This week’s interview is with Barbara Bavis, a Legal Reference Librarian in the Public Services Division of the Law Library of Congress. Barbara was a co-author of yesterday’s post on the electoral college and is joining the In Custodia Legis blog team – we look forward to reading more of her posts!
I consider myself a native of two places—North Carolina, where I was born, and Kansas, where I lived for several years while growing up. Looking at my family history, it seems fated that I would become a law librarian. My parents are both attorneys, and after running their own firm for several years, decided to utilize their law degrees in other fields—private sector human resources management and labor relations for my Dad, and teaching for my Mom. In addition, my grandmother worked for several years as a librarian. All of them instilled in me a great love of learning and the tenacity to always try to find the right answer, skills that I think have served me well in this career.
What is your academic/professional history?
I returned to North Carolina for my undergraduate education, graduating with a BA in history from Duke University. To the chagrin of some of my more sports–invested friends, I attended the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for law school, where I was a Comments Editor for the North Carolina Law Review. Working for the Law Review gave me my first taste of how law libraries worked, because I had to use all of the surrounding law libraries at one time or another to complete citation checks.
After law school, I worked for several years as an associate at LeClairRyan, both in its Richmond and Alexandria offices. I focused my practice largely in labor and employment law as well as immigration law. Working in