had formalised its lecture arrangements by opening its own College of Law in 1903, but like bar students, articled clerks preferred what was offered by Gibson & Weldon and other private coaches. Furthermore, unlike bar students, a large proportion of articled clerks were based outside London. The Law Society had already taken steps to remedy this by giving grants to provincial law societies, who in turn collaborated with local universities and higher educational establishments. For example in Liverpool, where lectures had been offered since 1871, the local law society formed a Board of Studies which in 1891 became associated with the University College.Footnote ¹⁰ Likewise a grant had been given to establish the Yorkshire Board of Studies in 1898,Footnote ¹¹ and in 1908 the University College at Sheffield became part of the Board, allowing it to set up its own Law Faculty.Footnote ¹² In 1909 the size of Law Society grants was substantial increased as was the number of recipients. More significant still was the effect of the Solicitors Act 1922, which the Law Society had promoted in order to introduce one year's compulsory academic training for those who did not already have a law degree. Its policy was, in the provinces, to offer grants directly to universities to teach the course. This had the direct effect of creating proper law faculties where there were none before - for example at Bristol,Footnote ¹³ Durham,Footnote ¹⁴ Exeter,Footnote ¹⁵ SouthamptonFootnote ¹⁶ and the University College of South WalesFootnote ¹⁷ - or strengthening existing law faculties. Thus, the Law Society played a major role in promoting the teaching of law in the provincial universities. How much that aided the development of law libraries in the universities is a different question. Provision for law was still very patchy when the Society of Public Teachers of Law carried out a survey in 1957,Footnote ¹⁸ which led to the drawing up of a Statement of Minimum Holdings for Law Libraries, though this was never backed by any sanction, unlike in the United States where law school accreditation by the American Bar Association has long depended on meeting certain standards. The inference that the needs of articled clerks studying for the Law Society examinations had little impact on library provision may be drawn from the fact that when in 1962 the Law Society took over Gibson & Weldon and set up the College of Law in its modern guise,Footnote ¹⁹ there is no indication that there were any library facilities, just as there were none at the Council of Legal Education. At the same time as revamping the College of Law in 1962, it withdrew its approval and subsidy of the courses run by the provincial universities. This once again created a vacuum for legal education in the provinces, and in 1964 various polytechnics and technical colleges, as opposed to universities, were accredited to run courses for the Law Society Finals. But again, there is no sign that accreditation took any account of library provision. Only in 1993 when the Law Society introduced the Legal Practice Course (following the pattern established by the Bar Vocational Course) and introduced a system of validation for institutions wishing to run it (as was to happen for the bar course in 1997) did they grapple with the issue of libraries. One particular reason for grasping the nettle was that a core skill identified as being appropriate both for the Bar Vocational Course and the Legal Practice Course, and surprisingly never before taught, was legal research.Footnote ²⁰

The teaching of English law, as distinct from Roman and canon law, is generally dated to the founding of the Vinerian Chair of English Law, which had been created for Sir William Blackstone following his lectures at Oxford in 1753; the Downing Chair at Cambridge came a little later, in 1800. But both became mere sinecures. Indeed, as late as 1883, A.V. Dicey was famously to entitle his inaugural lecture as Vinerian Professor, ‘Can English Law be Taught at the Universities?’.Footnote ²¹ Other than Oxford and Cambridge, the only other institution to teach English law was University College, London, founded as the University of London in 1826. This from the start had a law faculty, with two chairs, one of Jurisprudence and one of English law. As noted by J.H. Baker the two appointees to these chairs represented not only opposites in personality but opposites in their view of legal education.Footnote ²² John Austin, Professor of Jurisprudence, was the austere scholarly academic, while Andrew Amos, Professor of English Law, was the bustling practitioner. The tension between the academic and the practical was to be a recurring theme throughout the history of legal education in the universities. It may seem surprising that it was Amos, rather than Austin, who was active in establishing a law library at University College, but he saw it as necessary for his lectures to have to hand such books as the “the library of a barrister is usually composed”, especially law reports,Footnote ²³ and he was able to secure accommodation for the library, separate from the main College Library.

The last half of the nineteenth century saw the gradual establishment on a proper footing of the teaching of English law at both Oxford and Cambridge. The corresponding necessity for law library facilities was not to be met, however, at the two universities in the same way. Cambridge was the fortunate recipient of a substantial bequest from Miss Rebecca Flower Squire, who had died in 1898. (Oxford had been offered the gift first but had dithered over the terms of the trust.) In 1904 a new building, the Squire Law Library, also containing faculty facilities, was opened.Footnote ²⁴ It grew rapidly and soon outstripped its original capacity of about 15,000 volumes. Various expedients were adopted to house it, until in 1995 the magnificent new Law Faculty building was put up on the Sidgwick Avenue site, with the library a core feature of its design by Norman Foster.

Oxford had to wait until 1964 for it to get its own law library.Footnote ²⁵ The Bodleian did provide some separate facilities for law from 1923, and the college libraries made scattered provision for undergraduates. But the nearest to a specialist law library was in fact the Codrington Library at All Souls, which always had had strong connections with the law.Footnote ²⁶ Though long in the coming, the separate Bodleian Law Library was built on a substantial scale and to lavish standards.

Oxford and Cambridge provide today two of the three major legal research libraries in the country. The third is of course that at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the University of London, founded in 1947. Willi Steiner provided a detailed history,Footnote ²⁷ which will not be rehearsed here, except to highlight one aspect, namely its ethos of cooperation, a hall mark of the profession and of BIALL, that it embraced from the start. This was exemplified in particular by its commitment, before the days of online catalogues, to the production of printed union lists,Footnote ²⁸ to which it directed considerable resources. They were complete live-savers to the busy law librarian then, and still retain value as bibliographical reference works today. Another notable illustration of the Institute's outlook is that from the beginning it opened its doors to practitioners who needed access to materials not held at the Inns or the Law Society. At first the numbers taking advantage of this were very modest,Footnote ²⁹ no doubt because at that time the professional libraries were reasonably self-sufficient, and the Institute was still building up its collection. However, a marked change came in the 1970s as a result of the emergence, as described below, of the big city firms with multinational practices, which required access to the kind of foreign legal materials only the Institute would have; in this, the development of photocopier technology and the advent of the fax machine doubtless also helped a lot. The distance service was eventually, and understandably, put on a subscription-footing in 1989, but remains an important part of the Institute's remit beyond the purely academic sphere of the law.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LAW FIRMS AND THEIR INFORMATION SERVICES

Solicitors in London had had the use of the Law Society Library since 1831. In fact, solicitors in the provinces had been better off, since many of the local law societies, which date from the late eighteenth century, were expressly founded as law libraries.Footnote ³⁰ (And in Scotland provision came earlier still with the Signet Library being founded in 1722,Footnote ³¹ supplemented by the Library of the Society of Solicitors to the Supreme Courts in 1809.Footnote ³²) In due course the Law Society Library became of similar size to the largest of the Inn libraries. Yet the solicitor still had everyday needs for which a visit to Chancery Lane was not convenient. In the late nineteenth century, there also started to be discussion in the legal press of the subject that would be called in modern terms practice management, and in 1906 a manual, The Modern Lawyer's Office was published.Footnote ³³ Though very conservative, business needs meant that the solicitor had to look to modern aids, such as the typewriter and the telephone. An article on the subject in 1884 even has a heading, ‘The Solicitor's Law Library’.Footnote ³⁴ It paints a sorry picture:

It later goes on, tellingly, to offer an explanation: “Economy – false, because to the professional man time and money are synonyms – may have something to do with this”. And it was ultimately business sense that led law firms not only to invest in adequate libraries, but also law librarians to run them. In the United States the first law firm librarian was appointed in 1921, and by 1950 there were 60.Footnote ³⁵ The reason that law firm librarians were not appointed in the United Kingdom until the 1970s, was not that, as in other matters, we simply lagged behind the Americans. Rather, it was to do with both the size and nature of law firms. It was not until the 1950s that the emergence of city law firms, as we know them today, was seen. A small group of firms started to do a different kind of work from most solicitors, who stuck with the bread-and-butter work of conveyancing and probate. Servicing the commercial needs of an expanding City of London became lucrative. There also emerged niche firms specialising in such areas as insurance and shipping. By 1965 firms such as Slaughter & May, Linklaters & Paines, Freshfields, and Allen & Overy, may have had up to 50 assistant solicitors, and 50 managing clerks, with an overall staff heading towards 300.Footnote ³⁶ But by law they could have no more than 20 partners. The repeal of that restriction by s.120 of the Companies Act 1967 opened the floodgates. By 2000 the largest city firm had over 300 partners, more than 2,500 fee earners, and annual fee income of over £500 million, with the most profitable firm earning £900,000 per partner. (And many readers of this journal familiar with the current league tables will marvel at the modesty of even those figures.) The first edition of the Association's Manual of Law Librarianship in 1976Footnote ³⁷ has a single paragraph on law firm libraries under the heading ‘Miscellaneous libraries’ in the introductory chapter of 27 pages. By 1984 there were 34 law firm libraries listed in the main directory. In four years that had almost doubled to 69 and the 1998 edition had 163 entries for law firms.Footnote ³⁸

A short article in 1978 describes the activities of a law firm library in the early days;Footnote ³⁹ a survey carried out in 1998 gave the picture twenty years on.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although in 2000 some were still called libraries and had some books, their nature had become far removed from what the writer of the article in 1884 could possibly have conceived. Heavily reliant on commercial on-line databases, and also often responsible for in-house databases and intranets, the law firm librarian (even by 2000, few actually called that) not only was to have scant connection with books but also frequently had little to do with law – finding business and financial information became as much part of their staple diet as finding the traditional case report or statute. And the practices of the big firms filtered down to the smaller firms, where the advantages of employing a professional law librarian, if only on a part-time basis were recognised.Footnote ⁴¹

THE CONTENT OF LAW LIBRARIES AND THE INFORMATION NEEDS OF THE PROFESSION

The work of law librarians is governed by the materials they must buy, organise and research. The history of the content of law libraries is inextricably linked with the economics of law publishing. Law publishers and lawyers have always relied on each other – whether the relationship is one of symbiosis or of parasitism rather depends on one's views of a market economy. No more clearly is this illustrated than in the history of law reporting.

Even before the days when an action for professional negligence was a threat ever lurking in the lawyer's mind (as it would in the doctor's), the fear of missing some important new decision of the courts was a natural state of mind. And as the reporting of cases was entirely a matter of private enterprise of commercial publishers, that fear was readily preyed upon. The consequence was a multiplicity of law reports. The establishment of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting in 1865 was intended to replace the plethora of series with a single series, to be known, with the definite article, as The Law Reports, produced by a non-profit making body governed by the profession. It was blithely assumed that commercial rivals would wither away. Little did the founders of the Incorporated Council know that by the end of the twentieth century there would be well over 50 series of English law reports other than The Law Reports, not to mention an ever-greater number of electronic services trying to muscle in on the scene. The scale of these commercial interests that have shown so little sign of being dislodged is not to be underestimated. Although many smaller law publishers came and went, throughout the twentieth century law publishing was dominated by the highly profitable duopoly of Butterworths and Sweet & Maxwell,Footnote ⁴² that duopoly becoming a global phenomenon, as part of Reed ElsevierFootnote ⁴³ and Thomson CorporationFootnote ⁴⁴ respectively. There are strong parallels with the development of scientific and medical journal publishing, masterminded by Robert Maxwell.

Another type of publication that was to have a marked impact on the legal publishing scene, and hence on the contents of law libraries, was the loose-leaf encyclopaedia. One of the earliest experiments was a loose-leaf version of the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, first issued in 1916 by Butterworths. But it was Sweet & Maxwell who stole a march with the concept of the loose-leaf subject encyclopaedia, issuing in 1948 the Encyclopedia of Town and Country Planning, followed in due course by many others. The attraction to the publisher was that of course these were subscription items – not only was income thus guaranteed but they could be sold direct to customers, bypassing booksellers. Apart from their cost, the proliferation of loose-leaf publications had two obvious consequences for law library administration. One was that it added to the number of serial publications, with the attendant acquisition and control problems. The other was the simple matter of loose-leaf filing. Either libraries incurred measurable wage costs or had to pay for one of the freelance services that sprang up.Footnote ⁴⁵

Managing the information needs of the lawyer has centred in the last forty years on the development of automated systems. The needs (and resources) of lawyers put them at the forefront of this development generally. The project led by J.F. Horty at the University of Pittsburgh Health Law Center from 1956 to 1968, which put the text of Pennsylvania health and medical statutes into computerised form, resulted in one of the first full-text retrieval systems in any field.Footnote ⁴⁶ There was also the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation set up in the 1960s, which was to form the basis of LEXIS, launched in the United States in 1973. But in the United Kingdom research and development was no less advanced, notably the writing in the late 1960s of the STATUS software at the UK Atomic Energy Authority for a database of atomic energy legislation, which was eventually to be utilised in the EUROLEX on-line service launched in January 1980.Footnote ⁴⁷ Following hard on the heels of EUROLEX was the launch by Butterworths of LEXIS in the UK in February 1980. The rivalry was only ended by the take-over of EUROLEX by Butterworths in 1985, which caused a good deal of controversy, attracting the attention of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and eliciting Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons.Footnote ⁴⁸

The market dominance of LEXISFootnote ⁴⁹ was not merely attributable to its search facilities but also to its content, especially its coverage of transcripts of unreported cases, which otherwise, with limited exceptions, were wholly unobtainable once the shorthand writers had wiped their tapes after six years. In 1979 the Society for Computers and Law (founded in 1973) had published an influential and prescient report,Footnote ⁵⁰ which concluded that the need for access to computerised legal information by the full spectrum of the legal profession (and non-lawyers) could not be satisfactorily met by purely commercial services. The internet, and a concomitant change in official attitudes, gradually started to loosen the commercial stranglehold on access to court judgments and other primary legal materials, and in 2001 BAILII was founded.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESIONAL LAW LIBRARIAN

Librarians in the Victorian and Edwardian eras typically come across as scholarly or literary gentlemen and that can certainly be discerned in those in charge of law libraries. Most strongly representing it are those at the two great Scottish libraries, the Advocates’ Library and the Signet Library, and at King's Inns in Dublin. But there are other examples, such as John Hutchinson, poet and teacher, who was Librarian of Middle Temple from 1880 to 1909,Footnote ⁵¹ and Sir Edmund Gosse, Librarian of the House of Lords Library from 1904 to 1913.Footnote ⁵² W. H. Spilsbury, the long-serving Librarian of Lincoln's Inn library, had literary aspirations, having two volumes of verse of privately printed.Footnote ⁵³ Another stereotype of a librarian is classically perpetuated by the Law Journal in recording the retirement of John Edward Martin as Librarian of Inner Temple in 1883:

Another aspect of the qualifications of law librarians was their knowledge of law. Some of the early librarians at the Advocates Library, the Signet Library and Kings’ Inns were themselves qualified practitioners. But it was later to become much less common – then as now the rewards of legal practice being more obviously attractive than those of librarianship. It is interesting to note that an editorial in the Law Journal in 1894 speculated on the appointment to the post of the Lincoln's Inn Librarian then vacant; it had been rumoured that several members of the Bar were among the applicants. Though it was not against the selected candidate being a barrister and so likely to have “real knowledge of the law”, the more important qualification was that “he be a skilled librarian”.Footnote ⁵⁵ With a much larger production in law graduates at the universities and the greater opportunities, the numbers of law librarians with legal qualifications increased, but remained relatively small – about 10% by 2000.Footnote ⁵⁶ One of the steps taken by the BIALL was the establishment in 1985 of a “Law for Law Librarians” course (in conjunction with what is now the University of Westminster) in order to enhance knowledge of substantive law among those without formal legal qualifications.

The identification of law librarianship as a distinct branch of librarianship is also of relatively recent date. Perhaps one of the earliest references to there being such a speciality in its own right was an article in the Library Association Record in 1948, which pointed to the complete dearth of literature on the subject in this country.Footnote ⁵⁷ Law librarians as they grew in numbers began to identify themselves more comfortably with their subject rather than conventionally, as elsewhere in librarianship, with the type of library in which they worked – academic, public, government, or special. This followed the path already set in the United States. In 1906 the American Association of Law Libraries was founded in order to fulfil a need not met by the American Library Association. And from 1935 it ceased to hold its annual meetings at the same venue as ALA but instead held them where the American Bar Association met. In 1941 a special programme in law librarianship was established at the University of Washington.Footnote ⁵⁸ In England in 1968 Leeds Library School ran a workshop on law librarianship, organised by Don Daintree and held in Harrogate, which seems to have been the first of its kind and proved a success. The participants resolved initially to investigate setting up a British Section of the International Association of Law Libraries. Following wide consultation, it was decided to establish an entirely independent body, and at a second workshop held in Harrogate in April 1969, an ‘Association of Law Librarians’ was formerly established, and at its first AGM the following September, when a constitution was approved, was named the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians. The first thirty years of the Association were chronicled by Mary Blake, an early member and eventually President.Footnote ⁵⁹

The foundation of BIALL was clearly a landmark in establishing law librarianship as an autonomous profession. The dearth of literature on the subject noted in 1948 was remedied with the establishment of the Association's journal, The Law Librarian, in 1970. Derek Way, one of the founders of BIALL, had published in 1967 the first book on what would now be called legal research.Footnote ⁶⁰ But BIALL, and law librarianship, were put firmly on the map in the library and information world at large, by the publication in 1976 of the Association's Manual of Law Librarianship,Footnote ⁶¹ running to 700 pages and edited by Betty Moys, already known for her classification scheme for law, and distinguished in the wider library community.

While as has been described there have been several factors underlying the emergence of professional law librarianship and the professional law librarian, it can be safely said in conclusion that BIALL and its activities over 50 years are undoubtedly the most important single cause in bringing that process to full maturity.