We were saddened to learn of the death of Law Library titan, Roy M. Mersky. Law Librarian Blog reports:
Professor Roy M. Mersky died yesterday from complications of a recent fall. A member of the University of Texas-Austin School of Law faculty and the director of its law library since 1965, Mersky held the Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law. He was also a professor in the University’s graduate School of Information.
Professor Mersky received his B.S. in 1948, J.D. in 1952, and Master’s degree in Library Science in 1953 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a member of the Bars of New York, Texas and Wisconsin. He served in the US Army during World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star.
Mersky’s first law library position was at the University of Wisconsin Law Library, working as U.S. Government Documents Cataloger from May 1951 to June 1952. He served as Director of the Washington State Law Library, 1959-1963, and Professor of Law and Law Librarian at University of Colorado, 1963-1965, before his Texas appointment….
2008 marks the 50th anniversary of his first professional publication: Bibliographic Organization in Law Libraries: A Panel, 51 Law Library Journal 338 (1958). Of course, everyone knows his Fundamentals of Legal Research, first published in 1975 (with J. Myron Jacobstein), Spirit of Librarianship (with Richard Leiter), and his many works on Supreme Court history. He was working on Unknown Justices with William Bader at the time of his death.
For more on Professor Mersky’s many accomplishments, along with his Wisconsin connections, see his 40+ page CV.