Anthony Aycock - The Accidental Law Librarian

A few years ago, a staff member at the county public library called the law library where I was working. This was a small North Carolina county with a small library system, and she was calling from one of the branch librariesthe smallest branch, as I recall. This staff member had a patron with a legal question that she couldnt answer and wanted to know if she could send him my way.

Sure, I said, and hung up, thinking I would probably never hear from the patron. When you work in a law library, referrals from public libraries are uncommon, for two main reasons. First, many people who learn they have to drive to another library to tell their story to another librarian simply decide to go home and look up the answer to their question online (not always a good decision, as you will see in this book). The other reason is that many public librarians are unfamiliar with the law libraries in their own area. So, Ill admit that I was surprised by the call I am telling you about.

While I didnt expect the patron to show up, he did, later that same day. He looked about 60, with cotton-white hair and a weathered face, and he walked with the proto-shuffle of a lifelong day laborer. The guyIll call him Dandid not appear to be a lawyer, doctor, professor, architect, stockbroker, artist, or any of the other educated classes. I figured that he probably just wanted to expunge a criminal record (a process spelled out in the North Carolina General Statutes) or locate documents from an old court case (something he would have to go to the courthouse for), and I steeled myself for a lengthy, incoherent encounter.

Dan surprised and shamed me by being well-spoken. He had inherited his fathers house, which sat close to the highway. The Department of Transportation was preparing an offer for this property for a right-of-way, and he was going to meet with them in a few days. Dan wanted to know what questions to ask, what the offer would be based on, and what, if anything, he could do if he didnt like the offer. I heard him toss around words like judgment and easement. To a lawyer, these are terms of art. To the public, they can be as mysterious as Anatolian hieroglyphs.

When he finished his tale, I gave him my standard reply: Thats a huge research project. I say this about all but the simplest requests, not to deter patrons (though some need deterring, such as the ones who want to sue the President or Donald Trump or Satan) but to prepare them. Most legal questions are complex, and truth is a mosaic of facts, not a spectrum. Dan looked at me, undeterred. We have computers with internet access, I suggested, thinking he would be happy if he could sit down and bang keywords into Google. Dan, however, was doubtful: Dont you have books, too?

Well, yes, but it depended on what he wanted. He had said he was interested in cases. To most people, cases means copies of court documents: complaint, answer, judges order, etc. Sometimes, what they really want to know is the amount of money paid by the loser of the case. This is called the judgment. There are books, journals, and newsletters that publish certain judgments, but these tend to be headline cases, ones where the plaintiff got, say, $10 million for having the wrong leg amputated. The average litigant needs run-of-the-mill judgments, which you can get only by visiting the courthouse where a case was tried and asking for a case by docket number. I told Dan this, and he furrowed his brow. When I lived in Florida, he said, I was able to look up cases in law books.

He was talking about case reporters, which publish the rulings of cases on appeal (see ). Now