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Law Libraries in the Information Age: A Critical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2023

Abstract

This article traces the influence of theories of the information society, originating in the post-industrial theory of Daniel Bell, on developments in law librarianship. It argues that the main thrust of this influence has been to foster a conservative professional culture that emphasizes individual professional development and technological solutions in lieu of critical engagement with the political and economic forces responsible for eroding public and collective norms.

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Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by International Association of Law Libraries

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Elizabeth Berenguer, Lucy Jewel, and Judith Simms for their comments on earlier versions of this work.

References

1 Michael Harris, Stan A. Hannah & Pamela C. Harris, Into the Future: The Foundation of Library and Information Services in the Post-Industrial Era ix (2nd ed. 1998). This book, which attempted to introduce librarians to the vast literature on Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and its subsequent popularizations, is an important exception that proves the rule.

2 This definition of conservatism owes much to the theory of conservatism articulated by Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin 4 (2011): “conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

3 Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World 29 (2nd ed. 2005).

4 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting 129–134 (1973).

5 Id. at 127–128.

6 Kumar, supra note 3, at 49.

7 Bell, supra note 4, at 467.

8 Id. at 212.

9 Id. at 36.

10 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave 4 (1980).

11 See id. at 7–8.

12 See Kumar, supra note 3, at 61–62.

13 Feenberg, Andrew, Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy, 35 Inquiry 301(1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Justin P. Holt, Historical Materialism in The Social Thought of Karl Marx, 121–151 (2014).

15 See Ross, George, The Second Coming of Daniel Bell, 11 Socialist Register 331, 333 (1974)Google Scholar.

16 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism 29 (1999). See also Ross, supra note 15 at 333.

17 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader (Robert C. Tucker, ed., 1972) 335, 341–343.

18 Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16, at 28–29; see also Bell, supra note 4, at 125–126.

19 Bell supra note 4, at 148.

20 Toffler, supra note 10, at 91 and 415.

21 Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16, at 27.

22 Id. at 28.

23 Robert Neubauer, Information in the Neoliberal Age, or Vice Versa? Global Citizenship, Technology, and Hegemonic Ideology, 9 TripleC 195, 220; Michael Harrington, Post-Industrial Society and the Welfare State, in Libraries in Post-Industrial Society, 19 (Leigh Estabrook, ed., 1977).

24 On the transition from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism in economic policy described here, see generally Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (2014); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2014).

25 Peck, supra note 24, at 122; Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up 213 (1996).

26 See William C. Berman, America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton 22 (2nd ed. 2001). For a critique of the culture of poverty idea, see Adolph Reed Jr., The Underclass Myth, Progressive, Aug. 1991, at 18.

27 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 1 (2005).

28 Andre Gunder Frank, After Reaganomics and Thatcherism, What? From Keynesian Demand Management via Supply-Side Economics to Corporate State Planning and 1984, Contemp. Marxism, Winter 1981/1982, at 18, 21.

29 Neubauer, supra note 23, at 202–203.

30 Id. at 204.

31 Id. at 212 and passim; see also Marko Ampuja & Koivisto, Juha, From “Post-Industrial” to “Network Society” and Beyond: The Political Conjunctures and Current Crisis of Information Society Theory, 12 TripleC 447 (2014)Google Scholar; Fisher, Eran, Contemporary Technology Discourse and the Legitimation of Capitalism, 13 Eur. J. of Soc. Theory 229 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16.

32 Neubauer, supra note 23 at 208–209; Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society 151 (2nd ed., 2002).

33 2 F.A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty 108–09 (1976).

34 F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, in 2 The Collected Works of FA Hayek 102 (Bruce Caldwell, ed. 2008).

35 Id.

36 See Harvey, supra note 27, at 23.

37 See Toffler, supra note 10, at 385–387.

38 Id. at 409–413.

39 Ampuja & Koivisto, supra note 31, at 454.

40 Fisher, Eran, “Upgrading” Market Legitimation: Revisiting Habermas's ‘Technology as Ideology’ in Neoliberal Times, 2 Fast Capitalism 159, 162 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Fisher, Contemporary Technology Discourse, supra note 31 at 236.

42 Ampuja and Koivisto, supra note 31, at 449–50.

43 Id. at 455, 458; See also Barbrook, Richard & Cameron, Andy, The Californian Ideology, 6 Sci. as Culture 44 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stewart Brand, We Owe It All to the Hippies, Time, Mar. 1 1995, 125.

44 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Wash. Monthly, May 2002, at 15.

45 Fisher, Contemporary Technology Discourse, supra note 31, at 239.

46 Toffler, supra note 10, at 251–273.

47 Id.

48 Id.

49 For a critique of the “do what you love” slogan in popular culture, see Miya Tokumitsu, Tell Me Its Going to Be OK, The Baffler, Sept., 2018, at 6–11.

50 Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005), 231–232.

51 Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16, at 29.

52 Fisher, “Upgrading” Market Legitimation, supra note 40 at 13.

53 According to Neubauer, supra note 23 at 218, “while empowerment is found in the technological networks of the market, traditional exercises of democratic citizenship are subject to strict techno-market discipline. In this way the legitimation strategies of neoliberalism reveal themselves as a dialectical discourse—emancipatory democratic populism for those which accept the new order, and disciplinary futility and emiseration for those which resist. Framing the new order as an inevitable and unstoppable force of history, individuals are encouraged to abandon all hope of democratic alternatives to informational-neoliberal policies which will regardless bring emancipation if left to their own devices.”

54 Harris, Hannah, & Harris, supra note 1, at 29. Libraries in Post-Industrial Society, supra note 23, a volume published in 1977 which includes an introductory essay by Daniel Bell, is a primary illustration of this influence.

55 Harris, Hannah & Harris, supra note 1, at 44–49. See also Samuel E. Trosow, The Commodification of Information and the Public Good: New Challenges for a Progressive Librarianship, 43 Progressive Libr. 17 (2014).

56 Harris, Hannah & Harris, supra note 1, at 44.

57 Id. at 60; Miriam Braverman, From Adam Smith to Ronald Reagan: Public Libraries as a Public Good, 107 Libr. J. 397 (1982). For a discussion of democratic values and the public university system, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, 180–190 (2015).

58 Harris, Hannah & Harris, supra note 1, at 61.

59 Id.; Henry T. Blanke, Libraries and the Commercialization of Information: Towards a Critical Discourse of Librarianship, 2 Progressive Libr. 9, 11 (1991). For a discussion of parallel developments in Britain under Thatcher, see Webster, supra note 32, at 176–182.

60 Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16, at 33–34.

61 Kunkel, Rebecca, The U.S. Government Manual in XML: A Case Study of a Data.gov Open Data Set, 35 Legal Reference Serv. Q. 256 (2016)Google Scholar.

62 Harris, Hannah & Harris, supra note 1, at 31.

63 Id. at 33.

64 Day, Mark T., Discourse Fashions in Library Administration and Information Management: A Critical History and Bibliometric Analysis, 33 Advances in Librarianship 231, 279 (2015)Google Scholar.

65 John Buschman, Dismantling the Public Sphere, 58 (2003).

66 See id. at 92.

67 Webster, supra note 32, at 113.

68 Id.

69 Id. at 116.

70 Buschman, supra note 65, at 57–58.

71 See Vince Giuliano, Moving into the Information Age- New Technologies and their Implications for Law, in Legal Information for the 1980s: Meeting the Needs of the Legal Profession, 28 (Betty Taylor, ed 1982).

72 Martin, Peter W., The Future of Law Librarians in Changing Institutions, or the Hazards and Opportunities of New Information Technology, 83 Law. Libr. J. 419, 420 (1991)Google Scholar.

73 Richard A. Danner, Toward a Renaissance in Law Librarianship: The Report, Recommendations and Materials of the American Association of Law Libraries Special Committee on the Renaissance of Law Librarianship in the Information Age (1997).

74 See Guiliano Cicco, Have Law Librarians Missed the Information Age? N.Y. L. J., Jul. 10, 1995, at 7; Robert Berring, An Embattled Profession Faces New Challenges, Nat. L. J., July 12, 1993, at 26.

75 Jamie J. Baker, AALL Rebranding Initiative, The Ginger (Law) Librarian (Nov. 17, 2015), www.gingerlawlibrarian.com/2015/11/aall-rebranding-initiative.html.

76 AALL Rebranding Initiative: Why the Association for Legal Information?, AALL Spectrum, Nov.-Dec. 2015, at 11, 13 (2015).

77 Id.

78 Roma Harris, “Their Little Bit of Ground Slowly Squashed into Nothing”: Technology, Gender, and the Vanishing Librarian, in Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches, 175 (Gloria J. Leckie & John Bushman eds., 2009).

79 Id. at 168–69.

80 Id.

81 Brown, supra note 57, at 132–33.

82 The systemic view of unemployment as a structural feature of capitalist relations is at least as old as Capital, Vol. I, in which Marx theorized that what he called “surplus population,” or “reserve army” of unemployed workers as a necessary adjunct required by capital for the discipline of the working class: “The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader (Robert C. Tucker, ed., 1972). at 310–11.

83 See Rachel S. Turner, Neo-Liberal Ideology: History, Concepts, and Policies, 58 (2008).

84 Wacquant, Loic, The Penalization of Poverty and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism, 9 Eur. J. Crim. Pol'y & Res. 401 (2001)Google Scholar.

85 See Amanda Bird and Braden Cannon, From Steam Engine to Search Engines: Class Struggle in an Information Economy, in Class and Librarianship: Essays at the Intersection of Information, Labor, and Capital, 54–56 (Erik Estep & Nathaniel Enright eds., 2016).

86 See Toby Pearlstein & James Matazzaro, Survival Lessons for Libraries: Corporate Libraries: A Soft Analysis and Warning, Searcher, Jun. 1, 2009, at 15; Susan Smith DiMattia, Time, Inc. Closes Its Research Center, Libr. J., Jul. 2001, at 15.

87 See sources, infra note 89.

88 See Christine M. Stouffer, A Job for Life? Tenure and other Sticky Situations, AALL Spectrum, Sep.-Oct. 2011, at 11; see also Loosening the Ties that Bind: Academic Librarians and Tenure; College Res. Libr., Mar. 2006 at 164.

89 See, e.g., Michael Kelley, The New Normal, Libr. J., Jan. 1, 2012 at 37; Michael Kelley, Meredith Schwartz, & Michelle, Lee, Johnson County Faces Cuts, Possible Closure, Libr. J., Mar. 15, 2012 at 16; Michael Kelley & David Rapp, Detroit PL to Shutter Four Branches, Libr. J. Jan 1, 2012 at 14; Lynn Blumenstein & Norman Oder, Minneapolis PL Closures on, Libr. J., Nov. 11, 2007 at 17; Amy Jordan, Pratt Library Announces Which Branches to Close, Amer. Libr., Sep. 2001 at 20; Norman Oder, Buffalo System to Close 20 Libraries, Libr. J., Jun. 6, 2005 at 16; Gordon Flagg, State Budgets Hammer Public Libraries Nationwide, Amer. Libr., Aug.-Sept. 2009 at 19.

90 See Jean Grady, The “No's” Have It: AALL Members Embrace Tradition and Reject Transformative Rebranding, Dewey B. Strategic (Feb. 12, 2016) https://www.deweybstrategic.com/2016/02/the-nos-have-it-aall-members-embrace.html.

91 See e.g., Taylor Fitchett, James Hambleton, Penny Hazelton, Anne Klinefelter & Judith Wright, Law Library Budgets in Hard Times, 103 Law Libr. J. 91 (2011); Roberta F. Studwell, The Strategic Academic Law Library

Director in the Twenty-First Century, 109 Law Libr. J. 649 (2017)(stating that “Just as businesses employ process improvement techniques' to predict costs, increase return on investment (ROI),' and improve predictability and efficiency of outcomes, so must library directors.”); Genevieve Blake Tung, Academic Libraries and the Crisis in Legal Education, 105 Law Libr. J. 275, 304 (2013); James G. Milles, Legal Education in Crisis, and Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, 106 Law Libr. J. 507, 520 (2014).

92 Leigh Estabrook, Labor and Librarians: The Divisiveness of Professionalism, Libr. J., Jan. 15, 1981 at 125.

93 Michael F. Winter, Librarianship and the Labor Process: Aspects of the Rationalization, Restructuring,and Intensification of Intellectual Work, in Information Technology and Librarianship: New Critical Approaches, 143–164 (Gloria F. Leckie & John Buschman eds., 2008). James F. Tracy & Maris L. Hayashi, A Libratariat? Labor, Technology, and Librarianship in the Information Age, in Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, 53–67 (Catherine McKercher & Vincent Mosco, eds. 2007).

94 Buschman, supra note 65, at 87.

95 Henry T. Blanke, Librarianship and Public Culture in the Age of Information Capitalism, 5 J. Info. Ethics 54, 63.

96 John Dethman, Trust v. Antitrust: Consolidation in the Legal Publishing Industry, 21 L. Ref. Services Q. 123 (2002); Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797 (2006); Leslie A. Street & David R. Hansen, Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing, 26. J. Intell. Prop. 205 (2019).

97 See, e.g., Robert Berring, On Not Throwing Out the Baby: Planning the Future of Legal Information, 83 Calif. L. Rev. 615 (1995).

98 An example of such a technology which should be familiar to most librarians is the development of Digital Rights Management software, technology whose sole function is to protect private property interests in information. Although the ostensible purpose of DRM software is to thwart potential copyright infringement, information publishers frequently go beyond the bounds of copyright law to prevent even what the law would otherwise protect as fair use by consumers. Jason Puckett, Digital Rights Management as Information Access Barrier, Progressive Libr., Fall-Winter 2010, at 11, 13.

99 See infra, notes 114 to 118 and accompanying discussion.

100 Robert C. Berring, Collapse of the Structure of the Legal Research Universe, 69 Wash. L. Rev. 9 (1994).

101 See e.g. Shawn G. Nevers, Candy, Points, and Highlighters: Why Librarians, Not Vendors, Should Teach CALR to First-Year Students, 99 L. Libr. J. 757.

102 Arguable exceptions are two articles by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancik written nearly 20 years apart: Why Do We Tell the Same Stories?: Law Reform, Critical Librarianship, and the Triple Helix Dilemma, 42 Stanford L. Rev. 207 (1989); and Why Do We Ask the Same Questions: The Triple Helix Dilemma Revisited, 99 Law Libr. J. 307 (2007). The former considered the digest system and the latter addressed CALR, both concluded that these tools typically assert a conservative influence by focusing attention on what has already been written and is already known rather than encouraging leaps of intuition or emergent modes of analysis.

103 Blanke, supra note 95, at 64.

104 Wihelm Peekhaus, A Call to Reclaim Control Over Scholarly Publishing, J. Info. Ethics, Fall 2016, at 20, 24; Greg Lambert, Why Lexis’ Sales Approach Should Concern Law Firm Management and Leadership, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Jun. 11, 2018, https://www.geeklawblog.com/2018/06/lexis-sales-approach-concern-law-firm-management-leadership.html.

105 Scott Matheson, Access Versus Ownership: A Changing Model of Intellectual Property, 21 L. Ref. Services Q. 153, 168 (2002).

106 Kimberly Mattioli, Access to Print, Access to Justice, 110 Law Libr. J. 31, 38 (2018).

107 Id. at 48.

108 See Jennifer Dalglish, Daniel Cordova & Mark E. Estes, Managing Government Law Libraries Today: Challenges and Opportunities, AALL Spectrum Nov./Dect. 2016, 25.

109 The obvious proximate cause is the decline in public support for legal services for individuals that meet the definition of indigence. See Rebecca Kunkel, Rationing Justice in the 21st Century: Technology and Technocracy in the Access to Justice Movement, 18 U. Md. L.J. Race, Religion, Gender & Class 366, 371 (2018). However, there is evidence that middle income litigants are also forgoing professional assistance due to the cost involved; to the extent that research costs are factored into attorney fees, this may be one reason that these litigants are being “priced out.” See Nazareth A.M. Pantaloni, Legal Databases, Legal Epistemology, and the Legal Order, 86 Law Libr. J. 679, 704 (1993).

110 American Library Association, Professional Ethics, http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics, par. 3.

111 American Association of Law Libraries, AALL Ethical Principles, https://www.aallnet.org/about-us/what-we-do/policies/public-policies/aall-ethical-principles/

112 Sam Biddle, Thomson Reuters Defends Its Work for ICE, Providing Identification and Location of Aliens, The Intercept (Jun. 27, 2018), https://theintercept.com/2018/06/27/thomson-reuters-defends-its-work-for-ice/?comments=1; Sarah Lamdan, Surveillance and Legal Research Providers: What You Need to Know, Law Librarian Blog (Jul. 9, 2018), https://llb2.com/2018/07/09/surveillance-and-legal-research-providers-what-you-need-to-know/.

113 Joe Hodnicki, Does WEXIS Use Legal Search User Data in Their Surveillance Search Platforms?, Law Librarian Blog (Jul. 16, 2018) https://llb2.com/2018/07/16/does-wexis-use-legal-search-user-data-in-their-surveillance-search-platforms/.

114 See, Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, (2nd ed., 1991), 144; Jurgen Habermas, Technology and Science as “Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society, (trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, 1970), 104.

115 See supra, notes 4 to 21 and accompanying discussion.

116 See Dyer-Witheford, supra note 16 at 142–144 (discussing the nature of technologically-driven globalization as an instance of class decomposition).

117 Habermas, supra note 114 at 111–13.

118 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013).

119 See e.g. Richard A. Danner, Defining International Law Librarianship in an Age of Multiplicity, Knowledge, and Open Access to Law, in The IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management 15 (Richard A. Danner, ed. 2016); Daniel Poulin, Andrew Mowbray, & Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Free Access to Law and Open Source Software, in Software Applications: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, 373, 374 (Pierre F. Tiako, ed. 2009); Richard Zorza, The Sustainable 21st Century Law Library: Vision, Deployment and Assessment for Access to Justice (2012) at 10, http://www.zorza.net/LawLibrary.pdf

120 See Charlotte Hess & Elinor Ostrom, Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons, in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, 3, 14 (Charlotte Hess & Elinor Ostrom eds., 2006).

121 However, as Faith Agostinine-Wilson notes, there is a significant difference within the open source software community with adherents of “Free” software and “Free/Libre Open Source Software” movements, the latter being open to pursuing business partnerships and consequently, refusing to restrict downstream business uses from restrictive repackaging and resale of software developed using the FLOSS mode. A Critical Overview of the Digital Knowledge Commons from a Marxist Perspective, 4 Knowledge Cultures 176, 183 (2016).

122 Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray & Philip Chung, The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution, 1 J. Open Access L. 6, (2013).

123 See references, supra note 96.

124 See Arewa, supra note 96, at 822–23.

125 Graham Greenleaf, Free Access to Legal Information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement, in IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management, 201, 219 (R. Danner and J. Winterton, eds., 2011).

128 Asunción Esteve, The Business of Personal Data: Google, Facebook, and Privacy Issues in the EU and the USA, 7 Int'l Data Privacy L. 36 (2017).

129 Dan Dabney, Legal Information, Public and Private, VOXPOPULI, (Apr. 16, 2009), https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2009/04/16/legal-information-public-and-private/

130 Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, an Overview, in Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches, 33 (Gloria Leckie & John Buschman eds, 2009).