Brandeis Spotlight: Kurt Metzmeier

Kurt Metzmeier is associate director of the law library.

He has published widely in library, legal and historical journals. His primary research areas are legal research methods and the history of state courts and other legal institutions.

In December 2016, the University of Press of Kentucky published his book Writing the Legal Record: Law Reporters in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky.

He is an active member of several legal and scholarly organizations including the American Association of Law Libraries, Kentucky Bar Association, the Louisville Bar Association and the Kentucky Historical Society.

Why Brandeis?
I went to law school here. I actually went to undergraduate at the University of Louisville, but after law school I went to library school at UK and was hired by the UK law library as online librarian and later as coordinator of IT for the UK College of Law.

That job brings all kids of frustrations with it, so I was looking around for an opportunity to get back full time into librarianship. I really liked working here at the library as a student, so when the opportunity arose for me to come here, I jumped on it. I’ve always been interested in being a law librarian. I loved when I was a law student here at Brandeis so I was really excited to come back. When I got back, I realized how great of a place this was to work and I’ve been here ever since. 

You have a love of history and research. What is it about those fields that interest you?
I love chasing after the facts of a matter. I love to dig down really deeply and go to the original sources. I’m often surprised that the story you find there is much more complex than the legal rule that’s come down. People tend to look back on legal history and forget that judges and lawyers were real people like us and they were involved in all kinds of things besides the law. They had messy lives and were passionately involved in the politics and society of their day. It’s just fun to go back and find that out.

It informs how I look at present things, but it’s good on its own sense. The nice thing about being a librarian is that sometimes I can go on the chase for someone else and I don’t have to write it up. I also am quite willing to do a lot of research to back up what I say in the classroom or for one sentence in an article or one slide of a presentation.

I just finished writing a book, The Kentucky Law Reporters. I’ve got all these great stories and many made it into the book but others were too tangential. Sometimes writing is like teaching — it’s more editing than anything else. You just have so much time in the classroom or pages on a book. Lots of good things end up on the cutting room floor. Most students will know that if I get onto a tangent, it’s kind of dangerous. In my writing, I can recognize that a particular story is too tangential and maybe I’ll save it for something else. You have to “kill your darlings,” as Oscar Wilde said.

What career advice do you have for today's law students?
I think my best career advice to anyone is not to worry about the job and its title and what a particular profession looks like from the outside. Think about what concrete things you do at a particular job all day, and see if those particular things are things you like to do. 

You have to understand the law is a big sprawling area that includes people sitting in rooms drafting contracts or negotiating with people, all the way to people defending someone in a murder trial. So if you like standing up and talking, that’s one form of legal practice. If you’re quite happy spending your whole day reading things carefully and then writing documents, that’s another type of practice. If you like working with people to solve problems or to get deals done, it is another. So find out what you like to do in the many minutes of a day, and try and structure your job options so you’re doing those things.

To a law student, my other advice is, the nice thing about law is that you can move around a bit. So when get out of law school find the best job you can. But don’t decide that job is what you’re going to do forever. Do it the best you can, but when you’re in that job, see what things you like the most, and if they’re not there, you can always look for another job. It’s really important for people to be happy with their jobs because we spend most of our time doing them.

What's an experience you had as a student that has stuck with you?
When I was a history student at UofL, I was a student activist.

UofL students were working, as were lots of other forces, to end apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela. There was one year that all of the national student organizations, including ours, united to get rid of apartheid.

We decided that we were going to make a statement by seizing a university building and having a sit-in there. At UofL, we had a small group and we ended up taking over the information building (the one near the administration that is used for giving people parking passes). It was a small gesture that had a lot of impact. We stayed there for a couple of days and along the way got the support of other campus groups — including Student Government Association President Angela McCormick Bisig (who later graduated law school here and was elected to Jefferson County Circuit Court).

One of our retired law professors, Bob Stengel, walked over and offered to defend us if we were arrested. The campaign did succeed in convincing the university to divest itself of its funds in businesses trading with South Africa. The national student movement pushed the United States government to enact sanctions against South Africa, which in some way helped lead to the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the first free elections in South Africa.

So every day, if I roll my chair over to my office window and look right across the oval, I can see the place where we in the UofL Students Against Apartheid had our protest. This was an early lesson for me that individuals taking action with others could bring big changes.