The 9th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture took place during the BIALL Annual Conference at the Queens Hotel, Leeds on Thursday 13 June 2024. David Wills delivered the lecture and looked back over the last three decades and reflected on the many changes and challenges, especially with regard to technological developments, that have impacted on the law library and legal information world. His focus then shifted to more recent times and developments in law at a global level and the associated challenges of curating resources and collections to match the wide variety of interests across legal scholarship. The lecture touched on the demands in legal education, changes to publishing models, the financial challenges facing higher education and, most recently, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that altered research and study patterns, and which accelerated the demand for digital resources. Finally, the lecture looked to the next 30 years and the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence (AI), in order to determine what AI would mean for the future of law librarianship. The lecture identified the part law librarians and legal information professionals could play concerning AI and how they could help to protect academic integrity.

Francis Noel-Baker (1920–2009) was an English Philhellene politician and self-proclaimed benevolent landowner in Euboea whose relationship in his later years with Greek governments and people descended into acrimony and litigation. This stemmed from the decision he took to effectively become an apologist for the military junta which seized power in Athens between 1967 and 1974. This was despite London being a centre for Greek resistance-in-exile, the opposition to the regime shown by many of his fellow MPs and Labour Party colleagues, and his own earlier left-wing sympathies, including his support for the communist-backed partisans in Greece during the Second World War. Noel-Baker's advocacy of the Colonels reflected not merely political reality and economic expediency, as with the similar stance of the British government, but stemmed from his outdated convictions that Greece required saving from international communism and internal weakness.

In this article David Wills, the Librarian of the Squire Law Library, offers a brief description of the extraordinary range of architecture at the University of Cambridge with particular reference to the David Williams Building, designed by the world-renowned architects Foster + Partners. He suggests that, in the context of the Squire Law Library, which occupies the top three floors of the David Williams Building, the building has truly come of age; he looks at some of the features and challenges of its modern design; and notes that the building looks set to play a major part in the education and research activity of legal scholars and university students into the distant future. This article is a personal reflection based on the author's experience of using and working in the building for some 26 years since it was constructed and opened in the mid-1990s.

Legal Information Management has reached 50 years since it was launched, under a different name, by the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). In this article the current editor of the journal, David Wills, reviews the history of the journal from its launch in spring 1970 when it took the name The Law Librarian, and describes how it has evolved, often reflecting the changing nature of the legal information profession in those intervening years. He follows the journey as this periodical developed from small beginnings, explains how it was enhanced by successive editors, why it became necessary to change its title in 2001 and describes the move to the current publisher, Cambridge University Press in 2004. He reflects on the current status of the journal, as an electronic product while also retaining its profile in print and, finally, he draws attention to some possible challenges for the future.

The celebrated conservationist, and serial memoirist, Gerald Durrell often imaginatively revisited the Corfu of his childhood. Donkeys were integral to his vision of Greek rural life. Both the setting and the style of his literary output resisted what he regarded as unwelcome modernization. His 1968 publication The Donkey Rustlers, one of his few novels, shows how Durrell attempted to perpetuate an outdated view of both Greece and children's literature. It is argued that Durrell's well-attested affection for the Greek people was not well reflected by a narrative in which both foreign children and donkeys seem to come out on top.