Happy New Year, CALL!
As CALL and the Bulletin move into 2025, we’d like to remind you that the Bulletin is yours–and is here for you! Do you have ideas you’d like to share? Columns you’d like to write? Let us know!
Are there changes in your life you’d like to share? We’d love to hear those as well! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your editors. We can’t wait to hear from you!
First of all, I want to say how very thankful we are for Matt Timko and all he has done with the Bulletin since 2018 in his role as editor. Moving forward, Emily Barney will continue on as a “corporate memory” editor to provide tech training and access to the new team and Stacia Stein has stepped up to a new role as co-editor of the Bulletin.
For this issue, we hope you’ll take the time to review the work so many CALL members on committees and in the Executive Board were busy with in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. Here are a few of the highlights:
This summer, of course, included the AALL 2023 Annual meeting. In Mandy Lee’s inaugural President’s letter, she highlights how CALL stood out at the AALL 2023 meeting. Eugene Guidice shares his own take on the conference in his grantee report titled “It Was All About AI…..Or Was it?”
If you missed any of the 4 events hosted by Continuing Education 2022-2023, be sure to check their Annual Report where they’ve shared links to the Zoom recordings and some slides from events focused on recent IL legislation, ABA policies, and specialized legal research strategies.
Thanks to Clare Willis for her recap of the September CALL Business Meeting with Steven Schwinn and his discussion of SCOTUS trends with the administrative state and the implications of recent cases for the separation of powers.
CALL Award Profiles
While the 2023 Honorees were announced back at the May 2023 Business Meeting and shared in the Bulletin, we’re glad to include more details about each person in this issue:
Of course this is just the tip of the broad ranging work done within CALL in the last year, as you can find in the 16 more articles in the Table of Contents for Issue #268, with more details from the CALL Executive Board and our standing committees.
As we reflect on all the work done in the last year and what’s to come, we’re looking forward to working with Caitlin Archer-Helke, Shannon Conder, and Rachel Ford on the Bulletin committee.
Seeing so much great work done across all the CALL Committees makes us eager to bring in more examples throughout the year to highlight opportunities for members to connect and learn throughout our organization. With this current team, we are looking for ways to make the Bulletin editing more collaborative.
As I mentioned at the end of our last virtual CALL Business Meeting, we’d also like to help CALL members find what they’re interested here: if you have topics you’d like to learn more about from fellow CALL members, feel free to reach out to Stacia and me with “writing prompts” we can use to find and share the expertise available within our membership.
featured photo is Chicago Skyline Sunset from Promontory Point,
an older summer photo Emily took back in 2016
Another CALL Year has closed, and we say goodbye to one president while welcoming another. Scott Vanderlin gives his last message as President, and we welcome Mandy Lee as the new CALL President at the May Business Meeting at Osterio Via Stato (where Judge Jesse Reyes spoke). Continue reading Letter from the Editors
On April 7, The Mentorship & Leadership Development and the Continue Education Committees hosted a virtual panel discussion on adaptive leadership. Panelists included Eugene Giudice (Dentons US LLP). Joanne Kiley (HBR Consulting) and Mandy Lee (Chicago-Kent College of Law Library). Heidi Kuehl (NIU College of Law) moderated the panel. Continue reading MLDC Recent Webinar on Adaptive Leadership
The 2021-2022 Mentorship and Leadership Development Committee (MLDC) was comprised of Brandy Ellis, Sally Holterhoff, Heidi Kuehl, Lyonette Louis-Jacques, and Stacia Stein (chair). Mandy Lee served as CALL Board Liaison. The Committee sought to connect with new members and promote leadership development through 4 main initiatives: Continue reading CALL Mentorship and Leadership Development Committee 2021-2022 Annual Report
Thanks to a generous grant from CALL, I was able to attend the virtual AALL Management Institute in March 2021 The Management Institute is a two-day immersion which ambitiously aims to prepare “managers to thrive in uncertainty, confidently navigate conflict, and build commitment to strategic goals.” Continue reading Grantee Report: AALL Management Institute
Determined to eke out every last bit of knowledge from my library school experience, I’ve been asking my colleagues and fellow CALL members if there was anything they wished they would have learned in library school. Meanwhile, I’ve also been combing through job descriptions for clues, and reflecting on my own education and what I perceive as its gaps and its successes. Continue reading Things I Wish I’d Learned in Library School
I should have known from my choice of Hepburn & Tracy movies that I was destined to be a librarian. Adam’s Rib, where the two played married lawyers on opposite sides of the courtroom, was enjoyable, but Desk Set, which took place in the library of a broadcasting network in New York, was always my favorite. It is a classic story of technology vs. humans—with a little romance and holiday spirit thrown in for good measure! Bunny Watson, as portrayed by Katherine Hepburn, was so knowledgeable. She knew every resource in the library and had ready the answer to every question—even faster than a computer!
Librarianship has come a long way since the Desk Set[1] days, when technology and humans vied for supremacy in a library. Computers and technology are now integral to research. Continue reading ABA TECHSHOW Roundtable
This semester I am taking a class in Middle East Librarianship. As part of the course, I have been tasked to select 10-15 reference works that should be part of any basic Middle East reference collection.
In order to determine what these resources ought to be, I developed a few research strategies. First, I narrowed the focus to resources that would be useful in an academic law library. This required additional consideration because there are many legal jurisdictions within the Middle East. To address each jurisdiction separately would require more than 10-15 reference works.
Therefore, I decided to further narrow the focus to resources that deal with Islamic law generally or that provide useful background on Islam for the legal scholar. Secondly, because of my own language limitations, I chose to look only at resources aimed at English speakers. Finally, I also wanted to have a nice mix of databases, serials and monographs in the collection.
In order to determine what the most useful resources might be, I looked at various libguides at libraries with well-known Mid-East collections. When available, I also tried to find reviews of the sources to flesh out scope, perspective and intended audience. I also consulted In Custodia Legis – the blog for the Law Librarians of Congress, and Int-Law listserv’s public message archives. Are there any key resources that I missed? Are there any research strategies I should have applied?
In his book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (Knopf, 2015), Justice Stephen Breyer examines the ways in which foreign law and circumstances impact the Supreme Court. Many of Justice Breyer’s critics often disapprove of the Justice’s global outlook. In writing this book, Justice Breyer aims, in part, to put his critics’ anxieties about national sovereignty “in perspective.” So, what is the perspective of Justice Breyer?
Justice Breyer defines the Court and the World broadly, dividing the book into four categories: Part I examines how the Court can effectively protect basic liberties in the face of security threats; Part II focuses on statutory interpretation and asks: Can American statutes be understood to open the doors of American courts to foreign victims of human rights abuses? And what is the geographical reach of commercial statutes?; Part III considers how the Court interprets treaties that concern unfamiliar subjects; and Part IV looks at the extent to which exchanges between judges and lawyers of different nations help judges reach better decisions.
Justice Breyer backs up his main points with copious and detailed examples, making this book a valuable, if sometimes dry, resource. In fact, a casual book reviewer might be inclined to crack open a beer (Lagunitas … Born Yesterday… Fresh. Hoppy. Invigorating. However, this is a book review, not a beer review!) to get through the last 100 or so pages.
Continue reading Book Review – The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities
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