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The photo coming out of the Fayette County (TX) courthouse law library was not great PR. The story showed a stack of boxes from legal publishers that had pocket parts, shrink-wrapped text volumes, and who knows what else. Common sights in any law library, for sure, but the article suggests that this stack was accumulating without being processed. The books live in a library whose “door remains locked unless someone is using” the library. The law library has a Windows XP computer and no internet. There is a great deal of interest in access to information when we talk about the justice gap and I was struck at how this described so many of the problems that access to justice faces: money, people, accessibility.
The people of Fayette County (TX) and other Texas counties are actually pretty lucky. Lots of counties in the United States do not have a legal opportunity to have a law library. I’m not sure anyone knows how many people have a county law library. Even a recent effort on behalf of self-represented litigants missed lots of them. It’s missing nearly 80 public law libraries in Ohio, Cook County, Illinois’ largest, and a bunch in California, for starters.
A map from an ARCGIS site titled “Law Libraries: Open to the Public: 2024 How Law Libraries are Serving Self-Represented Litigants Across the Country”
I do not mean to put this effort down because I know this a huge task. Lots of these law libraries are not staffed with law librarians or, sometimes, anyone. When someone attempts to aggregate this data, they can’t rely on someone at the location reporting that a law library exists. Even if a law library exists, the range of what that means will go from books on shelves and a Windows XP computer without internet all the way to a fully staffed organization with current technology and multiple locations. A person in one county may have access to some sort of law library while the next county may be without any resources.
Fayette County is just the latest example of the balancing act that the funders go through to try to square a round problem. Texas counties may create a county law library. If they do, the county commissioners pick up a couple of obligations. I expect, at some point, some of the law libraries that have been created may be sunsetted for practical reasons like cost. I’m not sure if there is a good way to track that creation and removal (in Texas or anywhere else that allows for an optional creation of a law library) since I would expect those to be local governance decisions and not something likely to show up in any legal research database.
The county commissioners received a request for $75,000 and decided to allocate $20,000 for the law library, half from court clerk fees (filing fees?) and half from the general fund. The county budget was short on revenue and so a $55,000 cut to the law library shifts that burden—about 20% of the $316,000 potential deficit—saved a lot of other agencies that may have more relevance to people’s daily life.
A law library has a ton of potential relevance. But it relies so much more heavily on process. If there are books, those books have to be ordered, paid for, received, placed on shelves or updated with new pieces as they arrive. If it relies on databases, it requires an internet connection to be paid for, a computer or wifi network to be configured, for hardware to be installed and updated.
That is without even getting to the point where someone can use the information. Law students spend months learning how legal research tools work. I expect it is the outlier law school or law library that finds that everyone’s username and password works every time, all the time. For worse, the legal system is inaccessible to most people without assistance. It is not really surprising that unstaffed courthouse law libraries are underutilized.
Then you also have the potential audience. Fayette County has about 21,000 people and about 100 lawyers who in the State Bar of Texas directory. The county commissioners may have figured $1 per head made more sense than $3. I couldn’t find a county public library and I expect that La Grange (the county seat) stands in for that role. Interestingly, it is already a dual-purpose museum and library with a budget of $538,000 in expenses in 2024 offset by about $10,000 in investment income and miscellaneous revenue (the public library charges fines; the law library allows no circulation).
The reporter that wrote about the law library expenses (bless their heart) tried to price out the replacement cost of some of the materials. They focused on a print United States Supreme Court reporter set which would take $20,000 to replace. If a law librarian had been consulted, they might have offered the opinion as to whether anyone would bother to replace a set of Supreme Court reporters in this day of GovInfo and the Court’s own publication efforts for public access and perhaps no finding tools. Frankly, I don’t blame the reporter for digging in further: getting pricing and figuring out costing for law library materials is a nightmare even for professionals.
It was good to see that the Assistant County Attorney came with a bit of nuance, even if they largely came with the law-school-informed expectations of a practitioner (as opposed to what a self-represented litigant probably needs). While legal publishers are segmenting their content for practitioners, a public law library would need to license multiple segments (or a single large collection) to cover the necessary substantive areas. One can see why a pitch like Thomson Reuter’s pro se access is an easy choice in some counties, even if they end up paying $10,000 per seat for access (I am guessing at the amount; if anyone hassles me, I will FOIA pricing, but based on two licenses I’ve been involved in, I expect I’m not over the cost of a seat). I think this sort of self-represented pitch is for the public libraries, not the law libraries, because many public libraries will have larger budgets and the ability to justify that sort of expense. Also, they are more likely to exist everywhere there isn’t a public law library.
Of course, when you have a “public” law library (where the key is in the County Attorney’s office and can only be accessed during business hours), one might anticipate that a licensed commercial database isn’t going to get nearly enough use to justify the cost. Even one that allows remote access will, at some point, need someone to manage that access when a user can’t log in or the system is not working as expected. In other words, you can try to get the librarian out of the library, but you are going to pay for what they do one way or another.
Frankly, if I was a Fayette county commissioner, I would recommend closing the county law library and negotiating with the City of La Grange to expand their legal collection. I have said this many times but a public library is often a better solution to a public law library unless there are the resources to staff the law library and get it out of the courthouse.
La Grange’s library (called the Fayette Public Library already!) collects self-represented legal materials already, including Nolo titles. Even $10,000 from the court clerk’s fees could go a long way to expanding their legal information for access to justice purposes. This is particularly if the state, like Texas, has a lot of state-specific legal publications available (although many of these may be practitioner-oriented).
It feels as though the future for legal publishers will become increasingly narrow and focused on higher revenue generating audiences (large law firms), free-to-them organizations (county prosecutors, states’ attorneys), and captured audiences (law schools). Once people have become legal professionals, the choice to opt out of these platforms increases. And, for public libraries that are picking up the access to justice mission, there’s little value in licensing one of the major legal publishing platforms digital content, designed as it is for mediated access. The Thomson Reuters pro se access may be a play for this market, but it’s just a repriced version of their existing legal content. It’s not designed to be used without domain knowledge. If there is a death spiral to public legal information access, it may be the shift away from print to databases that leads to reduced usage that leads to reduced access, reduced usage, and ultimate closure of law libraries.
Unfortunately, when you lack professional law library staff and are making law library collection decisions, it’s not a surprise that there’s waste. A governance board and funder is more likely to continue to throw money at a problem to avoid eliminating a service. But I think this misses the opportunity of having someone else provide the service and, especially with a public library, to get some expertise that is currently missing when only lawyers and elected officials are part of the discussion.