In the 150th anniversary year of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the inception of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) this article by Alison Million considers any possible common contemporaneous connections between their authors. It makes particular reference to Lewis Carroll's legal associations and his fascination with the processes of law, considering to what extent these may have influenced Alice. In briefly reviewing ICLR history and the instigating factors behind reform it looks at the requisite skills needed finally to devise a successful scheme and any potential overlap between those and some of Lewis Carroll's many subject disciplines. The article concludes that just as the law helped shape Alice, so has Alice contributed to English case law by providing a descriptor for “perfect nonsense”.
Twenty years ago the author, Alison Million, submitted an article to Legal Information Management (LIM) entitled ‘Of Barristers and Books’ which recounted her experiences of working as a librarian to barristers’ chambers in the era of print and CDs. The article brought her into contact with the Librarian of Inner Temple Library and together they founded the Bar Librarians’ Group to meet the interests of both Inn and Chambers Librarians. This article in 2022 recounts how the ensuing 20 years have brought very different challenges to Chambers Librarians in the online era and how the Bar Librarians’ Group works hard to resolve difficulties on behalf of LIS professionals serving the Bar.
The ancient clusters of barristers’ chambers situated in and around London's Inns of Court are home to a growing number of law librarians. I first joined their ranks in December 1996, when I was offered a few hours work per week for a leading civil set on a freelance basis, performing mainly loose leafing. I accepted out of curiosity to learn exactly what went on in the enigmatic world of counsel's chambers, which was so often referred to in solicitors firms where I had previously worked.
In medieval England ‘forest’ did not have the same meaning as it does today but defined large areas of land governed by severe forest laws which Magna Carta had failed to temper. Instead, these were addressed two years later in the Charter of the Forest 1217 which, although a companion charter to the 1217 Magna Carta reissue, remains relatively unknown. This article by Alison Million explores the Charter of the Forest; its history, impact and legacy and considers why and to what extent its memory has been lost in time. It explains how the Charter of the Forest, and the pen of an unwitting scribe, contributed towards the name Magna Carta; a name which has just seen its octocentenial anniversary.
In the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.