Montana Lawyer April/May 2025

News and Notes from the State Law Library FRANKLIN RUNGE FOR YOUR REFERENCE

Library is lucky to have two reference librarians who are bright, hardworking, and kind. If you need assistance finding resources, an obscure citation, or a legislative history, please do not hesitate to contact our team at mtlawlibrary@ mt.gov. Continuing Legal Education. The Law Library provides CLE materials that you can check out or free online streaming options. If you watch one of our online CLEs, our website allows you to generate a Certificate of Completion, which you can then upload to the State Bar of Montana’s website. The materials that are not streaming online, but are physical materials we circulate, are CLEs from the National Business Institute (NBI). Our website will tell you what titles are available, and we will mail them to your office. As you can imagine, this is a popu lar service, so please be prompt in returning materials by the due date. Montana Legislative Histories. For decades, the State Law Library has compiled, archived, and digitized legislative histories. Our collec tion is generated by patron requests; therefore, it is not comprehensive. That said, we have thousands of legislative histories from the 1950s to present, with the bulk of the collection reflecting the period from 1974 to 2003. We have started a project to make all these materi als freely available on the Internet Archive. The project has begun with the earliest legislative histories, and we are posting the collection in chronological order (at the time of this article’s publication, we are up to 1981). Please visit our website for access and additional information. Do not hesitate to contact the Law Library with your reference questions or suggestions. We look forward to assisting in your research journey and hopefully generating some happi ness along the way.

I believe in the adage that if you want to be happy, you should start by making someone else happy. This explains why our library does a lot of laughing around the office. We assist the bench, bar, and citizens with their legal infor mation needs, which are a fantastic mix of the mundane to the arcane. The following are some initiatives that the Law Library is working on to make the life of a Montana lawyer a little easier, and I dare say that some of these efforts might even make you happy. Digital Library. We provide a digital library for individuals who possess one of our library cards. A link to the Digital Library can be found on our homepage. This resource contains 120 titles (and counting) covering topics from em ployment discrimination, mining law, agricul tural law, workers’ compensation, real property, defending traffic violations, civil procedure, and more. We are happy to spend significant resources on making you more confident in your research, pleadings, and practice. Many of these titles are published by LexisNexis, but the platform allows us to host additional titles from other publishers. If you do not have a Lexis+ account, it seems shortsighted to not take ad vantage of this resource. Even if you do have an online Lexis+ account, the Law Library’s collec tion of treatises might be more comprehensive than your plan. When you go to the Digital Library, you will be prompted to sign-in using your Law Library card number. If you do not have a Law Library card, you can receive one by contacting us at: lawlibcirc@mt.gov or (406) 444-3660. As I type this article, our country is going through a period of financial uncertainty, let me suggest to you that it is hard to beat the Law Library’s price of zero dollars and zero cents. Reference Assistance. When it comes to legal research, your suffering is optional. Our Law

Since 2023, F ranklin L. Runge has served as the State Law Librarian of Montana. He is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and has a master’s degree in library science from Indiana University. Before join ing Montana’s Judicial Branch, Franklin practiced law in Massachusetts and then worked for eleven years in higher education .

12 MONTANA LAWYER

WWW.MONTANABAR.ORG