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Proposed changes to law school library accreditation standards are raising concerns for Indiana law librarians, but advocates for online-only law schools say they see the issue differently.
Initially, on Aug. 17, the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar released for comment proposed revisions to Standards 601-606 and 701-702. Among the more notable changes would have been language in Standard 601 saying “(a) physical plant is not required” for a law library, and the removal of language from Standard 603 explicitly requiring a law library director to be a full-time employee.
Public comment on the proposal is open until Sept. 29, but already a new version of the revisions has been released.
A second memo was issued Aug. 30 that, most notably, removes the “physical plant not required” language. Instead, the revision to Standard 601 now says, “A law school shall maintain a law library and information resources sufficient to operate in compliance with the Standards, carry out its program of legal education, and support scholarship and research.”
“The purpose of these revisions is to give law libraries flexibility to use technology, information resources, and collection formats most appropriate for their law schools,” the Aug. 30 memo says. “Furthering flexibility for law libraries, there is no longer a requirement of a core collection (former Standard 606(a)) that must consist of the materials enumerated in former Standard 606(b); revised Standard 604(a) instead requires reliable and efficient access to a collection of materials and information resources that is complete, current, and in sufficient quantity or with sufficient continuing access.”
Librarians react
Miriam Murphy, director of the Ruth Lilly Law Library and a senior lecturer at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said the initial proposal to remove the physical plant requirement was concerning.
“It felt like the library was being disenfranchised from legal education to a certain degree because as we all know, the media out there on the internet and things are just so unregulated in a lot of ways and there’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Murphy said.
She pointed to how vast the internet is and said without resources and guides, misinformation can spread and it can be difficult for students to determine what is accurate. Some students need face-to-face interaction to understand how to research a topic or write a paper, she said, and that brings them into the physical law library.
“Some of the most important things are interactions, are face-to-face, not just online: students being able to have the ability to have study groups, a place to casually congregate,” Murphy said.
The IU McKinney library director gave as an example a student who spent their summer working as an associate. When the student returned the next fall, they said they were the only associate who knew how to effectively use online resources like LexisNexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg — skills they learned in the law library.
“We went from the guardians of the books to the purveyors of information, and the information is a lot online, but not entirely,” Murphy said. “You need a guide, because it is a wild world of information out there.”
Down in Bloomington at the IU Maurer School of Law, Susan deMaine, director of the Jerome Hall Library and a senior lecturer in law, said she isn’t concerned about her library, specifically, but she does have concern for her colleagues.
One concern of deMaine’s, she said, is the language regarding whether law library directors should be full-time.
Addressing those concerns, the Aug. 30 memo says, “Additionally, while the requirement that a law library director be full-time was removed in Standard 603(b), this was not intended to suggest that the law library director could be a part-time law school employee. The intent behind this change was to allow the law library director to have other responsibilities such as teaching law school courses, jointly managing the law school’s law library and a county law library, or other duties in addition to directing the law library. Also, Standard 603(d) specifies that the law faculty appointment with security of position for the law library director means security ‘reasonably similar to tenure.’ Further, there were also places where ‘law library director’ was replaced with ‘law library’ to indicate the involvement of the director and library staff in making decisions about the law library.”
Also, deMaine raised concerns about the proposed revision to Standard 601, even without the physical plant language. While “scholarship and research” are important, she said, there is more to law libraries than those two things.
“I have a concern that that could be used to really cut what law libraries are able to purchase because it’s not specifying ‘scholarship and research,’” she said.
The IU Maurer law library doesn’t only serve law students, deMaine added. It also serves IU – Bloomington students when possible, and its staff often go into the community to raise awareness about the free online legal resources that are available.
“The resources that we buy, we can’t really make available outside of IU, and often outside of the law school, because of cost,” she said. “But we can teach people how to use what is freely available.”
Librarian groups including the American Association of Law Libraries and the Society of Academic Library Directors are collecting feedback and are planning to submit comments on the proposed revisions, according to Murphy and deMaine.
‘Physical plant’ required?
While the “physical plant not required” language has been struck from the proposed revisions, the Aug. 30 memo indicates the interpretation is still similar.
“The choice of format, ownership, and means of reliable access for any part of the law library’s collection shall be sufficient for the law school to operate in compliance with the Standards and to carry out its program of legal education,” the revision to Standard 604 says.
An interpretation adds, “The appropriate mixture of collection formats depends on the needs of the law library and the law school; it need not entail a mixture that includes physical books.”
The requirement for a physical law library has been a hurdle for schools like Purdue University Global’s Concord Law School, which is fully online.
Not having a physical campus or law library means Concord Law isn’t ABA-accredited, so its students currently can’t take the bar in Indiana.
In a previous statement, Concord Law Dean Martin Pritikin said, “… (T)he ABA’s standards for accreditation contain requirements like a physical campus — including a physical law library — that drive up costs and restrict access without promoting quality.”
More recently, Pritikin told Indiana Lawyer, “Our students are located all over the country or even all over the world, and if we have a physical library somewhere, the vast majority of our students aren’t going to be able to access it, right?”
To that end, Pritikin spoke in favor of the revisions.
“I think it’s actually long overdue, so it’s good to see that the ABA is taking steps to catch up with reality,” Pritikin said. “I wish that they would do that by allowing a fully online school to apply for accreditation. I know they’re not there yet, but I think that this is a step in the right direction and, ultimately, that’s where they should be going.”•
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