I feel like I got a pretty decent law librarian education for my tuition dollar and still look to many of my old teachers down there in Furthest Tucson for mentorship, so it's with nothing but affection and respect that I say I have become convinced that they were dead wrong about print having a place in generalized legal research for the foreseeable future.
First, a few words in defense of print. As a librarian, I end up going to the print for a lot of my research. The example immediately springing to mind here is legislative history research, which tends to be easier for me to get through quickly in print given the chronological/sequential organization of Public Laws/Acts; I find United States Code Congressional and Administrative News to be much simpler to use in print than on Westlaw*, for instance, because online I'd need to search based on terms, whereas in print all I really need to know is the Public Law number, which of course I'm already going to know if I'm futzing around with legislative history research to begin with. Basically, the best thing print research has going for it is that a book is a book. When encountering a new print treatise from a publisher whose work you've never used, you won't need to learn a new interface for the pages or a new search logic for the table of contents and index. You can find what you need and just get out.
The problem with all this, though, is that it's fantastically easy for me to wax poetic on the convenience and simplicity of print given that I actually work in a goddamn library and so have unfettered access to a collection that could only be considered "modest" by moonman academic standards. This is, in my opinion, where legal research instructors lose their students time and again: if you present the best practices of legal research in the context of a print collection that your students know cost millions of dollars and years of CD/Acquisition labor to put together, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars (conservatively) a year to update, to maintain fitness for the purpose you are explaining, at least a good number of them are going to come to the eminently reasonable conclusion that the skills you're teaching are frankly not worth very much if they rely on that kind of overhead.
This is further complicated by the fact that not only is an academic law library itself pretty exceptional, it's also quite isolated, which is to say that for most practitioners, if the idea of using a deep print collection over a broad online one like Wexis didn't fall apart on the basis of cost (it does), it almost certainly would on the basis of time. It's often easy to for academics to forget that for most people, the library isn't Right Over There. If you're a practitioner in an urban or suburban area, you're looking at maybe two or three functional law libraries in your county provided you're lucky enough to be around a law school, complete with an hour round-trip drive time. All time you aren't billing.
The problem with all this, though, is that it's fantastically easy for me to wax poetic on the convenience and simplicity of print given that I actually work in a goddamn library and so have unfettered access to a collection that could only be considered "modest" by moonman academic standards. This is, in my opinion, where legal research instructors lose their students time and again: if you present the best practices of legal research in the context of a print collection that your students know cost millions of dollars and years of CD/Acquisition labor to put together, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars (conservatively) a year to update, to maintain fitness for the purpose you are explaining, at least a good number of them are going to come to the eminently reasonable conclusion that the skills you're teaching are frankly not worth very much if they rely on that kind of overhead.
This is further complicated by the fact that not only is an academic law library itself pretty exceptional, it's also quite isolated, which is to say that for most practitioners, if the idea of using a deep print collection over a broad online one like Wexis didn't fall apart on the basis of cost (it does), it almost certainly would on the basis of time. It's often easy to for academics to forget that for most people, the library isn't Right Over There. If you're a practitioner in an urban or suburban area, you're looking at maybe two or three functional law libraries in your county provided you're lucky enough to be around a law school, complete with an hour round-trip drive time. All time you aren't billing.
Unless you're padding.
But that's for a different blog.
*some smartypants will note that USCCAN only goes back to 2000 on Westlaw and that the short historical coverage is a pretty consistent pattern in online legal databases, but I maintain that if consumers really needed and demanded the full run of USCCAN on Westlaw, TW would put it up. The silence is, I think, instructive, but we've got to teach LH anyway, so please bear with our hypotheticals that pretend the courts in your jurisdiction haven't already ironed out pretty much every ambiguity in a major piece of legislation from 50 years ago.
