Associate Dean Hinckley elected chair of AALS Section on Law Libraries and Legal Information

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Steven D. Hinckley, associate dean for libraries and information services and professor of law at Penn State Law, was elected chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Law Libraries and Legal Information at the AALS 2015 Annual Meeting in January in Washington, D.C. His term began on Jan. 4 and will continue until the next chair is elected at the AALS 2016 Annual Meeting in January 2016.

AALS Sections are interest groups composed of members of the faculty and professional staff of AALS member schools. The sections present programs at the AALS Annual Meeting, provide newsletters for their membership, and conduct other activities of interest to their members, such as mentoring programs and exam exchanges.

Among his duties as chair, Hinckley will lead a committee responsible for organizing the slate of educational programming offered by the Section at the AALS 2016 Annual Meeting in New York.

Dean Hinckley has been involved in law librarianship on national and regional levels and has taught courses on lawyering skills, legal research, and computer law. He has been a frequent speaker at library, technology, and legal professional programs on the subjects of law and technology, digital copyright, digital information licensing, the Patriot Act, Internet filtering, and online legal research, and has published a number of articles on information access policies and computers in legal education.

The Association of American Law Schools, founded in 1900, is a nonprofit association of 178 law schools. Its members enroll most of the nation’s law students and produce the majority of the country’s lawyers and judges, as well as many of its lawmakers. The mission of AALS is to uphold and advance excellence in legal education. In support of this mission, AALS promotes the core values of excellence in teaching and scholarship, academic freedom, and diversity, including diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, while seeking to improve the legal profession, to foster justice, and to serve its many communities.