Appellate Law

Apparently, the law library of the future is going to be one big Kindle

By Greg May

The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute has just published a short essay by Professor Ronald E. Wheeler of Suffolk University Law School, titled “Is This the Law Library or an Episode of the Jetsons?”

The big takeaway: the library is going to resemble a super-advanced Kindle and its patrons will look like they are parts of the Borg Collective:

It will include technologies that we know about and technologies that are beyond our imaginations. Things like retinal and holographic displays are predicted to be in use in the next 5 to 10 years. Lawyers, law professors, and other law library patrons will be browsing touchable, holographic shelves to select volumes instead of walking through the stacks of physical libraries. Intelligent,robotic, personal assistants will be providing clerical and other kinds of support to library researchers. Law library patrons won?t carry around smartphones or tablets. Instead they will work on skin-embedded screens with fingernail displays, brain mapping, brain uploading, and DNA storage.

I encourage you to click the article title above to read Professor Wheeler’s view about what this technology means for how we must adapt our teaching, practicing, and researching of the law. Some, he notes, will have to overcome their thinking that electronic resources are less “scholarly” than print resources.

I will admit to some trepidation over technology, including the use of electronic briefs in appeals and the use of laptops in classrooms, but I’m no Luddite. I have concerns about how technology, or at least the misuse of technology, might undermine legal practice and scholarship. Still, I must admit that a general resistance to change and plain old nostalgia influence my thinking. Will today’s younger generation, seemingly so eager to embrace change, have the same nostalgia for their own “good old days” technology? Even the lawyers trained on the technology Professor Wheeler describes might lament the more advanced, “newfangled” technology that displaces the technology they used at the beginnings of their careers.

By the way, I stole that Kindle joke from an exceptionally funny Portlandia skit. Since it’s Friday afternoon, and we probably all deserve a laugh, here it is:

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

Full post as published by The California Blog of Appeal on August 07, 2015 (boomark / email).