Kevin Riordan: Rutgers law librarian a Web pioneer

John Joergensen, Rutgers-Camden law school librarian, is also a lawyer, a harvester, and a shepherd.

The last two titles sound a bit agrarian, but they are essential arts in his mission: to collect, catalog, curate, and present online a digital archive of the law of the land.

Free.

"Taxpayers have already paid for this information," says Joergensen, whose pioneering New Jersey Court Web project (www.lawlibrary.rutgers.edu) has posted state appellate rulings since 1997.

The site now includes digital copies of all sorts of documents, from federal court rulings to the deliberations of state constitutional conventions.

Much of the material, often available for a fee from publishers of databases and hard-copy texts, is generated by jurists and lawmakers who are public employees.

"We pay their salaries," says Joergensen, who's been putting our legal heritage online since before anyone had heard the word Google.

He recently was named "one of the nation's most interesting and provocative leaders in the combined fields of law, scholarship, and technology" by the legal research services firm Fastcase.

"There are thousands of books, but they're squirreled away in little libraries or very expensive databases," Joergensen says. "The public has no access, practically speaking.

"Why should we have to pay third parties for access to what our tax dollars paid for in the first place?"

Good question.

"One of the criticisms has been that the market [should be] taking care of this, rather than a public institution, and that the project smacks of socialism," he says.

"But if we say ignorance of the law is no excuse, then the law should be ubiquitous, and available."

Joergensen grew up in Bergen County and lives in Mount Airy with his wife, Patricia, a math professor at Holy Family University. They're raising four kids ages 10 to 17.

The librarian in the house is 50 - meaning he was a Fordham freshman in the manual typewriter era.

"I'll confess to watching Star Trek," he says in answer to my inevitable "Were you a nerd?" question.

Joergensen earned graduate degrees in law and philosophy, practiced criminal law in Philadelphia, and had recently earned his master's in library and information science at Drexel when he got his Rutgers job in 1996.