The Law Library

Law library

A law library is a library designed to assist law students, attorneys, judges, and their law clerks and anyone else who finds it necessary to correctly determine the state of the law....

of the United States Congress

United States Congress

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

was established in 1832.

Mission statement

From the Law Library of Congress website:

"The mission of the Law Library of Congress is to provide research and legal information to the U.S. Congress as well as to U.S. Federal Courts and Executive Agencies, and to offer reference services to the public ... To accomplish this mission, it has created the world's largest collection of law books and other legal resources from all countries, and now moves into the age of digitized information with online databases and guides to legal information worldwide."^{http://www.loc.gov/law/public/law-about.html}

The Law Collections in the early years of the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

 was established as an in-house reference library for Congress in 1800, the year the government moved from Philadelphia to the new city of Washington D.C.. Law books made up nearly 20 percent of the initial collection. These were for the most part publications in English and International law

International law

Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...

.

The first Library of Congress was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol Building in 1814. It was replaced by the purchase the library of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

 in 1815. This brought 475 law titles, 318 of which were published in England. It included Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

 laws and court decisions, but material from other states (which Jefferson had classified as "foreign law") remained limited. Although the Library received copies of all federal laws and Supreme Court decisions, obtaining state laws and decisions of state courts remained a problem for decades.

The Supreme Court and the Library

There were repeated efforts to extend the use of what was generally called "The Congress Library" to other government officials and especially to the federal judiciary. The United States Supreme Court sat in the United States Capitol Building from 1801 to 1935. For the first decade of the nineteenth century its Justices could not formally use the Library of Congress, although they may have been able to consult the books with a letter of introduction from a Member of Congress. On March 2, 1812 a Joint Resolution of both Houses of Congresses authorized use of the Library by the justices of the Supreme Court, on whose behalf Chief Justice

Chief Justice of the United States

The Chief Justice of the United States is the head of the United States federal court system and the chief judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Chief Justice is one of nine Supreme Court justices; the other eight are the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States...

 John Marshall

John Marshall

John Marshall was the Chief Justice of the United States whose court opinions helped lay the basis for American constitutional law and made the Supreme Court of the United States a coequal branch of government along with the legislative and executive branches...

 (served 1801-1835) wrote a polite letter thanking Congress for the favor.

Establishment of the Law Library in 1832

The first three decades of the nineteenth century saw repeated unsuccessful attempts to establish a separate Law Library to serve both Congress and the Supreme Court. The initiative came from those members of Congress who had had distinguished legal or judicial careers. On January 20, 1832, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 Senator William L. Marcy

William L. Marcy

William Learned Marcy was an American statesman, who served as U.S. Senator and the 11th Governor of New York, and as the U.S. Secretary of War and U.S. Secretary of State.-Early life:...

, a sometime Associate Judge of the Supreme Court of New York, introduced a bill to "Increase and Improve the Law Department of the Library of Congress." This time, the Bill passed both Houses of Congress and was signed by President Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...

 on July 14, 1832. (The Statute remains in force, now listed as 2 U.S.C. 132, 134, 135, 137.)

The Act directed the Librarian to prepare an "apartment" for the purpose of a law library and to remove the law books from the library into the apartment. The Justices of the Supreme Court were authorized to make rules and regulations for the use of the Law Library during the sitting of the court. The Law Library, however, remained a part of the Library of Congress which was responsible for its incidental expenses.

A sum of $5,000 was appropriated "for the present year" to purchase law books, with $1,000 for each of the next five years. The books would be selected by the Chief Justice. Some 2,011 law books (693 of which had belonged to Thomas Jefferson) were transferred from the general collection, and became the nucleus of a collection that now exceeds 2 million volumes. The Law Library thus acquired its own appropriation and budget line, as well as a statutory relationship with the Supreme Court that would endure until 1935.

Providing legal information to Congress and the Supreme Court

For most of the nineteenth century the Law Library was housed in the former Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building. A spiral staircase connected this with the Court in the room above, and the Custodian of Law (the early title of official later called the Law Librarian) climbed the stair to deliver materials requested by the Justices. The rules of the Law Library, set down by the Chief Justice, permitted the Justices of the Supreme Court, Members of Congress, and some "gentlemen of the bar having a case on the docket" to sign out up to three books from the collection. The Custodian of Law helped patrons to find the law by physically locating a book and putting in their hands. A special collection of major texts and court decisions was reserved for the exclusive use of the Justices.

The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory (1803) and of Florida (1819), which brought property and inheritance systems based on French and Spanish law, provided some incentive for the acquisition of books from the civil law tradition. The first systematic effort to collect foreign law came in 1848 soon after the conclusion of the Mexican War, when Congress directed the Library to obtain all available laws of Mexico. In the second half of the nineteenth century collections of laws of the major European nations were added.

Public service circa 1898

Although the Library of Congress was founded and funded to serve Congress, from the earliest years there was pressure to make its collections available to the public as well as to government officials. By the end of the nineteenth century members of the public were free to consult the collections, although only Members of Congress and a few other officials could borrow books. The Law Library had a few tables, which were usually occupied by students from local law schools.

The Law Librarian's Annual Report for 1898 described a room "about 50 feet square. This cockpit, dim-lighted and inconvenient,... is expected to accommodate the justices, lawyers engaged in cases, the members of the bar in search of light, as well as law students." Service was limited by crowding, short hours, and a small staff who were obligated to serve Congress and the Supreme Court before anyone else. A law reading room with a limited collection was set up in the newly-opened Library of Congress Building in 1897, and eventually the entire collection and staff moved to less crowded quarters in the new building.

Expansion of scope and staff

The twentieth century saw a major expansion of the scope of all Law Library activities. Reference service to the public benefited from a larger and, equally important, a well-catalogued collection. In the first decade of the Twentieth Century the Law Library began a program of publication of authoritative reference works on the laws of the United States and of major foreign nations. After the early 1900s the Law Library was led by a series of Law Librarians with high professional qualifications and previous experience in the practice of law, the foreign service, or academic law schools. They oversaw what became a major on-going program of legal indexing, first for the laws of the United States and then for those of foreign nations.

In 1899 the law collection consisted of 103,000 volumes (including 15,000 duplicates), of which about 10,000 were in foreign languages. By 1950, 150,000 of 750,000 volumes were in foreign languages. The major acquisition of foreign language material came after the Second World War, and reflected the great increase in the absolute number of jurisdictions in the world, the changing position of the United States in world affairs and the deliberate policy of attempting to collect legal material from all jurisdictions.

The 1909 publication of the index to the United States federal statutes, which immediately became a standard reference work for law libraries, marked the beginning of the Law Library's transition from a purely local reference library to a major center for legal research. Law Librarian Dr. Edwin Borchard

Edwin Borchard

Edwin Borchard was a U.S. law professor at Yale University and jurist. He also served as a law librarian in the Law Library of Congress. Was a representative of the ACLU during the Korematsu v. United states Supreme Court Case. Studied and practiced law at Yale University for 34 years.-External...

 began the production of bibliographic guides to the law of foreign countries with the 1912 publication of a guide to the law of Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, followed in 1913 by his own Bibliography of International Law and Continental Law. For the next several decades major publications on the laws of Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, the larger Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

n countries, Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

 and East Asia

East Asia

East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...

 were produced, usually with support from various foundations or government agencies. Initially the work was done by temporary staff or outside experts, but after the mid-1930s the Law Library gradually began adding permanent staff whose primary qualifications were in foreign rather than United States law.

The permanent staff of the Law Library grew from 5 in 1901 to 6 in 1910, stayed at 7 from 1911 through 1921, and numbered 10 in 1924. Their numbers were augmented by sets of temporary workers employed on specific projects and funded either by grants from foundations or by one-time Congressional appropriations. By 1946 the total had increased to 30, and the Law Library requested 30 additional positions to relieve the overburdened staff.

Funding from outside bodies supported the expansion of the Law Library's foreign research capabilities after the Second World War. From 1949 to 1960 the National Committee for a Free Europe

National Committee for a Free Europe

The National Committee for a Free Europe was an American anti-communist organization, founded on March 17, 1949 in New York, which worked for the spreading of American influence in Europe and to oppose Stalin's Soviet occupation and dictatorship...

 supported a staff of 12 lawyers from Eastern European and Baltic countries then under Communist rule. In 1951 the Department of State

United States Department of State

The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...

 began a Far Eastern Law Project, under which refugee scholars from China collected and translated legal material from the newly-established People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

.

By the 1950s the Law Library responded to the manifold problems of trying to find, much less interpret, foreign legal information by striving to, whenever possible, employ individuals trained in the law of the country in question and able to provide authoritative answers in English. The staff of foreign-trained attorneys has, over the years since the late 1940s, included former judges, private practitioners, diplomats and legislative drafters. In fact, the foreign attorneys play a significant role in developing the collection, selecting the most relevant texts and serials for the jurisdictions they cover.

By 1960 the pattern of a Reading Room providing reference service in United States federal and state law and a foreign legal research and reference wing staffed by specialists with expertise in the laws of particular foreign countries was set.

Institutional differentiation

After about 1900, as the volume of acquisitions and the percentage of foreign language materials both increased and the workload of the Supreme Court also increased, the Justices played a diminishing role in the selection of books for the Law Library. The move of the Supreme Court to its own building in 1935, and the establishment of a separate Supreme Court Library of American and British law brought the close institutional relations between the Law Library and the Court to an end. The Law Library continues to support the Supreme Court's needs for information on foreign and international law.

Congress established the Legislative Reference Service (the organizational ancestor of the present Congressional Research Service

Congressional Research Service

The Congressional Research Service , known as "Congress's think tank", is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a...

) in 1914, but for its first decade the LRS was headed by the Law Librarian and much of its work consisted of legal indexing, for both American and foreign law, and responses to Congressional requests about American, International and foreign law.

By the late 1920s the division of labor that endures to the present was established. The RS (later CRS) contains an American Law Section (now Division) working exclusively for Congress and depending on the collection maintained by the Law Library. The Law Library operates the Reading Room, provides reference service in U.S. law to Congress on a priority basis, and is responsible for all reference and research service in foreign, comparative and international law.

Indexing foreign law

Indexes and other finding aids are indispensable tools for legal research

Legal research

Legal research is "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and...

, but the laws of many countries are not well-indexed or available in authoritative or up-to-date codes or collections. The first major project of the Law Library was the 1907-1910 preparation of an index to United States federal statutes, an endeavor funded by a special Congressional appropriation. In 1902 the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Herbert Putnam, proposed a comprehensive index to current legislation from all the countries of the world. He noted that "If accompanied by a reference to preceding statutes or by brief abstracts ... it may become an instrument of the highest value not merely to the theoretic investigator, but to the practical legislator." Although there were far fewer sovereign countries in 1902 than today, Congress's practical legislators refused to fund so ambitious a project. The idea did not die though, and various guides to the legislation of foreign countries were produced as funding permitted.

Legislative indexing was a major activity of the Legislative Reference Service during its first ten years (1916–1924), and the staff of the Law library began keeping a card index to Latin American laws in the late 1920s. This was eventually published as the Index to Latin American Legislation in a two volume set in 1961, with two supplements - in 1973 and 1978 - covering the years from 1961 through 1975. The indexing of Latin American legislation continued, being adapted to existing information-processing technology as it developed from the 1970s through the 1990s.

By the 1990s, indexes and guides to the laws of many developed nations had become available, often on a commercial basis, as electronic files accessible through the Internet. Although not usually available to the general public, the Law Library's legal specialists used these for their research. But, control of a rapidly expanding body of legal information from a growing number of jurisdictions remained a major challenge to legal researchers. One institutional solution arrived at was an international, cooperative network that makes indexes, abstracts and the complete text of new laws available over the Internet. This is the Global Legal Information Network

Global Legal Information Network

The Global Legal Information Network is a cooperative, not-for-profit federation of government agencies or their designees that contribute national legal information to the GLIN database. It is an automated database of statutes, regulations and related material that originate from countries in the...

 (GLIN), which is coordinated by the Law Library of Congress. The Library's foreign law efforts are via its Directorate of Legal Research, which has a staff of foreign–trained lawyers from around the world along with research specialists.

Notable reports issued

In August 2009, the Law Library of Congress issued a controversial and disputed legal opinion

Legal opinion

In law, an opinion is usually a written explanation by a judge or group of judges that accompanies an order or ruling in a case, laying out the rationale and legal principles for the ruling....

 report titled Honduras: Constitutional Law Issues. The report was originally commissioned by Congressman Aaron Schock

Aaron Schock

Aaron Schock is the United States Representative for , serving since 2009. He is a member of the Republican Party. The district is based in Peoria and includes part of Springfield. At the age of , Schock is currently the youngest U.S. representative and the first member of the U.S. Congress born...

 (R.

Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

, Ill.

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

), prepared by Senior Foreign Law Specialist Norma Gutiérrez, and published by the Law Library of Congress. It features a legal analysis of the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis

2009 Honduran constitutional crisis

The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis was a political dispute over plans to rewrite the Constitution of Honduras, which culminated in a coup d'état against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the Honduran military...

 with a specific examination of the legality of President

President of Honduras

This page lists the Presidents of Honduras.Colonial Honduras declared its independence from Spain on 15 September 1821. From 5 January 1822 to 1 July 1823, Honduras was part of the First Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide....

 Manuel Zelaya's

Manuel Zelaya

José Manuel Zelaya Rosales is a politician who was President of Honduras from January 27, 2006 until June 28, 2009. The eldest son of a wealthy businessman, he inherited his father's nickname "Mel," and, before entering politics, was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.Elected...

 28 June 2009 removal from office and expatriation

2009 Honduran coup d'état

The 2009 Honduran coup d'état, part of the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, occurred when the Honduran Army ousted President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile on June 28, 2009. It was prompted by his attempts to schedule a non binding poll on holding a referendum about convening a...

.

Foreign Law Resources

• World Law Bulletin (a monthly publication of the Directorate of Legal Research, through March 2006)
• Global Legal Monitor archive (monthly issues, May 2006-July 2008)
• Global Legal Monitor searchable database

Further Reading

• The Directorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress: A Treasure Hidden Under a Bushel Basket