In response to Mr. Seale:
I started to post a response to the "law schools have free CALR"
comment the other day, but restrained myself. At this point, I'll
just say that Mr. Seale is confusing the issue of helping pro se
litigants with the issue of access to online legal research sources.
The former has little to do with the citation debate. The latter is
simply an example of the use of market power by a couple of
publishing giants.
For me to provide access to Lexis or Westlaw for ANYONE other than
law faculty and students, is a breach of the library's licensing
agreement and quite possibly the crime of theft of services. I can,
and do, help both lawyers and pro se litigants routinely with paper
and cd-rom resources. I also help them with access to resources on
Internet, using our WWW server.
But LEXIS and Westlaw have successfully imposed a restrictive use
agreement on academic law libraries. (Ironic, because more than one
area attorney has chosen to subscribe to cd-rom sources after coming
in and trying them out here.) The citation requirements/copyright
issue simply means that competition in the area of electronic legal
research has been severely limited. This limitation of competition
means that lawyers and pro se litigants using this library, whose
taxes pay much of the tab for our resources, will continue to miss out
on the advantages of enhanced electronic research sources.
A law librarian can provide assistance without practicing law just as
a medical librarian can without practicing medicine. There is a vast
literature on this subject. It is hardly relevant here. Mr. Seale
pays taxes that fund public law schools, and at least in this
library, he would be welcome to use all our materials. But he cannot
use CALR here, for reasons that have nothing to do with reference
practices. West and MEAD have seen to that quite apart from any
library policies which may or may not be desirable.
Claudia Driver
Assistant Law Librarian
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 72701
(501)575-7506
cdriver@mercury.uark.edu
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