Criminal Law Libraries

The practice of criminal law is an important aspect of a safe and secure civil society. Both the maintenance of acceptable levels of freedom from the fear of physical harm and theft on the part of citizens and the guarantee of assurances in observance of Constitutional rights and the avoidance of abusive conduct for those accused of a criminal act form part of the fabric of a successful system of criminal law, and can be partly secured through the education of legal professionals in the past cases and precedents that have arisen in regard to this field. One way to ensure that this field remains at acceptable levels for educating law students and reminding practicing professionals of their responsibilities is to safeguard the system of criminal law libraries, through which a wide array of information on the field can be offered. A good criminal law library will offer extensive information drawn from incidents in the past that can provide the guidance and expertise of experience for conduct in cases to occur in the future. Criminal law libraries thus form an important part of the overall legal education system and, by extension, of the legal system as a whole. Both citizens without any active involvement in the legal profession and people who work in the legal field should be aware of the utility to be found in the form of an adequately equipped and staffed criminal law library.

A common location for criminal law libraries to be found is through the library collections that are provided by many courthouses. The setting of a criminal law library facility in a courthouse can be a way to ensure the accessibility of important information related to the practice of criminal law at the most relevant and essential times for it to be available. Criminal law professionals can enjoy access to the most recently updated rulings and cases, while people immediately facing criminal charges without the benefit of any formal training in the practices and regulations of the legal profession can attain some measure of comfort through a criminal law library with the laws by which they may be judged and can gain a sense of whether their rights are being adequately observed and their attorneys behaving within the limits and to the extent that is required by the system. Since people who find themselves facing some kind of criminal charge may be particularly disadvantaged from a social or financial standpoint, the resources of information that are offered through criminal law libraries can be especially irreplaceable. One area where the issue of the needed continuing public support for the maintenance of criminal law libraries has been raised with particular urgency by observers of the legal profession lies in the decision announced by the state of Connecticut in January 2010 to close six of the fifteen criminal law libraries based out of courthouse collections in order to answer budgetary woes. The American Association of Law Libraries points to this case as a vital moment for the public criminal law library.