First Contact: Law Librarianship, the Triple Helix Dilemma, and the Overlooked Foundation of CRT in LIS

Abstract

In the last two decades, librarians and LIS scholars have turned to critical race theory (CRT) for new insights about their field and its relationship to race and racism in the United States. Yet law librarians have been engaging CRT since the 1980s. In fact, founding critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote about law libraries and legal information—just as several law librarians and legal information scholars were writing about critical legal theory—in the earliest days of the movement. This paper surveys these works and assesses the impact they have had on law librarianship in the hope of encouraging CRT-aligned LIS scholars and librarians in other subfiels to discover this previously overlooked foundation of CRT in LIS.