Note: Ms. O’Brien wrote this essay as part of her selection to receive a special ALL-SIS grant to attend the symposium on “Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring.”
On October 21, 2006, the University of California at Berkeley hosted a symposium in honor of Bob Berring entitled, “ Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring.”1 The list of panelists was a veritable who’s who in academic law librarianship, and I was fortunate to have received a grant from ALL-SIS to attend. As I looked around the lecture hall, I soon realized that I was nearly the only non-director in attendance. Yes, all of those important people had come to honor Bob Berring, a legend in the field.
My first introduction to Bob Berring’s work came while I was an undergraduate. A student in a Paralegal Studies program, one of my legal research & writing professors showed us several of Professor Berring’s videotapes on mastering print legal research. I remember thinking that they were surprisingly helpful, although I had not suspected that that particular medium would be an effective tool for teaching print research. Then, as a law student, the text for my legal research & writing course was the seminal work, “Finding the Law” by Bob Berring and Elizabeth Beringer. Again, our professor showed us a variety of Berring videos to reinforce our research skills. By this time, electronic research was coming of age, as Lexis and Westlaw had developed cutting-edge databases, and the videos emphasized the importance of using all of the tools at a researcher’s disposal - both print and electronic. Fast-forwarding to last semester and my first time teaching Advanced Legal Research, I once again turned to Professor Berring’s works while preparing my course. In so doing, I re-read “Finding the Law,” and I felt ready to face the challenge that lay ahead.
Therefore, you can imagine how thrilled I was to attend the symposium at UC Berkeley. I was not disappointed. Many thought-provoking ideas were broached by the panelists and I have attempted to highlight some of the central themes below:2
Fittingly, the symposium ended with remarks by Professor Berring himself. One, in particular, resonated with me; that is, his assertion that legal research cannot be taught in the first year of law school. His contention is that since 1Ls have not yet been exposed to the legal system, nor the documentation created by this system, expecting them to become proficient researchers at this stage is foolhardy. Harkening back to Professor Barbara Bintliff’s talk earlier in the day about “shared contexts,” he stated that “[y]ou cannot decant the skill set from the context.” Those of us who teach Advanced Legal Research can attest to the fact that upper-level students, who have either completed procedural courses, previously participated in legal clinics, or have law clerking experience, learn more quickly because they understand the nature and relevance of the information that they are seeking. Perhaps Professor Berring’s next triumph will be to alter the point at which law schools introduce legal research to their students.
To see the influence that Professor Berring’s works continue to have on up-and-coming legal researchers, I needed to look no further than my own class. When teaching the ins-and-outs of federal legislative history research last semester, I decided to show a videotape on the subject from the series entitled, “Legal Research for the 21 st Century with Bob Berring.” In it, Professor Berring is his usual animated self, and when referring to online research calls those who are enamored with this method of research “Internet Cowboys.” Later in the semester, my students were giving small group presentations on research resources related to specific areas of the law. I asked them to highlight print and electronic resources (including authoritative Internet sites), which contain information pertinent to those areas of practice. I knew that Professor Berring had left his indelible mark when the first group’s presentation contained a slide entitled “Internet Resources: For you ‘Internet Cowboys’.” Need I say more?
1 See the symposium’s Web site for more information about the panelists and abstracts of their presentations, at: www.law.berkeley.edu/library/conferences/berring06/panelists.html.
2 Although I wanted to share some of the ideas and thoughts that were raised during the symposium, I fear that I have not given them their due justice. Please look for the published symposium papers, which Thomson West will be issuing forthwith.
3 Paragraphs have not been universally adopted by all of the jurisdictions utilizing neutral citations.