
In 1996, when Professor Bernard Hibbitts first established JURIST, few could have foreseen the impact the project would have. Whether measured in terms of the individual lives it has touched, its global reach, or the impressions it has left on the landscape of online legal news coverage, JURIST’s role cannot be overstated.
What began as a modest online repository for legal scholarship evolved under Professor Hibbitts’ visionary leadership into a groundbreaking service that revolutionized how legal news reaches the public. Through his innovative approach of empowering law students as reporters and editors, he created a unique educational model that has trained generations of legal professionals while delivering accessible, authoritative coverage of rule-of-law issues to millions of readers worldwide. Upon his retirement in December 2024, after nearly three decades of service, his legacy endures in JURIST’s continued commitment to bridging the gap between legal academia and public understanding, fostering transparency and justice across borders.
A festschrift is a collection of writings published in honor of a scholar, traditionally during their lifetime. This digital festschrift for Professor Hibbitts will grow organically through regular contributions published several times weekly. All entries will be permanently archived and indexed on a dedicated section of JURIST’s website, creating a living testament to his transformative vision and lasting impact on legal journalism and education. This is the sixth entry in this ongoing series, the (as-yet) entirety of which can be found here.
It’s not unusual for a law school to have a legal historian on the faculty but it is notable to have a faculty member with one foot in the past and another in the future. Such is Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts, affectionately known as Bernie by his colleagues. Standing on the sidelines for several decades watching Bernie navigate these two worlds has been quite revealing and an exercise in humility.
I know very little about Hibbitts’ background so I can only speculate where his deep love of history originated. If it wasn’t sparked by a close family member it must have been nurtured through his extensive university education. However it arrived, it is reflected in his teaching, his presentations, and his scholarship. At some point he realized that there is more to history than just reading texts. In the classroom he enhanced his lectures with collected objects handled by students, photographs, graphic illustrations, maps, and other items. His presentations, like his classroom lectures, are lively mixtures of narrative and media that grab your attention immediately. Bernie approaches his historical research like an archeologist. He has an extensive personal library and has probably borrowed books from every university library in the English-speaking world but beyond the texts, he is digging through primary documents that he has uncovered. Having had the privilege of helping him with a project or two I can verify that every stone gets overturned. This might mean that a deceased subject’s surviving family members are tracked down to locate letters or other memorabilia or it might mean that pamphlets or other remnants of an institution are hunted and purchased on the internet. Each layer revealed seems to lead to another layer.
In a 1996 article, Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace, Bernie Hibbitts dropped a bombshell on the scholarly legal community. Law review articles, long the mainstay of academic legal publishing, were his focus. True to form, Hibbitts began this piece with the history of law review publishing, followed by a review of past complaints. He addressed some of the changes that the publications have undergone over the years while attempting to remedy the criticism. Finally, he jumped to the future and looked at some of the experimental publishing going on in other scholarly fields. Hibbitts developed solutions to most of the historical problems by utilizing currently available technology. His principal idea was to abandon the student-edited law review entirely in exchange for faculty self-publishing on the World Wide Web, or a system to be developed by an academic organization. Central to this idea was the concept of editions, meaning that texts could be revised and republished over time. Articles would be available for commentary by other academics, could be published in a timelier manner, and the faculty author would retain control over the text, relieving student editors of the opportunity to make major edits. Digital publishing would also allow for improvements like hypertext to be made and provide for the possibility of media insertions in the text. All of this was very revolutionary at the time and started an extensive conversation among his colleagues. As time has gone on many of Bernie’s ideas have been incorporated into the commercial systems BEPress and the Social Science Research Network. What made his article so forceful almost thirty years ago now was not just the thought-provoking way he dissected the concept of the law review but the strategic organization of his masterful writing. It was truly a visionary piece of legal scholarship.
At about the same time Last Writes was being published, Hibbitts came up with another brilliant idea, JURIST. The elimination of the student-run law reviews that Hibbitts was proposing in Last Writes would cut back on the opportunities for law students to get extracurricular writing and editing experience. An international student-operated legal news service utilizing the latest technology would solve that problem and provide the world legal community with a resource unlike anything in existence. At that time legal news was available through a few different avenues. Legal newsletters were available for certain selected subject specialties although their print format usually limited their availability to a monthly publication schedule. Even when these newsletters were converted to a digital format they tended to come out monthly and follow much the same design as their predecessors. Some legal newspapers were published more often, but frequently they were local in scope and only available in large cities or they were oriented towards the practicing attorney. Magazines were almost always monthly and many of them were produced by bar associations and again were more practical in nature. There was a need for a legal source of information that was international in scope and timely. I suspect that coming up with the idea may have been easier than dealing with the logistics of implementing it. A project of this scope would have turned most faculty members away, but Hibbitts persevered and developed JURIST into the award-winning legal news network it is today. It’s not unusual to hear that JURIST was the first to publish a legal news story, provide a document or interview a newsmaker.
All these accomplishments are only topped by Bernie’s demeanor. He is one of the most approachable individuals to ever set foot in the Barco Law Building. The respect and appreciation he has shown to members of the library staff is recognized by them all. Personally, I have found working with him to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job. Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts, here’s to a long and productive retirement.
Citation:
- Bernard J. Hibbitts, Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace, 71 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 615 (1996).
Marc Silverman is a Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and worked alongside Professor Hibbitts for decades as a faculty librarian and ultimately Director of Pitt Law’s Barco Law Library.