Legal Information and the Development of American Law

Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring

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Legal Information and the Development of American Law:
Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring

Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley

Few will argue with the proposition that Bob Berring of the the University of California-Berkeley School of Law has been throughout his career the foremost thinker about the influences of legal information--the literature of the law--on the development of the law and legal thought in the United States. His 1987 suggestion that "[f]rom the late nineteenth century, the development of the American legal system can be seen as a history of the development of forms of legal publication," and his own explorations of "whether the forms of publication have been mere vehicles for the transmission of legal knowledge or important influences in the development of that knowledge" have inspired the thinking of numerous other writers and provided a lens through which to view the dramatic changes that have taken place in the legal information environment over the past twenty-five years.

A distinguished group of scholars will gather for a symposium honoring Bob for his work on the historical role of legal information and the impacts of digital technologies in the legal information environment.