Legal Current

In July, I had a chance to meet Bob Berring, professor at Berkeley Law. I arranged our meeting to include him in a video that we debuted at the 2009 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The video is titled “Salute to Law Librarians” and features Berring, West author and law professor Arthur Miller and law librarian consultant Linda Will.

As many of you know, law librarianship is at the heart of Berring’s impressive career. He’s a teacher, author and tremendous resource and leader in his profession.

Before I flew out to San Francisco to meet Berring, I went on Twitter to see if anyone who follows the @westlaw account that I manage had any burning questions for him. This post features Berring’s answer, on video, to a question from @montserratlj who asked about the skills a legal reference librarian needs to have:

Berring’s response includes this quote, that “great reference librarians are born, not made”:

@montserratlj also asked us to find out if Berring has any plans to retire anytime soon, and what other careers he could have pursued:

On the retirement talk, Berring said that it’s not going to happen anytime soon. He’s a full-time professor and says “there’s no better gig than that. I will teach until they drag me out with a cane,” Berring joked. “The great thing about tenure is you can get old and stupid and obnoxious and all that happens is fewer people take your classes!” Though, he added, “there’s no better high” than getting a class engaged in learning about the law.

As for alternate careers Berring said, growing up in Ohio, his aspirations were to be a high school teacher in Cleveland. But “one little corner of me wanted to be President of the United States.”

We’ll share more from our interview with Bob Berring in some upcoming posts here on Legal Current.

Posted by Kevin Hunt in: Education | In Practice | Video | Share