Librarians don’t come across as folks who storm the Bastille. But when the 118th annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries met in Portland this week under a banner exhorting the group to “Be Bold,” deep thoughts about the Dewey decimal system gave way to revolutionary resolve.
In his keynote address, Roosevelt Weeks, the Fort Bend County library director, reaffirmed the core values of the profession to serve the public and preserve knowledge. And that calling requires librarians to be both “strategic and subversive,” prompting a cathartic release from an assembled body battered by an assault of budget cuts and book bans. Step outside the comfort zone to make sure the money people understand the library’s importance and make sure the customer gets the knowledge they seek at a time where powerful interests keep throwing up roadblocks. It sparked the librarian equivalent of running through a wall after a locker room speech: filing out of the room in an orderly fashion.
The attendees needed this sort of a pep talk to heal some cracks in solidarity. Rumbling under the buzz of the vendor hall, some public-side librarians harbored some frustration toward their private-sector counterparts. It’s a professional conference and not Real Housewives so I never had the opportunity to Andy Cohen my way through the dispute, but the folks suffering the brunt of DOGE-fueled haphazard budget cuts and “wokeness” crackdowns orchestrated by grandstanding politicos feel a little abandoned by Biglaw and private school librarians keeping their heads down. If it’s a professional organization, where’s the professional support?
It’s a dicey situation though. When Biglaw managing partners cower in fear whenever Trump talks, a Biglaw firm librarian doesn’t necessarily enjoy the freedom to stand up in righteous indignation. That’s how authoritarianism works: atomize communities to divide and conquer. Forcing rifts within the guild is the whole play. It’s also further support for the need to be “strategic and subversive.” Recognize that not everyone can fight the same fight the same way, but those who can’t fight can’t forfeit their obligation to find creative avenues to support their colleagues.
Because, as the experience of Biglaw surrender firms shows, the machine can and will come for the private sector soon enough.
A panel on media literacy briefed librarians on the struggle against disinformation. Or how civilization is circling the drain while we play whack-a-mole with InfoWars. Randy Blazak, Chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, framed the discussion through the work of Emile Durkheim. You know, like most lawyer conversations. But specifically, Durkheim’s concept of anomie: a condition of normlessness where people suffer free-floating dismay at their inability to cope. Durkheim’s work focused on a rise in suicide during industrialization. Today it’s getting into QAnon to deal with the fact that minorities live down the street. There’s a reason Make America Great Again never gets too explicit about what they mean by “great.”
The descent into crazy has long been a funnel, taking mainstream conservative thought at the top and watching as some of those Republican Rotarians get a little too into anti-government rhetoric and then QAnon and then zip-tying a member of Congress. And then, obviously, getting a senior DOJ post in this administration. But the mouth of the funnel is wider than ever post-COVID and the process is compressed. The red-pill brick road from anti-vaxxing to January 6 is a lot shorter than it was from William F. Buckley to Oklahoma City.
Librarians can’t fix everything, but they do serve as a key intervention point in the disinformation process. For law librarians, they can tend the switch that diverts the next sovereign citizen. It’s a little like a flu shot in the middle of a bioweapon attack, but it’s a role that the librarians can uniquely fill.
A panel on the librarian’s role in historical research provided an unintentional counterpoint. If the morning session addressed fighting disinformation, this one involved librarians being used to manufacture it. With originalist judges getting high on 18th-century vibes, librarians are tasked with compiling the material that feeds that fuels that judicial addiction. Some quantitative data from the session revealed that the Supreme Court — in particular the conservatives — are increasingly citing endogenous materials outside of any of the briefs. And while judges should endeavor to get the right answer regardless of the briefing, the briefs have the benefit of surviving the adversarial process. When a judge yanks a book from obscurity and tells the parties, “interesting argument, but anyway I read this instead” it undermines the deliberative process.
Anyway, it’s the librarians gathering all that endogenous history at the behest of the justices. And certainly it’s their job to deliver for their customers, it just felt like a process designed to enable the worst impulses in disingenuous jurists. For example, judges prefer online materials for the same reasons of convenience we all do, but this by its nature exclude wide swaths of actual history. Librarians, by and large don’t want to deliver half the story just because it’s the only part that someone bothered to digitize, but that’s what the courts demand. One librarian noted taking the time to learn corpus linguistics to serve judges who might request the fashionable academic tool to abuse in search of a cherry-picked textual meaning. Apparently, no judge had yet taken up that service at the library in question, but maybe it’s because they’ve already started using AI for all their fake language history needs.
Hell, soon the Federalist Society won’t need librarians at all! As the research presented at the panel revealed, justices (and presumably the judges copying them) are citing more secondary sources these days. Research can be so darn inconvenient for reverse engineering a result, but prepackaged, pseudo-historical law reviews written by intellectual fellow travelers provide an end run around the academic rigor librarians bring to the process. Get some FedSoc flunkies to slap together some historical-ish footnotes and get it published by some 2L journal staff hoping to bolster their future clerkship prospects!
It’s not so much research as it’s intellectual laundering.
Bringing us, inevitably, to the robots.
Like everywhere else in 2025, artificial intelligence dominated the conference. The vendor hall provided an AI petting zoo showing off the proprietary work being done to herd large language models into professionally responsible pens. Law librarians may not control the tech budget, but they might be the fiercest internal constituency a vendor can nurture. They survived the digital revolution and came out the other side as knowledge managers… they will hold a lot of sway in how the next phase of legal research plays out.
Yet for all its promise, AI is already part of the legal research problem. Stephen Embry already wrote about the risk AI poses to the very development of critical thinking skills. But the decision to jam AI into everything causes fundamental research miscues too. No one writes a brief off Google, but sometimes you need a basic internet search just to figure out where to even begin. But now users don’t even go into the various primary resources the engine finds because there’s a half-assed summary at the top that dissuades anyone from scrolling down.
This even came up in at the conference — during the originalism panel, someone mentioned Elena Kagan saying “we’re all originalists now” at her confirmation hearings. Except she didn’t. The “we’re all ______ now” construction comes from Kagan’s 2015 Harvard Law School lecture where she said we’re all textualists now.” During her confirmation hearings, in response to an inquiry about the Framers and search and seizure, Kagan said, “sometimes they laid down very specific rules. Sometimes they laid down broad principles. Either way we apply what they say, what they meant to do. So in that sense, we are all originalists.”
A minor distinction to be sure, especially when you remember textualism and originalism are just advertising copy for the same garbage jurisprudence. BUT, the error made its way into the session because when you ask Google you get:
This is the slop people have to wade through now. As John Adams might say, “vibes are stubborn suggestions.” That’s an exact quote I’m sure because AI tells me so.
Librarians form the last line of defense against an information apocalypse. It’s not just those budget cuts and book bans. They’re also watching AI slop supercharge disinformation campaigns and casually mislead users while being told that the real threat to democracy is a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are. Law librarians may not face the latter problem as often but as the guardians of the body of legal research that undergirds a common law system, they’re fighting off all the other problems while being told they’re going to be replaced by a mansplaining machine spitting out fake cases.
It’s an all around depressing moment. But one that the librarians can face down if they’re strategic and subversive enough.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post The Revolution Will Be Card Cataloged: Dispatches From The Law Librarian Frontlines appeared first on Above the Law.
Librarians don’t come across as folks who storm the Bastille. But when the 118th annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries met in Portland this week under a banner exhorting the group to “Be Bold,” deep thoughts about the Dewey decimal system gave way to revolutionary resolve.
In his keynote address, Roosevelt Weeks, the Fort Bend County library director, reaffirmed the core values of the profession to serve the public and preserve knowledge. And that calling requires librarians to be both “strategic and subversive,” prompting a cathartic release from an assembled body battered by an assault of budget cuts and book bans. Step outside the comfort zone to make sure the money people understand the library’s importance and make sure the customer gets the knowledge they seek at a time where powerful interests keep throwing up roadblocks. It sparked the librarian equivalent of running through a wall after a locker room speech: filing out of the room in an orderly fashion.
The attendees needed this sort of a pep talk to heal some cracks in solidarity. Rumbling under the buzz of the vendor hall, some public-side librarians harbored some frustration toward their private-sector counterparts. It’s a professional conference and not Real Housewives so I never had the opportunity to Andy Cohen my way through the dispute, but the folks suffering the brunt of DOGE-fueled haphazard budget cuts and “wokeness” crackdowns orchestrated by grandstanding politicos feel a little abandoned by Biglaw and private school librarians keeping their heads down. If it’s a professional organization, where’s the professional support?
It’s a dicey situation though. When Biglaw managing partners cower in fear whenever Trump talks, a Biglaw firm librarian doesn’t necessarily enjoy the freedom to stand up in righteous indignation. That’s how authoritarianism works: atomize communities to divide and conquer. Forcing rifts within the guild is the whole play. It’s also further support for the need to be “strategic and subversive.” Recognize that not everyone can fight the same fight the same way, but those who can’t fight can’t forfeit their obligation to find creative avenues to support their colleagues.
Because, as the experience of Biglaw surrender firms shows, the machine can and will come for the private sector soon enough.
A panel on media literacy briefed librarians on the struggle against disinformation. Or how civilization is circling the drain while we play whack-a-mole with InfoWars. Randy Blazak, Chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, framed the discussion through the work of Emile Durkheim. You know, like most lawyer conversations. But specifically, Durkheim’s concept of anomie: a condition of normlessness where people suffer free-floating dismay at their inability to cope. Durkheim’s work focused on a rise in suicide during industrialization. Today it’s getting into QAnon to deal with the fact that minorities live down the street. There’s a reason Make America Great Again never gets too explicit about what they mean by “great.”
The descent into crazy has long been a funnel, taking mainstream conservative thought at the top and watching as some of those Republican Rotarians get a little too into anti-government rhetoric and then QAnon and then zip-tying a member of Congress. And then, obviously, getting a senior DOJ post in this administration. But the mouth of the funnel is wider than ever post-COVID and the process is compressed. The red-pill brick road from anti-vaxxing to January 6 is a lot shorter than it was from William F. Buckley to Oklahoma City.
Librarians can’t fix everything, but they do serve as a key intervention point in the disinformation process. For law librarians, they can tend the switch that diverts the next sovereign citizen. It’s a little like a flu shot in the middle of a bioweapon attack, but it’s a role that the librarians can uniquely fill.
A panel on the librarian’s role in historical research provided an unintentional counterpoint. If the morning session addressed fighting disinformation, this one involved librarians being used to manufacture it. With originalist judges getting high on 18th-century vibes, librarians are tasked with compiling the material that feeds that fuels that judicial addiction. Some quantitative data from the session revealed that the Supreme Court — in particular the conservatives — are increasingly citing endogenous materials outside of any of the briefs. And while judges should endeavor to get the right answer regardless of the briefing, the briefs have the benefit of surviving the adversarial process. When a judge yanks a book from obscurity and tells the parties, “interesting argument, but anyway I read this instead” it undermines the deliberative process.
Anyway, it’s the librarians gathering all that endogenous history at the behest of the justices. And certainly it’s their job to deliver for their customers, it just felt like a process designed to enable the worst impulses in disingenuous jurists. For example, judges prefer online materials for the same reasons of convenience we all do, but this by its nature exclude wide swaths of actual history. Librarians, by and large don’t want to deliver half the story just because it’s the only part that someone bothered to digitize, but that’s what the courts demand. One librarian noted taking the time to learn corpus linguistics to serve judges who might request the fashionable academic tool to abuse in search of a cherry-picked textual meaning. Apparently, no judge had yet taken up that service at the library in question, but maybe it’s because they’ve already started using AI for all their fake language history needs.
Hell, soon the Federalist Society won’t need librarians at all! As the research presented at the panel revealed, justices (and presumably the judges copying them) are citing more secondary sources these days. Research can be so darn inconvenient for reverse engineering a result, but prepackaged, pseudo-historical law reviews written by intellectual fellow travelers provide an end run around the academic rigor librarians bring to the process. Get some FedSoc flunkies to slap together some historical-ish footnotes and get it published by some 2L journal staff hoping to bolster their future clerkship prospects!
It’s not so much research as it’s intellectual laundering.
Bringing us, inevitably, to the robots.
Like everywhere else in 2025, artificial intelligence dominated the conference. The vendor hall provided an AI petting zoo showing off the proprietary work being done to herd large language models into professionally responsible pens. Law librarians may not control the tech budget, but they might be the fiercest internal constituency a vendor can nurture. They survived the digital revolution and came out the other side as knowledge managers… they will hold a lot of sway in how the next phase of legal research plays out.
Yet for all its promise, AI is already part of the legal research problem. Stephen Embry already wrote about the risk AI poses to the very development of critical thinking skills. But the decision to jam AI into everything causes fundamental research miscues too. No one writes a brief off Google, but sometimes you need a basic internet search just to figure out where to even begin. But now users don’t even go into the various primary resources the engine finds because there’s a half-assed summary at the top that dissuades anyone from scrolling down.
This even came up in at the conference — during the originalism panel, someone mentioned Elena Kagan saying “we’re all originalists now” at her confirmation hearings. Except she didn’t. The “we’re all ______ now” construction comes from Kagan’s 2015 Harvard Law School lecture where she said we’re all textualists now.” During her confirmation hearings, in response to an inquiry about the Framers and search and seizure, Kagan said, “sometimes they laid down very specific rules. Sometimes they laid down broad principles. Either way we apply what they say, what they meant to do. So in that sense, we are all originalists.”
A minor distinction to be sure, especially when you remember textualism and originalism are just advertising copy for the same garbage jurisprudence. BUT, the error made its way into the session because when you ask Google you get:
This is the slop people have to wade through now. As John Adams might say, “vibes are stubborn suggestions.” That’s an exact quote I’m sure because AI tells me so.
Librarians form the last line of defense against an information apocalypse. It’s not just those budget cuts and book bans. They’re also watching AI slop supercharge disinformation campaigns and casually mislead users while being told that the real threat to democracy is a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are. Law librarians may not face the latter problem as often but as the guardians of the body of legal research that undergirds a common law system, they’re fighting off all the other problems while being told they’re going to be replaced by a mansplaining machine spitting out fake cases.
It’s an all around depressing moment. But one that the librarians can face down if they’re strategic and subversive enough.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
