Cornell Law Library will miss our colleague, supporter, and great friend Professor Robert S. Summers who retired at the end of last year. At his last contracts class in December of 2010, part of a series of Retirement Events, Professor Summers was honored by former and present students, colleagues, family, and friends. He had two opportunities to address the group and in his first brief remarks he said it was the most appropriate occasion “to express his profound gratitude for 42 years at Cornell Law School.” He expressed gratitude to his students, colleagues, research assistants, and administrative assistants, and “gratitude to the attentive and very helpful librarians – God bless them – their great contributions should be acknowledged more often.”
Later, near the end of the occasion, he said:
I wish also to express my profound gratitude and appreciation … to the excellent librarians, without whom naught! I’m a book worm and those librarians have satisfied the appetite of that worm in a most remarkable way. And sometimes I fear the librarians don’t get quite their due and I want to emphasize their importance.
And for a good many years I not only was heavily engaged in supporting our librarians here but I was chair of the Cornell University Library board. And we did our best to get people in line to support the Library budget and to support the efforts of the librarians to make the campus conscious of the profound importance of those libraries. We just tend too often to take all those books on those shelves for granted. Let me tell you there’s a lot of work behind that, a lot of careful attention behind that, and much gratitude is due.
