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One of the struggles public law libraries have is that they were conceived at a time when there was a tight connection between the bench and the bar. Law library governance is often replete with judges and lawyers even though many U.S. law libraries primarily serve people without a law degree. But that birthplace often meant a public law library was housed in the most convenient public building: the courthouse. In recent decades, though, fear has made courthouses less accessible to the public and I worry about what that means for access to justice.

When I interviewed for my current job, one of the things I talked about with the search committee was access. In a relatively unusual situation, the San Diego Law Library is housed in a government building separate from the courthouse. While we have certain security measures and training in place, we are more like a public library than like a public courthouse.

I think law libraries in courthouses risk their existence as well as their effectiveness. It is no fault of their own. But as fear surrounding the safety of the judiciary has seemingly increased in this century, the courthouse law library is increasingly caught behind a security apparatus that is in opposition to access. When the judiciary and its infrastructure increases friction to access the courts, it can make the law library inaccessible.

Up-Armored

This is largely anecdotal. I looked for data on attacks on judges and impact of courthouse security on access to justice. The Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t appear to have done anything recently on this. The National Center for State Courts has a couple of research pieces from a decade or more ago (Security At What Cost, 2006, and Courthouse Security Incidents Trending Upward, 2012) but they seem to mostly focus now on how to secure rather than why to secure.

I wasn’t able to find data on how many courthouse security incidents had occurred and a probability of how likely they were. I hate to say it, but the courts capture so little actionable data about themselves that I didn’t spend a lot of time digging for what I assumed wasn’t there. We get caught up in the very real singular cases of a lawyer being killed at their office or a judge murdered at their home. But I am not at all persuaded that these security challenges are proportionally different from the average citizen living in a culture awash with firearms.

I thought this survey of courthouse staff in Ontario (Canada) was interesting (n=632). I think they highlight some of the issues that law librarians in public law libraries also face. But there remains that balance between ensuring law library staff can work safely and ensuring that people have access to the information and services they need, and that we exist to provide, to resolve legal issues.

One of the things you notice is that there is a group of people who are not stopped at courthouse security. They are courthouse employees but also often include members of the bar. Not because they are vetted for their mental well-being but because they are part of the justice operation. They may be exempted from rules that prohibit bringing in a mobile phone or a laptop, things that other people may also need in a courthouse or courtroom.

That inequality creates immediate, practical issues.

She brought photos of the neglected repairs on her phone to court. When she learned she couldn’t bring in the phone, she hid it under a trash can outside. When she arrived, late, to the courtroom, a default judgment had already been entered against her.

In 83 Million Eviction Records, A Sweeping and Intimate Look at Housing in America, Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, New York Times, April 7, 2018

Increasingly, users of public law libraries will need to print to PDF or download a form and have somewhere to save it. They may need their own devices and the law library’s wireless network to use legal research, to translate English-only legal resources or to use assistive tools.

All Parties are Opposition Parties

But there is also a mindset that comes along with this. I was attending a function recently for lawyers at our law library. A municipal court judge was a speaker and was going to be showing up shortly before their presentation. Parking in our location is hard to find and isn’t adjacent. Anyone who comes to our library will have to walk a block, whether from public transit or a parking lot.

A lawyer voiced their concern to me that this judge would have to walk along the sidewalk to the law library. “What if someone recognizes them?,” the lawyer asked. The intimation was that the judge might run into a litigant or someone who felt ill-served by the legal system and endanger the judge’s safety.

I was gobsmacked. I walk to work every day and, while I’m not a judge, I have never felt that there was a general threat to my being. I’m not sure that participants in the legal system hang around near the courts when their case is done. But even if they did, is it reasonable for judges to be worried about those sorts of interactions? Judges work in a confrontational system of justice: there is usually at least one winner and one loser. Losers may be unhappy about their outcome but, despite the furor over courthouse security, the thousands of judges in the United States do not seem to be routinely under threat.

At another event I attended, also for lawyers, a state supreme court justice attended. They had a security detail that stood around the room. No one could sit at the same table at which the justice was sitting. It was pretty peculiar. I have attended state bar events in other states and the supreme court justices mingle with the bar without that sort of security precaution. But perhaps those states have also become more restrictive, isolating their judges more from the public and the bar.

What does it mean when our justice officers, whether lawyers or judges, become fearful of people without law degrees? How does that affect people’s ability to access justice? What does it do to the documented biases that judges already enter the courtroom with?

Fear Factor

Fundamentally, I think that you can’t secure environments to the point of entirely preventing bad outcomes. When I worked at a law library in an Ohio courthouse, a police officer left their firearm in a public washroom and, by the time they returned to recover it, the gun had gone missing. This courthouse had metal detectors and this firearm only entered the building because it was being carried by someone who could bypass the security.

Ironically, we are simultaneously looking outside the courthouses to deliver services. Not just law libraries, but the courts and non-profits are worried about rural access to justice. They’re investing in “justice buses” that either send a bunch of lawyers to parachute into a location or take a bookmobile approach with one lawyer and a bunch of resources. I wonder whether the friction at the courthouse makes that need even greater.

The question I have is whether prevention is better managed by isolation or by resilience? I think about it a lot in relation to our public-facing staff. I’ve learned a lot from our veteran librarians about how they manage stressful interactions and de-escalating that stress. The survey of Canadian courthouse staff above represents these interactions as events or discrete interactions. And they are but they are also something more. The stress can lead to anxiety about future interactions. Even once the event is over and staff have been able to create space from the person or the incident, there remains a heightened emotional state that needs to be managed. We don’t want staff going home upset or in an unhealthy emotional state. That path leads to burnout, staff turnover, departure from the profession at a time when the need has never been greater.

At the same time, we cannot do our work if we’re isolated from the people we’re working with. Library staff don’t get a security detail. While we have a security officer on our staff, our public services team has to be able to manage difficult situations as well. They need to develop a certain amount of internal resilience to not only deal with a stressful day but be able to come back the next day, and the next. We have to staff a deep public services team to enable the kind of inter-connected support that they need to be able to be successful.

Isolation is an unlikely solution for security-related challenges in law libraries. We can’t do our jobs in isolation. Also, security mechanisms are generalized for lower level staff. In courthouses, court clerks are not getting security details. They rely on hardened buildings and access obstacles to reduce the likelihood of negative outcomes.

It also makes me wonder if people involved in the administration of justice would be better off getting the same sort of training we do as librarians. How to deal with vexatious patrons. How to deal with “First Amendment auditors”. How to deal with an active shooter. Rather than feeling fear of participants in the legal process (or having it projected on them by the bar), showing a resilience to the potential threats that come with the work we do.

The cost of legal representation has already created a have/have not environment in the administration of justice. Isolating the bench and bar from the people who use the system cannot be healthy for the legal system in the long term. It can’t be healthy for law libraries that operate from within organizations that maintain that fearful mindset.