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28 Legal Reference Services Q. 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/lgrefsq28 and id is 1 raw text is: Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 28:1 7, 2009 I Routledge Copyright 0 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 Taylor& Francis Group ISSN: 0270-319X print / 1540-949X online DOI: 10.1080/02703190902961445 Introduction to Special Issue Legal Research: MacCrate's Fundamental Lawyering Skill Missing in Action BARBARA BINTLIFF Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor ofLaw, and Director, William A. Wise Law Library, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA It can hardly be doubted that the ability to do legal research is one of the skills that any competent legal practitioner must possess.' The American Bar Association's 1992 MacCrate Report2 was the catalyst for major changes in American legal education. With its identification of funda- mental lawyering skills, MacCrate provided detailed guidance and structure for law schools to assess and as needed, enhance their curriculum to prepare students for the practice of law. Some of the biggest changes brought about by the MacCrate Report were in legal writing instruction and clinical offerings, the programs through which most fundamental lawyering skills are taught. The MacCrate Report helped catalyze then-existing trends to professionalize legal writing instruction and increase clinical offerings (both live-client and simulated). In addition, mock trial and moot court competitions increased, providing additional outlets for the application of client skills and multiple writing opportunities; as often as not, clinical or writing faculty supervised these competitions. Law schools reallocated resources and invested significant funds in improving their offer- ings in these areas. For the most part, these programs taught the fundamental lawyering skills identified in the MacCrate Report; legal education and law graduates are the better for it. However, little attention has been paid to one fundamental lawyering skill-legal research. The large majority of U.S. law schools have assigned research instruction responsibilities to their legal writing faculty.3 Unfortu- nately, this model all but guarantees that research instruction will be un- deremphasized. Teaching writing and teaching research require different knowledge bases and approaches, not unlike other seemingly similar fields, such as securities law and corporate taxation or labor law and employment Address correspondence to Barbara Bintliff, University of Colorado Law Library, 402 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0402. E-mail: barbara.bintliff@colorado.edu 1

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