The following is a guest post by Alexander Salopek, a collection development specialist in the Collection Services Division of the Law Library of Congress. He previously wrote posts on Fred Korematsu’s Drive for Justice, Fred Korematsu Winning Justice, Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Ibrahim Muteferrika, First Muslim Printer of the Ottoman Empire, and The Coroner’s Court, Westminster, London: Pic of the Week, among others.
This Memorial Day weekend, I attended the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) conference in Calgary, Canada. Given my background as primarily a U.S. law librarian with most of my formal collection work being done at the U.S. Supreme Court, it was a boon to be able to learn about law librarianship in a different country. I was both lucky and a little unlucky – since the Canadian legal system is in English, although there is a French version of everything too. It is a common law country with a civil law jurisdiction as well. For any U.S. residents who are familiar with law in Louisiana, it is a civil law jurisdiction like Quebec; however, that similarity does not mean that Canada’s legal system is just like the United States. Nothing I understand about the U.S. legal system can be transferred to my understanding of the Canadian legal system without research and engagement in understanding the differences and similarities. It is fascinating that all criminal law is the same everywhere in Canada, even though civil law is different in each provincial jurisdiction.
Another fact of Canadian law that I find so incredibly reasonable, but never thought about before this conference, is how much history affects how and what laws are passed, and the differences that exist between U.S. and Canadian law. Every time a law was discussed during the conference, the context of when it was passed was also discussed. Seeing how the law in Canada dealt with the problems Canadians were facing helped me realize that U.S. laws also deal with the problems the U.S. and the individual states are facing, and particularly their attempts to solve those problems. I have always been deeply interested in how the facts of a case relate to its outcome and to what lesser extent facts lead to legislation being passed. Travelling to a different country and learning how they view their laws and their history for themselves was a huge revelation for me. This view made it clear why robust foreign and comparative legal collections need to be maintained here in the U.S. to support such research and learning. I left the conference feeling that with hard work and determination, and historic moments in mind, one can interpret and compare the laws in any jurisdiction.
