Changes To ABA Standards On Library And Information Resources: Unintended Consequences For Legal Scholarship

Nicholas Mignanelli (Yale; Google Scholar), Whither the Monograph: Changes to the ABA Standards on Library and Information Resources and Their Unintended Consequences for Legal Scholarship, 2 Nw. L.J. des Refusés __ (2025):

Recent actions by the American Bar Association (ABA) threaten the future of the legal monograph. Resolution 302, passed by the ABA House of Delegates at its midyear meeting in February 2024, substantially revised the standards on library and information resources by omitting any reference to a core collection and adding a corresponding interpretation that states, “[t]he appropriate mixture of collection formats . . . need not . . . include[] physical books.” This Essay argues that these changes to the ABA standards intended to clear the way for the proliferation of online law schools will have serious unintended consequences for legal scholarship, specifically by hindering access to a significant part of the corpus of legal literature at many law schools and leading to fewer publishing opportunities for legal scholars. 

This Essay proposes that another organization, the Association of American Law Schools, mitigate these effects by adding language to its bylaws that require member schools to continue to steward permanent collections that support scholarly research and sustain legal scholarship.