From roughly 1970 to 2010, law and economics rose from the margins to a dominant position in American legal academia, accompanied by a dramatic increase in citations to law and economics scholarship. Citation analysis is often treated as a proxy for intellectual merit, but that assumption becomes questionable when ideas are advanced through systematic, well-funded, and sustained promotion aimed at serving specific political and economic interests. This study examines the right-wing funding networks that supported the rise of law and economics and analyzes the resulting bibliometric patterns in legal scholarship. By tracing these financial and citation dynamics, the study argues that the ascendancy of law and economics was neither inevitable nor grounded solely in intellectual quality. Instead, it reflects a deliberate strategy to cultivate academic legitimacy for a purportedly neutral but politically targeted, pro-corporate, anti-regulatory legal doctrine-one that has played a significant role in shaping American law, legal education, and public policy over the past half-century.
Legal research instructors can use multiple-choice questions to teach students to learn legal research. Implementing multiple-choice questions in legal research courses not only carries rich pedagogical benefits but also effectively addresses the challenges posed by the new NextGen Bar Exam. Legal research instructors must thoroughly evaluate the overall principles of multiple-choice question design and diligently tailor each element of the multiple-choice questions. They further need to develop policies to support the implementation of multiple-choice questions to maximize their rich potential.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) raises concerns about bias, discrimination, and privacy. Because AI systems rely on existing data, they can replicate and amplify entrenched prejudices, including religious bias. This is particularly concerning in the context of Islamophobia, driven by misinformation about Islam and Muslims. This article examines Islamophobic AI in the United States. It proposes a definition of the concept, reviews how biased datasets reinforce religious discrimination, and analyzes relevant judicial decisions and legislative efforts, including anti-Sharia laws. Finally, it offers a framework for addressing Islamophobia in an era when AI, particularly large language models, increasingly shapes decision-making.
Using the lens of media studies, this article presents a comparative history of the development and use of print and electronic reference sources. It draws on prior studies of Black's Law Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Wikipedia, as well as original research on Wex, the legal encyclopedia created and maintained by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University. This comparison supports more recent refinements of media studies theories, suggesting that the medium does not dictate the message; rather, culture and technology interact dynamically in the development of reference sources.
Citators have long worked behind the scenes, shaping case law and influencing how judges and lawyers view precedent. Yet their creation has been the sole realm of private publishers. As artificial intelligence (AI) is further integrated into citators' creation, the human role is at risk of being automated. This article examines citators' influence over substantive law, the human-in-the-loop justifications for preserving human involvement in citators' creation, and the argument for courts to produce their own citators. By reclaiming this function, the courts can help enhance their legitimacy and preserve the human role in creating structures of legal information in the AI age.
With the recent changes to the American Bar Association (ABA) Standards related to collections, has the time come for an all-digital academic law library? This paper argues that while an academic law library may meet the Standards for ABA Accreditation without physical books, that alone should not be the final determinative factor as to whether the law library needs physical items. That question must look to the needs of the institution in fulfilling its mission.
This article examines the relationship between law librarianship and legal information science in the age of generative AI (GenAI), arguing that closer integration between the two is essential to navigating a rapidly evolving legal information landscape. It contends that law librarianship-long grounded in stable classification systems and cognitive authority-must adopt the analytical methods of legal information science to remain effective in the digital era. Together, these fields can reinforce the rule of law by improving the organization, retrieval, and stability of legal information. The article identifies emerging subfields of legal information science that support this integration and develops several concepts in detail, including rule of law and Thin Theory, Ecologic Holistic Media Theory, heuristics for evaluating GenAI, the relationship between rule of recognition and cognitive authority, and the use of GenAI-informed taxonomies for classifying legal cases. By aligning the core values of law librarianship-intellectual freedom, equitable access, and preservation-with these analytical tools, the article offers a framework for sustaining legal research, education, and access to justice in the GenAI era.
The positives of well-formulated classroom recordings outweigh their potential drawbacks. Sharing class recordings provides diverse groups of law students with a second chance and unprecedented flexibility to learn legal research outside the classroom. It also helps instructors improve their teaching. Carefully tailored plans and measures will minimize potential side effects of associated challenges, such as privacy, copyright, and negative impact on learning issues. It is beneficial and practical for legal research instructors to share classroom recordings with their students to facilitate learning.
Thirty years have passed since a published comparison of natural language and terms and connectors searching in legal databases, and that analysis included only Westlaw. The current study compares natural language and terms and connectors searching in both Westlaw and Lexis for two hypothetical scenarios. Searchers ran four searches for each hypothetical: Lexis natural language, Westlaw natural language, Lexis terms and connectors, and Westlaw terms and connectors. The results showed no statistically significant difference between natural language and terms and connectors for either hypothetical. This suggests it may be appropriate to reduce the time and energy spent teaching law students how to use terms and connectors in searches.
We present empirical data about the status and demographics of academic law library directors in comparison to data on faculty status generally; use historic data to show trends over time; discuss why tenure is declining for directors; and recommend additional support for scholarship, recognition of administration as service in the tenure process, and better uniformity and transparency in directors' position descriptions. The data and insights are timely. The American Bar Association is currently focusing on the status of clinical, writing, and library faculty in accreditation. This article is important for directors, aspiring directors, faculty, deans, and university leaders to guide contract negotiation, retention, and support.
Unlike traditional search engines limited to connecting users to original source content, generative AI systems produce new, ad-hoc sources of information derived primarily from patterns in their training data and information fed into the system as context. As such, generative AI systems can play a mediating role between users and information sources, especially when these systems are integrated into databases and web search engines. This article examines how GPT-4 (ChatGPT) interacts with law review articles, revealing its unreliability in summarizing them independently but notable accuracy when provided with full-text input. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential solution for improving AI accuracy in a more automated way, yet concerns persist about algorithmic bias, authors' rights, and the impact on legal scholarship. Law librarians must carefully consider these factors when determining how their institutions' scholarly work is accessed and used by AI systems.
Students who began law school in the fall of 2023 could be among the first to encounter the NextGen Bar Exam. Examinees will now be required to demonstrate proficiency in legal research to become practicing attorneys. This change provides an opportunity to evaluate the pedagogy employed to prepare students for the bar exam and beyond. Incorporating critical information literacy into the legal research curriculum will enable students to master the analytic and metacognitive skills that will be tested on the NextGen Bar Exam. Law librarians can incorporate these skills into legal research instruction by implementing the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.
The pandemic exposed the struggles of workers everywhere. The complexity of handling family, work, illness, and a host of other issues led many to reconsider their employment. The phrase "The Great Resignation" summed up the zeitgeist of the early pandemic. Concurrently, open positions for academic law librarians were increasing. I sought to unravel the apparent surge in open positions by surveying academic law librarians to discover why they resigned from their positions or considered leaving them during the period of January 2020 through June 2023. These findings were evaluated within the context of a high volume of job postings in an otherwise stable field. This paper presents the quantitative survey results, revealing the complex reasons academic law librarians quit, including career advancement, low salaries, unbalanced workloads, and lack of respect.
Legal academia is likely stuck with law faculty scholarly impact rankings-that is, using citation counts to judge a law faculty's reputation and influence. But why can't we produce better, more useful studies? Current rankings rely on outdated methods. Moreover, these rankings-touted by their creators as objective-suffer from long-standing flaws. They are also grounded in limited understandings of legal citations as sources of information. This paper calls on law librarians to advance legal citation research by adopting methodologies from other information sciences and developing legal citation taxonomies and theories.
It is time for law schools to prepare law students for legal research questions on the NextGen UBE Bar Exam, beginning in July 2026. This article provides resources for law schools and students as they prepare for legal research questions on the NextGen UBE Bar Exam. The article emphasizes the importance of teaching legal research, discusses the addition of legal research to the NextGen UBE Bar Exam, and explains how legal research skills will be assessed. The article explores curricular changes, opportunities for collaboration across the curriculum, and the impact of Generative AI on the NextGen UBE Bar Exam. It recommends a fundamental approach to teaching legal research.
Law libraries have expressed concerns about the ability to hire law librarians and the challenges that may impede new candidates from entering the profession. This article looks at three specific areas-requirement for credentials by hiring libraries, the cost of acquiring those credentials, and changes in U.S. population mobility- to explore how law libraries might adjust their practices to attract more candidates for open and emerging roles.
Law school grading practices often conflict with legal research instruction goals. Small class sizes render norm-referenced (curved) grading unreliable, and the emphasis on ranking students detracts from learning essential skills. Drawing on scholarship on legal education and other disciplines, this article examines several grading approaches that may better serve students and instructors, including criteria-referenced, specification-based, and equitable grading systems. It offers practical suggestions for improving grading practices, such as working with colleagues on assessment design, being intentional about grading formative work, and using anonymous grading. The article concludes with a call for more discussion about grading in legal research courses.
This article evaluates a "disclaimer" statement that the American Law Institute (ALI) recently placed on the Restatement (Second) of Agency, originally published in 1958. The disclaimer asserts that Section 219(2)(d) was not approved by ALI's membership, but this article examines the historical record and finds that according to the documented procedures and proceedings, Section 219(2)(d) was properly included. This article argues that ALI should remove the disclaimer to avoid misleading courts and researchers and undermining the reliability of Restatements as highly persuasive secondary sources.
This article reports the results of a study examining the ability of legal and nonlegal Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform legal analysis using the Issue- Rule-Application-Conclusion (IRAC) framework. LLMs were tested on legal reasoning tasks involving rule analysis and analogical reasoning. The results show that LLMs can conduct basic IRAC analysis, but are limited by brief responses lacking detail, an inability to commit to answers, false confidence, and hallucinations. The study compares legal and non-legal LLMs, identifies shortcomings, and explores traits that may hinder their ability to "think like a lawyer." It also discusses the implications for legal education and practice, highlighting the need for critical thinking skills in future lawyers and the potential pitfalls of over-reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) resulting in a loss of logic, reasoning, and critical thinking skills.
Libraries, archives, and museums are cultural memory organizations responsible for preserving and conveying a culture's story. While they have broad editorial discretion in collection management, they also bear significant responsibility, relying on professionals with the expertise to make complex decisions. Practical constraints-such as space, finances, and biases-necessitate content-based limitations and collection policies. This article examines collection management through legal concepts like pure speech, expressive conduct, and state actor status under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, distinguishing viewpoint discrimination from content-based discrimination. It also explores ethical decision-making through the lenses of justice, virtue, and the common good.
