This article by Alexander Lock and Jonathan Sims describes the context in which Magna Carta was obtained. It distinguishes different versions of the charter and signposts particular documents and publications in the history of its transmission and interpretation up to the early nineteenth century. It also identifies various texts and objects which have indicated the charter's significance for groups and individuals at particular junctures. These include information carrying objects which might support research on Magna Carta within the context of the circulation and reception of legal meaning. A major focus of the article is a chronological account of the charter's invocation from the thirteenth century to the early nineteenth century.

This Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2015, delivered by Professor Stephen Mayson2, explores the commercial evolution of law as a business, and draws attention to the disconnect between this development and continuing significant unmet need for legal services and prohibitively high fees for consumers and small businesses. The evolution is therefore supposed to be far from complete, and is hampered by the broken business model of law firms. A further shortcoming is the regulatory framework for legal services. Although this, too, has evolved in recent years with the introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007, the framework is nevertheless built on the still-complex and limiting structure of reserved activities, regulatory objectives and prescriptive detail. The author then explores the implications for information professionals, and highlights the opportunities for them to contribute to the development of ‘knowing management’, to the better education and training of legal practitioners, to helping them and their organisations address greater complexity and fluidity in regulation, and to harnessing market and client intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of legal services and the value of client relationships. The themes of cooperation, collaboration and connectivity underpin all of these opportunities, and contribute to the possibility of shaping and re-forming the role of the information professional in the 21st century.

In the 150th anniversary year of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the inception of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) this article by Alison Million considers any possible common contemporaneous connections between their authors. It makes particular reference to Lewis Carroll's legal associations and his fascination with the processes of law, considering to what extent these may have influenced Alice. In briefly reviewing ICLR history and the instigating factors behind reform it looks at the requisite skills needed finally to devise a successful scheme and any potential overlap between those and some of Lewis Carroll's many subject disciplines. The article concludes that just as the law helped shape Alice, so has Alice contributed to English case law by providing a descriptor for “perfect nonsense”.

Sexuality and Law scholarship is a new and developing field but, like most legal scholarship, it is dominated by masculine concerns and methodologies. This article, by Rosemary Auchmuty, explains why research that ignores feminist concerns and methodologies will be incomplete and inaccurate, and suggests questions that should be asked of resources to ensure a complete and accurate coverage of the topic.

The amount of physical space available is a vital issue for virtually all law libraries. In this article, Dunstan Speight, Library Manager at City law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP, presents the issues involved in reducing and retaining library materials, to help library managers present a sound business case for maintaining the collection they need. Dunstan's experience is that of a law firm librarian, but it is hoped that much of what follows will also be relevant to librarians in other sectors.

This article, written by Lesley Dingle, is based upon an in-depth interview with Dame Rosalyn Higgins in March 2014. It highlights particular elements that characterise her contribution to legal scholarship and international adjudication, and should be read in the context of the biography presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive: http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent_scholars/dame_rosalyn_higgins.php. Dame Rosalyn Higgins was born in Kensington in 1937. She grew up in London during the Blitz and her matter-of-fact account of these times epitomised her later career: application to the task in hand, and a lack of a sense of expectation. After the War, she passed successively through grammar school, Girton College, Yale and the Royal Institute of International affairs, steadily immersing herself over fifteen years in the work of the United Nations during its formative period. It was on the UN's role as the global peace-keeper and international law-maker that she became the acknowledged authority. There followed a long period of formal academia (1978–95: Kent and LSE), during which she rose to high office. This experience further honed her scholarly and administrative instincts, and she was honoured in 1995 with a DBE. Later that year Dame Rosalyn was appointed to the Bench of the International Court of Justice – the first woman to rise to this position, and in 2006 was elected its President. She retired in 2009.

Infiltrate and Conquer … looks at how librarians might take inspiration from outside of their profession to gain greater visibility and influence within their own workplaces. The piece is a mixture of experiences: from the author, Emily Allbon, from others who have left the profession but who use those skills in other careers, and also from some librarians outside of law. The focus here is on why, and indeed how, to forge partnerships and encourage collaboration with others inside and outside of your profession. The author's Lawbore website and associated technologies will be discussed throughout the article.

Mark Pexton, of Herbert Smith Freehills LLP, provides a report on the findings of a survey into the use of Collection Development Policies (CDPs) and related collection development issues in law firm libraries. The survey was conducted during September 2014 and during the course of this article he provides an analysis of the benefits and difficulties of creating and implementing a CDP.

Historically, civil justice has been conceived as a concentration of non–criminal matters, including several heterogeneous procedures, and that is the main reason why it has been subject of study in several countries in Latin America where procedure reforms are being designed, implemented or evaluated. Santiago Pereira Campos examines justice systems in Latin America in collaboration with Alejandra Pírez Ledesma who worked with him on this article.

This article, by Rosemary Hunter, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research’ in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. She begins by describing the uses of judgments as sources within feminist research on judging, and then outlines three different methods of analysis employed within this research: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and the newest method, that of rewriting judgments.

Loyita Worley discusses the need for librarians to promote library services more avidly within their organisations. She argues that providing a high quality information service to clients is not necessarily sufficient and that librarians need to give considerably more effort to promoting and branding their services, in the way that other teams in law firms already do. She looks at why librarians should brand, how they should do this and what they should brand. The perspective of the user is also taken into account and the importance of building trust and confidence with clients is identified as a key feature in the approach to branding and promotion.

Wills are an overlooked source. Alongside birth, death and marriage certificates they are official legal texts that provide a record of families, kinship and personal life. They have a particular significance for research about gender and sexuality. This paper, by Daniel Monk, highlights some of the insights that they can provide and discusses the methods (and associated pitfalls) for accessing and reading them.

The Library is of value as a physical and social space, as a place that can facilitate learning; independently and in distinct ways to its role as repository of, and point of access to, information. The problems that defenders of this “learning place” aspect of the Library face are bound up with a very powerful, and indeed prevalent, metaphor. This metaphor is of teaching and learning as the transfer of information from one place or head, to another place or head. Therefore, Graham Ferris and Angela Donaldson put forward a far more realistic account of learning, and combine it with an example of learning being enacted in practice. We need to articulate the value of the Library as a place of learning because it is under threat from pressures on resources that are being deployed on a “common sense” but fallacious assumption that Libraries are about the storage and manipulation of information only.

This article, written by Teresa M. Miguel-Stearns, explores the vast differences in judicial authority not only between the common law and civil law traditions, but also among various countries steeped in the civil law tradition in Latin America. Judicial review, certiorari, precedent, and other functions and characteristics of the judiciaries of five distinctly different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico) are compared and contrasted with each other and with the common law tradition. This evaluation demonstrates that despite their, arguably, similar distant histories and legal foundations, each country has evolved into a unique legal system with significant differences in the treatment of the judiciary and its jurisprudence.