By now all academic law librarians are probably aware that a few weeks ago the American Bar Association’s Strategic Review Committee proposed a revision to the Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools stating that “A physical plant is not required” to meet the standards for academic law libraries. Although that statement was quickly removed from the proposed revisions, the current version is now silent on the necessity of a “physical plant.”
These events have got me thinking about the importance of the law library as a tangible space. Is a physical space truly necessary, or is it a luxury?
It’s understandable why some would question the need for a physical library. Building space is expensive. Most of our research resources are digital. The embedded librarian movement that emphasized the very real benefits of integrating librarians into classrooms and clinics had the unintentional side effect of de-emphasizing the importance of the independent library space. Remote learning, Covid-19-driven building closures, and work-from-home trends also contributed. This conversation isn’t new. We’ve been having it for at least twenty years.
Librarians actively responded with increased focus on the library as a gathering place that can meet many community needs. Public libraries doubled down on maker spaces, increased programming, and brought in social service providers. University libraries added coffee shops to encourage gathering and conversation and other spaces that supported learning. Geoffrey T. Freeman, an architect who specialized in library design, summed up the movement in 2005 as follows:
“The library is the only centralized location where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research.”
Geoffrey T. Freeman, “The Library as Place: Changes in Learning Patterns, Collections, Technology, and Use” in Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2005).
Yet isn’t a library much more than that? The library as a physical entity serves as a powerful tangible symbol of the intangible and has a function beyond study space. Think of the massive temporary memorials of flowers, candles, and teddy bears that appear at the sites of tragedies. These places become loci for focusing and expressing grief. Even more important for society, they serve as representations of love and caring to counteract violence and hatred or the cold indifference of natural forces. A physical library represents our values—concentration, thinking, openness to ideas. More importantly now than ever, the library is a symbol of the ever-present noise of an insistently loud and commercial world that always wants to take something from us. The library is the place to detach from that noise and think about bigger things—justice, mercy, and truth. I hope that all our libraries can be a place where anyone can come and learn about the law.
The library is also a tangible symbol of our work as librarians. Electronic resources are everywhere and nowhere. Yet these resources are not free gifts from the ether. They require labor and obscene amounts of money to implement and manage. Maintaining physical collections and spaces serves as a reminder of tangible assets librarians and our institutions invest in research and learning. This investment should not be taken for granted.
Our law firm librarian friends may be shaking their heads. They maintain impressive collections of resources and provide sophisticated levels of service while paying much more exorbitant prices than we do without much physical space and with lawyers spread around the globe. But their mission, their business, and their clientele are different.
A physical law library symbolizes more than just the sum of its parts. It represents enduring ideals that need champions now more than ever. It is a symbol worth fighting for.
RIPS Law Librarian Blog 
I was just recalling the value of a law library as a learning space for law firms. Sometimes the best forms of education is via the workspace shared amongst the most learned and the least. At least that is what I witnessed through my past experience as a law librarian. It is missing today in many law firms and possibly an oversight. I hope the space is recreated for those who have already forfeited. I think it is worth the cost per square foot and doesn’t need to be huge since it isn’t really about the print anymore, it’s about the space. What draws people to work in a library setting is to know they’re not alone and there are valuable resources available within that space. Sometimes the best value is when a librarian or another attorney is there to help. It is a convenience, and possibly a luxury. It is definitely an advantage.