American Association of Law Libraries

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is a nonprofit educational organization with over 5,000 members across the United States. AALL's mission is to promote and enhance the value of law libraries to the legal and public communities, to foster the profession of law librarianship, and to provide leadership in the field of legal information and information policy."

AALL was founded in 1906. The American Association of Law Libraries' vision is to be

a thriving professional association whose members and libraries – whether physical or virtual legal information services – are recognized as critical to the success of their organizations and as central to society. AALL members possess the knowledge and skills to maintain effectiveness in a constantly changing legal environment. Since the ready availability of legal information is a necessary requirement for a just and democratic society, AALL and its members advocate and work toward fair and equitable access to authentic current and historic legal information, and educate and train library users to be knowledgeable and skilled legal information consumers.

The first president of the AALL was Arthur James Small (1869–1937), who was elected at the association's formation on July 2, 1906. Small was a law librarian at the Iowa State Library, and it was his idea to create an organization separate from the American Library Association specifically for law librarianship. Small never graduated high school or attended college, yet he successfully served the Iowa State Library for over forty years.

Frederick C. Hicks (1875–1956) was another early president who greatly contributed to the AALL's vision. Hicks was a law librarian at both Yale and Columbia. In 1919, Hicks was first elected president of the AALL. He served two terms as president, 1919–1920 and 1920–1921. In 1923, Hicks authored Materials and Methods of Legal Research. Prior to the publication of this book, there were very few legal research texts keeping pace with the explosive growth in casebooks and legal literature. Hicks was also a major proponent of expanding the scope of the AALL's Law Library Journal. Prior to Hicks's input, the Journal mostly served as a depository for AALL committee reports. Hicks believed an expanded Journal could cover multiple aspects of law librarianship, ranging from scholarly articles to industry news.

The first woman to be elected AALL president was Rosamond Parma (1884–1946). She served two terms from 1930 to 1932. Parma was also the first law librarian for the University of California, serving as director of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall library from 1911 to 1935. She also managed the California Law Review.

A. Mercer Daniel was the first African-American member to be admitted to AALL in 1933, and was inducted into the inaugural class of the AALL Hall of Fame in 2010. Daniel faced significant discrimination, with AALL staff frequently expressing resentment at his requests for equal accommodations in travel and lodging in attending conferences throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

Harry Bitner (1916–2001), who served as president for 1963–1964, helped elevate the position of law librarian from an under-educated service position to today's highly skilled specialists. Bitner outlined his thoughts in a Law Library Journal essay titled "The Educational Background of the University's Law Librarian" where he advocated college, library school, and law school degrees for new law librarians. In 1953, Bitner, along with Miles O. Price, authored Effective Legal Research. This work updated and advanced many of the themes first presented in Hick's Materials and Methods of Legal Research. As president, Bitner was instrumental in establishing a permanent headquarters for the AALL.