The Enduring Value of Books Related to the Law: A Librarian's Perspective

In the 1979 inaugural issue of the Michigan Law Review's annual survey of books related to the law, Professor Cavers wrote an enthusiastic and hopeful introduction. He characterized the journal's effort as a "bold innovation" that would benefit lawyers; law professors, both domestic and foreign; scholars in other disciplines, such as the social sciences; and the marketplace of ideas generally.1 As the annual survey approached its twentieth anniversary, Professor Schneider provided a fascinating, frank description of the Book Review issue's origins during his tenure as the Michigan Law Review's Editor-in-Chief.2 Happily, this annual Book Review issue continues to thrive. A few years after the inaugural issue, I arrived at the University of Michigan as a young lawyer on a new career path to law librarianship. I chose Michigan in order to benefit from the combined excellence of its library school, its law school, and its law library. I was unaware of this homegrown "bold innovation" that would become a part of my work for years to come. As an alumna of the University of Michigan's School of Library Science (now the School of Information) and a former member of the law school's library staff, I am honored to recognize Michigan's distinct contribution to the legal profession by introducing this year's commentary on a typically impressive and eclectic array of titles.The law librarian works at the juncture of the two disciplines with the most direct interest in the work product that this annual issue represents- law and scholarship. Cavers touched on this fact when he observed that, if "faculty participation would be tolerated, I suggest the appointment of a faculty book-review editor-often the law librarian would be a good choice."3 The law librarian's stock-in-trade is the scholarship of law and, increasingly, other disciplines. Books, in whatever format,4 remain a key source of historical trends, facts and theories, and research paths and leads, all of which support librarians' central professional role in the work of judges, scholars, practitioners, and students. Reviews of these books provide intellectual support for librarians by setting the works in a scholarly framework. And reviews provide practical support by offering critical evaluations that assist librarians in assessing a book's usefulness for a research task or in deciding to purchase books for our collections. In fact, this annual issue of the Michigan Law Review is one of a handful of scholarly book review collections that librarians often use to choose titles to add to library collections.5Others have written about the value of reviews of law-related books and have lamented their decline in the traditional student-run law review.6 My focus instead is on the importance of the books themselves. This is a simple point and self-evident to anyone who has chosen to read this issue of the Michigan Law Review. But I offer the perspective of a librarian, not a legal scholar. How do librarians use books, value them, and seek to preserve their content, from cover to cover?Allow me a few words on the classic "treatise." Librarians often use the word "treatise" as shorthand for a substantial secondary work on a legal topic. Black's Law Dictionary defines a treatise as "[a]n extended, serious, and [usually] exhaustive book on a particular subject."7 This classic, all-encompassing synthesis has seen days of both favor and decline over the history of legal publishing. Some eras in legal history and some areas of law may be more amenable than others to treatment by the classic treatise. Professor Tribe-who famously decided to cease work on his treatise, American Constitutional Law,8 after the first volume of the third edition had been published-had such an ambitious definition for his work. He stated in a letter to Justice Breyer that "if one is aiming at a work that organizes the corpus of decisional law-that identifies, and reflects critically on, the major themes and directions of movement-then this isn't the moment. …