Wednesday, LII Director Tom Bruce did a guest appearance in Paul Lomio‘s Advanced Legal Research class at the Stanford Law School.  Just like the substitute teachers we had in middle school, Bruce attempted to cover his ignorance of the subject by entertaining the class with movies:  West’s recent marketing piece featuring Bob Berring, and a sneak preview of a new 3-minute video describing the LII’s mission and history (and it’s pretty good, if we do say so ourselves).  A lively discussion of the issues raised by these two very different ideas about why we have legal information services and who uses them ensued.  Students know a lot….

If you’re interested in these issues, you might want to look at the public discussion on slaw.ca (a bit hard to find all of it in one place), at Bruce’s response here, and at an earlier blog post responding to the same arguments from West employee Dan Dabney.   On YouTube, you can also find videos describing the 17-year history of the “volunteer” LII movement worldwide (1,2,3) featuring the Canadian and Australian LIIs — de facto national resources for law in their respective countries.