Director's Corner: Fall 2026

This article is from the fall 2026 issue of Hearsay, the semi-annual newsletter of the Wheat Law Library.

A Season of Beginnings

There is something about fall at KU Law that makes the law school feel particularly alive. The trees around Green Hall begin to turn, a new class of students settles into the rhythms of law school and the library once again becomes a place of conversation, discovery, and, perhaps inevitably, a fair amount of caffeine.

For me, this fall has also been a season of beginnings and transitions at the Wheat Law Library. As I enter my second academic year as director, I have been thinking a great deal about what makes a law library valuable in a time when legal information is increasingly digital, legal research tools are changing rapidly and artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the way lawyers work.

Some things, however, have not changed.

One of my favorite fall traditions is the Barber Emerson Bluebook Relays. Each year, our first-year law students form teams and race through the library, putting the legal research skills they have been developing in the lawyering program to the test. They locate sources, identify the relevant information and then produce citations in proper Bluebook form. The competition rewards speed and accuracy, but it also requires something more fundamental: knowing how to find and evaluate legal information.

Watching the Bluebook Relays is a reminder that, despite all the technological changes taking place around us, the foundations of legal research still matter. Knowing where to look, recognizing a reliable source, understanding how authorities relate to one another and communicating that information accurately remain essential skills for every lawyer.

At the same time, the tools available to accomplish those tasks are changing quickly. The Wheat Law Library continues to move toward a primarily digital collection, while maintaining important print resources, particularly Kansas and federal materials. This transition gives us an opportunity to think carefully about what we collect, how we provide access to it and what our students and faculty need from us in an increasingly digital research environment.

We are also exploring what artificial intelligence will mean for legal education and legal practice. The library has begun working with Harvey AI and is exploring additional ways to help our faculty and students understand both the possibilities and limitations of emerging AI tools. We are particularly interested in moving beyond the question of whether AI can perform a particular task and toward the more important questions: When should we use it? How should we evaluate its work? And what skills must a lawyer retain when technology is doing more of the initial research and analysis?

This fall also brings a new member to our library team. Our Electronic Services & Emerging Technologies Librarian Rebecca Orozco will help us navigate many of these changes while continuing the important behind-the-scenes work that makes our digital resources accessible and useful. I am excited about what this position will allow us to accomplish in the coming years.

Yet even as our collections and technologies evolve, the heart of the Wheat Law Library remains the same: people helping people find, understand and use information. Our librarians teach research, work with faculty, assist students, support scholarship, troubleshoot technology, answer questions and occasionally help someone find the one obscure source that everyone else has given up looking for. 
That combination of tradition and change seems particularly appropriate for fall. It is a season that reminds us that change is inevitable, but that change does not mean abandoning what came before. Instead, we take what we have learned, adapt it to new circumstances and begin again.

So, as another academic year gets underway, I am looking forward to seeing what this new year brings to the Wheat Law Library. There will be new technologies to explore, new students to teach, new scholarship to support, and undoubtedly a few Bluebook citations to correct.

And perhaps that is exactly as it should be.

Welcome back to the Wheat Law Library.

We are glad you are here.

Blake Wilson
Wheat Law Library Staff Director