Profiles in History:  “First” Academic Law Librarians from Days Past

Have you checked the list of Academic Law Library “firsts” compiled by the ALL-SIS Centennial Committee at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/centennial/firsts.asp? Some of the “firsts” are institutional firsts, such as the first library to issue an independent annual report. Others are personal “firsts” or accolades such as the first librarian to be awarded a Bender scholarship. To find out more about the amazing careers and people behind the accolades, read on.

Frederick Hicks was the first academic law librarian to become president of AALL. He was elected in 1919, and re-elected for a second term in 1920. He began work at Columbia University in 1910 and was formally appointed Law Librarian in 1915. He almost tripled the size of the collection in the fifteen years he was at Columbia. He also began teaching problem based seminars on legal research at Columbia. These seminars became so popular that Hicks was promoted to the faculty rank of Associate Professor of Legal Bibliography. In 1928 he left Columbia for Yale where he almost tripled the size of the collection in his years there before retiring in 1945.

Hicks was a gifted administrator, teacher and writer. His Materials and Methods of Legal Research, published in three editions in 1923, 1933, and 1942, was the standard for legal bibliography. He was a prolific author publishing no fewer than twenty books and fifty-two articles during his career. See Bibliography of Books and Articles by Frederick C. Hicks, 37 Law Libr. J. 19 (1944) for details. In 2000 he was honored by the ALL-SIS when they named a newly created annual award the Frederick Charles Hicks award. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to academic law librarianship.

Rosamond Parma was the first woman president of AALL. She served as a member of the Executive Board from 1926 - 1927 and served two terms as AALL president from 1930 - 1932. In 1911 she was appointed the first librarian of the University of California Law Library. She assembled the core scholarly collection of over 55,000 volumes almost single-handedly by the time she retired in 1935. She received her law degree from the University of California where she was named to the Order of the Coif. She published several articles in Law Library Journal including The Origin, History and Compilation of the Case-book, 14 Law Libr. J. 15 (1921) and The History of the Adoption of the Codes of California, 22 Law Libr. J. 8 (1929).

William Roalfe was AALL president from 1935 - 1936 and worked to establish the first regional association of law librarians, the North Carolina Law Librarians. The association became the first chapter of AALL in 1940 and was the forerunner of the Southeastern Association of Law Libraries. In 1947 Roalfe became the first president of the Chicago Association of Law Libraries. During his career he directed several law libraries:  the University of Southern California, Duke, and later, Northwestern.

He is perhaps best known in the profession for proposing an expansion plan in 1930 which became the virtual blueprint for the development of AALL in the decades following. He outlined his plan in a letter to AALL president Rosamond Parma in 1930. He proposed creating a headquarters with full-time staff, enlarging the Law Library Journal, and publishing a variety of materials which would help librarians track the literature of law. He also wrote The Libraries of the Legal Profession (1954) and the 5th and 6th editions of How to Find the Law (1957, 1965). For more information see Michael G. Chiorazzi, “William R. Roalfe: Builder of Libraries, Scholar, Association Animal,” in Law Librarianship: Historical Perspectives 215 (Laura N. Gasaway & Michael G. Chiorazzi eds., 1996).

Mercer Daniel, the first African-American member of AALL, was a librarian and sometimes dean at Howard University Law School for thirty-three years, the last twenty-five as the director and Law Librarian. He had an unbroken string of AALL annual meeting attendance from 1934 to 1975, no small feat in the days of institutionalized segregation. He was an authority on John Brown and Harpers Ferry and a frequent contributor to the Howard Law Journal, the Journal of Negro History, and the Journal of Negro Education.

In the early years of his work at Howard University, the only library assistants employed were the top ranked senior students. Prof. Daniel noted that “there was no guarantee that the student graded at the top would also prove to be the best employee for library work.” (51 Law Libr. J. 214 (1958)) Prof. Daniel was very proud that Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice, was his library assistant for two years. Prof. Daniel is remembered daily as faculty and staff use the library catalog named Daniel in his honor.

Miles O. Price was named law librarian at Columbia in 1929. He was the first academic law librarian to teach a Law Library course in an accredited library school. He began teaching his course at School of Library Service of Columbia University in 1937. The course focused instruction on law books, their organization, and their use for reference work. Through his course Price became acquainted with a generation of trained law librarians. He ran an informal placement operation as a result. He subsequently held the formal posts as chair of the AALL Committee on Major Jobs in Law Libraries and chair of the Education and Placement Committee. His course resulted in the publication of a number of library administration and teaching materials such as his Syllabus for the Study of Law Library Administration (1937), his Effective Legal Research (1953), written with Harry Bitner, and the Price Catalog for a Library of 15,000 Volumes (1942), published as a working model for librarians who cataloged law books.

Prof. Price was service oriented and established reference services at Columbia for the first time. His collection goals were to develop the foreign law collection, to build a criminology collection, and to fill gaps in the collection, especially in early state session laws. He was committed to developing a subject classification for law, and after he retired in 1959 he was appointed by the Librarian of Congress to the Advisory Committee on the Development of a Library of Congress Classification for Anglo-American Law. He worked tirelessly on a number of AALL committees including the Index to Legal Periodicals Committee and the Joint Committee on Microcards. For more information see Marion G. Gallagher, Miles Oscar Price - The Journal Record, 62 Law Libr. J. 11 (1969).

Marian Gould Gallagher was president of AALL (1954 - 1955) and Professor of Law and Law Librarian Emeritus, University of Washington (1944 - 1981). She was a remarkable librarian and library educator. She started publishing the Current Index to Legal Periodicals as a current awareness tool for her faculty at Washington, and decades later, the publication is still being published and is now distributed to law schools and attorneys all over the world in several formats.

Prof. Gallagher also began publishing the President’s Newsletter in 1954. Her Newsletter evolved into the AALL Newsletter which eventually became AALL Spectrum. She directed the law librarianship program at the University of Washington for thirty-seven years. That program had a remarkable impact on the profession and produced many law library and AALL leaders. Prof. Gallagher frequently represented law librarians to those outside the profession - she was an active member of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and served on the President’s National Advisory Committee on Libraries in 1967 - 1968, as well as other presidential committees and commissions under three presidents. For more information on her, see the AALL Centennial FAQs.