critical legal studies

Hartog on Hurst, and Why Zotero 6 is a Total Game-Changer

Today’s Read:
Hendrik Hartog, Four Fragments on Doing Legal History, or Thinking with and Against Willard Hurst, Law and History Review, v. 39, issue 4, pp. 835-865 (Nov. 2021) (Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248021000626)

In my last post, I talked about how I still get Harper’s magazine in print in the mail and like to mark it up with a pen. I even showed a picture of the ink-covered article that I was discussing. At the time, I really thought that nothing could match pen-and-ink annotating of printed-out articles.

Reader, I may have been mis-informed.

One of our SJD students is also one of my Twitter mutuals. He tweeted out a link to this article by Hendrik Hartog this morning and said that he “couldn’t get it out of his head.” If that is not a compelling invitation to read and blog about an article, I don’t know what is.

I’ll get to some substance about the article in a minute, but first let me talk about why this experience has shown me that Zotero 6 is, truly, a game-changer.

I have been, at best, a half-hearted Zotero user in the past. I recently had to get a new laptop at work, which meant downloading and installing the newest version of the app, Zotero 6. I have offered Zotero training to our researchers for a few years now, since it is the only CMS that Harvard offers university-wide for free, and some of our LLM and SJD students have reported that it really helped them stay organized and efficient. This is why I forced myself to use it before – so that I knew exactly what it could do and answer questions from students about it.

With the release of Zotero 6 in April 2022, the platform now comes with a built-in PDF Reader and Note Editor.

Y’all, the stuff just got real with this new feature.

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Equitable Information Access and Librarianship Praxis: Let’s Get Critical

Today’s Read:
Lauren Smith & Michael Hanson
Communities of Praxis: Transforming Access to Information for Equity
The Serials Librarian, v. 76, nos. 1-4, pp. 42-49
DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2019.1593015

I recently submitted a proposal to write a chapter on Critical Legal Studies for a new library science textbook, and it was accepted.

In the proposal, I used the Critical Legal Studies research guide I created for our library to create a framework for the future book chapter. Basically, I want to get the content of this guide into some kind of written form, since library research guides have a bit of an ephemeral quality.

While the chapter will be primarily about critical studies in law, it will also include some basic information about critical librarianship. I want to encourage future law librarians consider issues of disproportionate representation and information access in their own professional practice. Or, put another way, I hope that they will choose to incorporate praxis into their practice of librarianship.

For this reason, this recent article from The Serials Librarian caught my eye, and I decided to blog about it. The article is based on a presentation given by Lauren Smith at the 2018 NASIG (formerly the North American Serials Interest Group) conference. In her talk, Smith discussed three themes that are necessary to “democratize” information, which means making sure that all people are empowered to exercise their right to access it: power, praxis, and privilege.

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Diving into Legal Pragmatism

Citation:
Michael Sullivan, Legal Pragmatism: Community, Rights, and Democracy (2007), introduction and chapter 4, https://www.worldcat.org/title/legal-pragmatism-community-rights-and-democracy/oclc/219688202&referer=brief_results

It is likely that we have arrived at my final blog entry for this year. I am travelling the next few weeks and cannot promise that I will read and blog something scholarly while I am away. I have not had a vacation in a very long time and hope to enjoy some downtime reading for fun.

I finished several research guides this past year, and I am especially pleased at how two of them in particular turned out:

These two guides were definitely a bit of a stretch for me. I do not have a lot of experience in the social sciences aside from my time in library school, and both of these guides turned out to be, by necessity, very multi-disciplinary.

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