LLASTL Blog

Did you know that the Law Library Association of St. Louis has an online catalog that you can search remotely?   We have a growing selection of resources for the pro se patron representing himself in a legal matter. You can view the list of pro se resources by going to our catalog and viewing the list from a drop-down menu on the catalog home page.   Many of these pro se resources can also be downloaded, and can therefore be accessed and read without even having to come to the Law Library.

We get a lot of visitors in our library who are attempting to educate themselves about a legal issue, find legal representation, find legal forms, or figure out how to represent themselves in a legal case.   The complexity of the law and the court process and rules can be overwhelming to a non-lawyer.   To help these patrons, The Law Library Association of St. Louis decided to create a “Guide to Representing Yourself in Court.”   The Library was able to fund the creation of this guide after receiving a grant from the St. Louis Bar Foundation.

The Law Library Association proudly collaborates with Saint Louis Public Library on several projects. Here's what Lisa Thorp of Saint Louis Public Library had to say in our recent Q and A with her.

More often than you might think, we receive a request from an attorney looking for an older version of a Missouri statute that they cannot find online.  The Law Library has sets of the Missouri Revised Statutes dating back to 1879.  If you ever need to compare a new statute to its older version, please visit our library and check out our collection.   We also have print volumes of the Missouri Session Laws dating back to 1836.  For the digitally savvy, these session laws can also be found online at https://mdh.co

Each month the Leadership Development Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) highlights a librarian leader and asks them a few questions about their leadership journey. Read more about the profile of our Library Director in the late December installment.

HeinOnline is a legal research database that is offered free of charge both in the library and remotely for Law Library Association members. But to call HeinOnline a legal research database does not cover its complete scope. This resource provides more than 210 million pages of multidisciplinary periodicals, government documents, legislative histories, international documents, case law and more.

The Law Library Association of St. Louis is proud to co-sponsor the Legally Reading book discussion group, along with Saint Louis Public Library.  Over the years, our book group has read and discussed a number of noteworthy books on a range of social justice issues. Past titles have included “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson, “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou (about Elizabeth Holmes and the investigation of her company, Theranos) and “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann, now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese.

As we all know, the year 2020 brought the COVID-19 pandemic and with it, an end to in-person professional conferences.  One of the conferences most helpful to our staff is the Annual Meeting of the Mid-America Association of Law Libraries (MAALL). 

From 2020 to 2023, the MAALL Annual Meeting carried on, but only in a virtual format. There were many inspiring sessions at these meetings, but something was lost in not being able to connect in person.

In May of 1838, Charles Daniel Drake distributed a petition and obtained nineteen signatures to form a law library. He modeled his plan on the law libraries he knew in Boston and Philadelphia, which were supported by individual membership dues. When serving in the Missouri House, Hon. John Fletcher Darby (four times mayor of St. Louis) introduced a bill that incorporated the Law Library Association in 1839.

Professor Morgan Hazelton of Saint Louis University is also a prolific author. Her most recent book is “Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision Making.” The Law Library Association asked Professor Hazelton to tell us more about her new book. 

Tell us about your book, “Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision Making.”