Law libraries in a country represent its legal potential. These testify to law and legal development, place of law in people's mind and life and quality of legal education, in a country. Future legal development and people's attitude towards law, to a great extent, is dependent upon the state of and scope for legal education in a given group. It might be suggested that the law libraries pulsatingly reflect the standard, methods and objectives of legal instruction in a country. Prescribed law courses, level of legal teaching, quality of legal research, expectations and aspirations both of the law teacher and the pupil and priority of emphasis among areas of law, all can be easily ascertained by observing the law libraries of any people.

Law libraries occupy a unique and, in many respects, an ambiguous status in the United States. This status tends to set them apart in a variety of significant ways from the ubiquitous prototypes of general libraries and, with the possible exception of medical libraries, even from the different categories of specialized libraries in other academic or professional areas. The distinctiveness of law libraries in the United States, which is shared to a greater or lesser extent by many law libraries elsewhere in the world, and especially in countries possessing legal systems based on common law, cannot fully be appreciated by anyone who does not have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the nature and content of law as well as a working familiarity with the idiosyncratic uses of library materials by the legal profession in the exercise of judicial and legislative processes. Unfortunately, the incontro-vertible value of this self-evident requirement if frequently overlooked.

Law libraries, like all other types of liberaries, are undergoing a period of rapid change, as a result of the greatly increased production of printed materials, the adaptation to new technology and the introduction of new media. To meet these challenges successfully requires careful planning. Planning inevitably makes one think of the future; the very word ‘plan', which means an organized method according to which something is to be done, is future oriented. However, to appreciate fully the present state of planning for law libraries in Canada, it is helpful first to have some idea of the history of our development. It is a history which indicates that law library service in Canada has been very slow in evolving. This fact, which I had long suspected to be the case, became quite apparent to me when in 1971 I had the occasion to write an article on law libraries in Canada for the Law Library Journal. I will not go into all the historical detail at this time but simply mention the major points.