The Friends of the Law Library of Congress held its annual meeting of the Board of Directors on Oct. 22 in the Madison Building offices of the Law Library of Congress. Abe Krash, president of the Friends, presided over the meeting, which drew members from as far away as Austin, Texas, and New York City.
Board members (from left): Executive Director Anne Mercer, President Abe Krash, Law Librarian of Congress Rubens Medina, Betty Southard Murphy, Paul Warnke, John Jenkins, Kenneth Halajian, Kathleen Price, Charles Mathias and Keith Ann Stiverson.
Law Librarian Rubens Medina presented his annual report and brought the members up to date on the project for which they had provided the seed money, the upcoming conference in March 2000, "Democracy and the Rule of Law in a Changing World Order." The conference, co-sponsored by the New York University School of Law, will bring together about 100 legal scholars, judges, legislators and social scientists from jurisdictions all over the world to discuss the bearing of changing legal patterns on the relationships between law and democracy. Following this report, the board voted to make an additional gift to the Law Library to help defray the costs of the project.
Other items on the agenda included the election of new officers to the Board, selection of a winner for the annual Wickersham Award, presented at the Wickersham Award Dinner in March at the Supreme Court, and a review of the Friends' mission statement in connection with possible future programs.
The Friends is a nonprofit organization founded in 1932 by some of the country's most distinguished jurists. Today the membership includes attorneys, publishers, scholars and librarians across the nation committed to support the preservation and growth of the Law Library of Congress, the largest and most comprehensive source of legal information in the world. It currently has holdings of more than 2.3 million volumes, foreign legal specialists to analyze and interpret the collection and its own digital initiative, the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a cooperative parliament-to-parliament legal database, as well as the National Digital Library's award-winning legal component, "A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774 -1873."
