President of the Russian Association of Law Libraries, Plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, professor, Doctor of Law.
Legal library plays the most sufficient role in the education and preparation of a lawyer, in the legislation process and law enforcement practice. Serious amendments have taken place in almost all areas
1. Changes in the training and professional activity of a lawyer are based on:
- Increased role of law in the society,
- Rapidly increased activity in the law making process,
- Enormously increased number of educational institutions, preparing lawyers, and, as a consequence, ascendancy of the amount of legal and paralegal scientific literature,
- Freedom of mass-media and state refusal to control the quality of legal literature
2. State organs activity’ normative maintenance includes issues of
accessibility and timeliness of receiving legal normative
documentation, as well as reliability of used materials. It is also
complicated by the necessity to renew all departmental normative legal
bases, because of reorganization of governmental and other organs.
3. Role of library in the lawmaking process. Open choice of
legislation development and its adaptation to International and
European standards prescribes the necessity of studying and drawing on
other states’ experience, monitoring of current legislation as well as
practice of its implementation.
4. Library as a manager of legal information. Role of libraries in the
formation of public and professional legal spheres. Necessity to
increase professional attitude to library activities and inverse
effect on publishing activity.
5. Formation of a new legal library: traditional and electronic
versions of the library, requirements to the legal “library product”,
problem of low-quality legal literature. Variants and ways to achieve
these new aims.