Accessible legal research tools needed for justice (1910)

As the situation now stands, it is impracticable for the average litigant always to get Justice in the average case, for the lawyer he employs often can not properly investigate all the law, that is the multifarious and conflicting authorities, and prepare his briefs without an expenditure of labor and of time out of all proportion to the real value of the services to the client. Often an astute lawyer, either by reason of his ability, his ingenuity or his good fortune, locates or stumbles across a line of authorities which, while not correct in principle, are sufficiently weighty to impress the trial Judge, and the lawyer on the other side is either not sufficiently learned or sufficiently industrious to get the correct decisions on the other side which conflict with and which, if used in argument, would overcome those presented by his opponent. This results in more mistakes and errors in Trial Courts than should occur, and often, indeed very generally, it is impossible, for financial reasons, for the loser to take an appeal.

Lucien Hugh Alexander, Memorandum in re Corpus Juris, 22 Green Bag 59, 84 (1910)

Professor Values Quotation Books. Also RAs.

It's amazing how four or five quotation books and a good research assistant can cover for my lack of education.

C. Steven Bradford, The Gettysburg Address as Written by Law Students Taking an Exam, 86 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1094, 1102 n. 42 (1992)

Detective V.I. Warshawski Gets a Computer

An hour with the library's computer specialist reinforced my need to buy my own machine. Not that the specialist wasn't helpful—she was, very. But the amount of information available at the end of a phone line was so great, and my need for it so strong, that it didn't make sense to be dependent on the hours the library was open.

Sara Paretsky, Guardian Angel (New York: Dell, 1993), p. 215

Justice O'Connor on Libraries

 In my work a good library is essential. It enables me to learn the background and previous discussion of the various issues I am called upon to decide. It provides the stability and continuity for the rule of law.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, quoted in 24 American Libraries 1048 (Dec. 1993)

Vision of Library, 1876

The time was when a library was very like a museum, and a librarian was a mouser in musty books, and visitors looked with curious eyes at ancient tomes and manuscripts. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is in the highest sense a teacher, and the visitor is a reader among the books as a workman among his tools.

Melvil Dewey, The Profession, American Library Journal 1 (1876): 5-6 (reprinted in Sarah K. Vann, ed., Melvil Dewey: His Enduring Presence in Librarianship (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978)

Weddington Went to the Library

That question was not something I had studied in Constitutional Law or in any other law school class, but I knew what to say: "I do not know, but I will go to the library and look it up." That trip to the library twenty-one years ago began a journey that has never ended and has brought me here today.

Sarah Weddington, Roe v. Wade: Past and Future, 24 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 601, 602 (1990)

Need to Guard Against Gradual Oppression

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of the change in the air—however sight—lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.

William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters, p. 162 (Melvin Urofsky ed., 1987) (Sept. 10, 1976, letter to Young Lawyers Section of Washington State Bar Association)