Professor Roy M. Mersky, the Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law and director of the Tarlton Law Library and Jamail Center for Legal Research at The University of Texas School of Law, died May 6, 2008, in Austin.Professor Roy M. Mersky, the Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law and director of the Tarlton Law Library and Jamail Center for Legal Research at The University of Texas School of Law, died May 6, 2008, in Austin.
Like most young Jewish men from the boroughs of New York City, Roy Mersky thought he would be a doctor. He enrolled in the NYU pre-med program but when the US entered WWII, he enlisted. After failing the eye test, he memorized the chart and was eventually assigned to the 87th Infantry Division. Roy went through the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the Combat Infantry Badge, and many battle ribbons.
When the war was over, he dropped any plans to become a doctor and followed the progressive, anarchist genes of his immigrant Russian grandparents. After a summer organizing farm workers in California, the GI Bill sent Roy to the University of Wisconsin, a Midwestern school known for its social liberalism. After a course in labor economics, he became convinced that he could do more for trade unionism with a law degree. While in law school, he worked in the government documents department of the law library and became interested in librarianship, particularly adult education.
Rhea Ballard-Thrower reminds me that Roy became an honorary member of one of the oldest black fraternities, Kappa Alpha Psi. Roy was inducted because he was the first white graduate student to have a black roommate at the University of Wisconsin. They asked him if he would be willing to participate in integrating graduate student housing and he said yes. His roommate was a tall African American, Jimmy Jones, who later became a judge. They had one bed and a mattress which they took turns in using. One Saturday Jimmy’s friends came in to find Roy lolling comfortably in bed talking to Jimmy on the mattress at the foot of his bed. Roy was nearly thrown out of the room. Roy took great pride in the fact that he was a member of a black fraternity.
Roy and some friends started a storefront law practice but he soon found a job at the Milwaukee Public Library, first in adult education then in the legislative reference office. When the Yale Law Librarian, Harry Bitner, was looking for a legally trained librarian, Roy applied and was hired.
Bitner, a former assistant librarian at Columbia under Miles Price, followed Frederick Hicks, who had come to Yale from Columbia. Frederick Hicks, another man of “Napoleonic stature,” developed the first formal course in legal research while at Columbia and the first comprehensive treatise, Materials and Methods of Legal Research. His successors at Columbia and Yale, Price and Bitner, followed Hicks with their own major treatise, Effective Legal Research. Naturally enough they passed some of the work involved on to their assistants, Mersky at Yale and Mike Jacobstein at Columbia. Thus was born a productive partnership that spanned decades, as well as a life-long friendship. Roy always referred to the two as the odd couple: RMM boisterous, demanding, outgoing; MJ quiet, gentle, humorous. To save money they roomed together at AALL. Roy would throw open the hotel windows for fresh air; Mike would close them for warmth.
Over the years Mersky and Jacobstein produced numerous bibliographies, indexes, reprint series, and textbooks on legal bibliography. The Index to Periodical Articles Related to Law began when they were assistants in the Ivy League. Fundamentals of Legal Research and Legal Research Illustrated began after they were both directors and in a position to compete with Price and Bitner.
After Yale, Roy served as Director of the Washington State Law Library, 1959 - 1963, and Professor of Law and Law Librarian at University of Colorado, 1963 - 1965. An active civil libertarian, he marched in Selma with a small group from Colorado.
When Texas began a search for a law library director, Dean Page Keeton contacted Dean Edward King at Colorado for advice. As King later told Roy, “I mistakenly told him you were the best law librarian in the country.” Roy always wondered about the true meaning of that phrasing.
Roy initially was not taken with Austin. He made what he considered unreasonable demands of Keeton and they were all met. So he felt obliged to accept the Texas position and moved to Austin in 1965.
At Texas Roy set out to make the Tarlton Law Library one of the premier libraries in the nation. He believed in the library as an intellectual center as well as a physical repository of knowledge. “Throughout his career, Roy Mersky was fiercely determined to better serve the UT Law faculty, the UT Law students, and the UT Law community at large more than any other law library served its constituents,” said Law School Dean Larry Sager. “And he was fiercely determined to enlarge the idea of a fine library to include lectures, conferences and exhibitions of erudite bibliography and history.”
Service was supreme, especially service to faculty, but Roy played the numbers game as well as anybody. Long before US News & World Report began producing the rankings that have begun to skew legal education, Roy wanted his library’s numbers to grow and grow they did. Roy’s bibliography grew as well and the number of publications and projects involving the library staff was staggering.
He was an author of, and contributor to, scores of books and articles, and was acknowledged in many more texts written by others. He was a frequent speaker both in the United States and abroad on legal research, the history of the United States Supreme Court, law and language, law in popular culture, and rare law books. He served as the interim director of the Jewish National and University Library of Hebrew University during his sabbatical in 1972 - 1973. He also served as acting director of the New York Law School Library in 1982 - 1984. He consulted on the construction and organization of many law schools.
Roy was a member of numerous associations and honorary societies, including the Texas Philosophical Society, the American Law Institute, and the American Society for International Law. Among the many honors he received were the 2005 Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award from AALL and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and the Information Studies Alumni Association’s Centennial Celebration Alumnus of the Year Award. In 2003, Roy was named one among the 50 most innovative librarians working today by the Library Journal. This summer he was awarded posthumously the Frederick O. Hicks Award by the ALL-SIS and the Spirit of Law Librarianship Award that he founded with Rich Leiter was renamed in his honor.
For someone so passionate about labor justice, it is ironic that working for Roy was not always easy. As John Christensen said, working at Tarlton is one those experiences that only those who have done so can understand. Perhaps Nietzsche describes it best: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Counter-balancing the demands were a delightful staff with strong bonds. John also reports that “[w]hile RMM was professionally demanding he was also flexible. When … my wife was in library school, he let me keep [my] baby … in my office … while [my wife] took an afternoon class.”
Roy was one of the first to staff his reference department entirely with lawyer-librarians but he took a perverse pride in the fact that their pay was low and the work rate high. Roy knew the motto of some staff was There is life after Mersky and he put enormous effort into finding good positions for his people and into keeping in touch with their careers. Though he never claimed to be a mentor, he will be remembered as such. The large number of law library directors and senior librarians who trained at Tarlton is staggering, but he also extended the Tarlton umbrella to many who were never on staff.
Roy was a strong advocate for law librarians in many forums. Roger Jacobs said of him that “he has been a foundational timber - gnarled, splintered, and knot filled, but renowned for his professional strength - in my awareness of law librarianship. I know of no other person in the profession whose name, for some reason or other, would come up in almost any meeting of law librarians. He was a great librarian and a towering colleague. We will all be poorer for his passing.”
