Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been noticing my guard dropping in my interactions at work. I first noticed it after a class, when the students had brought up a topic and I had ended up reaching back into my own personal history for a story. I’ve felt it a bit with interactions with some…

Reading Time: 4 minutes
I will be taking my research and writing students on a tour of the law library soon. It’ll include a walk through our collection floors and past my office, as well as other nooks and crannies. I don’t keep any diplomas on the wall which, while I’m not defensive about it,…

Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been in my current role just over a year and it is the second one where we had a bit of process change around money. In my previous role, the CFO died about 5 months after I started and we found that knowledge of some of the library’s processes died…

Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m in a liminal space on my writing. It was a very busy summer, one way and another, and I was in a bit of a forced march to get projects done before it was over. The book manuscript is the longest piece I’ve ever written. I got it and a…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
It all started with a inflammatory headline on an article shared on Mastodon. It was from a politically aligned media site that was suggesting that a new Congressional Bill would deprive Americans of rights. I read the article and then I read the bill. By the time I returned to Mastodon,…

Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am back in the classroom this semester. As I put together my syllabus, I faced the artificial intelligence section. It is, for me, relatively inconsequential even though I am teaching a research and writing class. I point students towards Grammarly, which the university (not the law school) has a site…

Reading Time: 4 minutes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The cratering of X seemed to foreshadow a resurgence of blogging. New platforms sprang up, walled gardens expanded, there was some fracturing but, all in all, not a lot of obvious growth. As someone who blogs but more importantly…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been contemplating my ability to juggle my responsibilities—leader, manager, parent, partner, pup valet—and was reminded, once again, that we need to give ourselves slack. No one and nothing operates at 100%, let alone the cliché commonly brought up of 110% now that we’re in American football season, on a…

Reading Time: 9 minutes
I have just passed my first anniversary at the new job. It seems to have come around faster than I expected although, considering everything else going on in the last 12 months, that may hardly be surprising. There have been a number of changes that I had to negotiate, not all…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
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…

Reading Time: 7 minutes
There are times when you know you need help and you take the step to ask for it. We were selling a house in Canada and moving to the United States. There are tax consequences and they were complicated because now we had 2 national tax regimes to deal with: capital…

Reading Time: 3 minutes
My mind wandered in the middle of a presentation—taking a speaker’s comment and turning it in the light, thinking about the facets—at the AALL annual meeting. This is both a common occurrence and also my real purpose of attending. A speaker will sometimes say something in a way that gets behind…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
When you self-host your own website or have it hosted on someone else’s hardware, it takes up a small part of your brain. I chose to put my websites on other people’s equipment because that mental occupation was a bit more than I wanted to handle: was it running, how was…