Paul D. Callister
Director of the Leon E. Bloch Law Library & Associate Professor of Law
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law (since July 2003).
B.A., Brigham Young University (1988);
J.D.,
Cornell Law School (1991);
M.S. in Library & Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2000)
email
816-235-1650
vitae
Professor Callister received tenure on the UMKC Law School faculty in 2007. He initially joined UMKC in 2003 as the Director of its law library after serving as an Assistant Professor of
Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Professor Callister has emphasized improving the physical and electronic
holdings at the law library, increasing instructional services,
digitization projects, partnering with local
institutions, and initial planning for fundraising of the library's facility.
Professor Callister's research interests include the pedagogy of legal research
instruction and the relationship of information environments to legal institutions,
jurisprudence, stability and the rule of law. With regard to the
former, in June 2009, Callister participated in the Conference on Legal
Information: Scholarship and Teaching, held at the University of Colorado
Law School, which conference produced the
Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education. His conference paper
and other related articles on the topic are available at
http://works.bepress.com/paul_callister/9/.
In connection with a desire to understand how information environments affect
the rule of law, in 2007 Callister co-founded the Institute for Rule of
Law, Identity, Stability & Culture (IRISC), which is dedicated to
promoting stability in foreign states through the rule of law, culture, and
civic identity. In April, 2008, Callister presented,
Rule of Law in the Context of Stability, at National
Defense University in Washington, D.C. to an audience of military,
State Department, and USAID officials.
 Callister was also recently invited to
author a chapter, "Seeing the 'Whole Elephant': A new model for Law School
Libraries" for an Aspatore Books series,
Inside the Minds: The Changing Role of
Academic Librarianship (2008).
In fall of
2007, Professor Callister was the invited keynote speaker for the annual meeting
of the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information, held in Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia, where he spoke on The Question Concerning Libraries. In the
fall he also presented a
paper, entitled Books
above the Throne: The Ascension of the Book and the Actualization of Rule of
Law in 17th -Century England at the International Conference of the Book,
hosted in Madrid, Spain. A paper, based on the presentation, is currently
under submission to law reviews (download).
In October of 2006, Callister was invited to present a paper at Boalt Hall Law School for a symposium, "Legal Information and the Development of American Law Further
Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring." The resulting
article, Law and Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology: A Prolegomenon to Future Law Librarianship,
was recently published in Law Library Journal (download).
In September of 2006, Professor Callister received
the Brenner Faculty Publishing Award for Law's Box: Law, Jurisprudence and
the Information Ecosphere, 74
UMKC Law Review 263-334 (2005) (download).
The article was unanimously selected from among UMKC law faculty publications
published in 2005-2006.
 In another recent publication, Identity and Market for
Loyalties Theories: The Case for Free Information Flow in Insurgent Iraq,
25 Saint Louis University Public Law
Review 123-153 (2006) (download),
Professor Callister applied "Market for Loyalties Theory" to understand how the
information environment affects the establishment of a stable society, including
the rule of law.
 Professor Callister has traveled widely for his research and professional
purposes, including to Beijing, Chongqing and Nanjing, China (2006) as part of
UMKC's China Law program, to the Prague in the Czech Republic for the ABA's CEELI Rule of Law Initiative (2004), and Salzburg, Austria for various Salzburg
Seminars (2004 and 2006). While at a Salzburg Seminar in 2004, Professor
Callister served as draftsman for a working group and session statement,
The Communal Role of
Libraries. In August of 2007, he will participate in UMKC Law School's
Oxford program.
Professor Callister is active in the American Association of Law Libraries
(serving as Chair of the organization's Copyright Committee for 2005-2006 and on
the Government Relations Committee for 2006-2008). He has just been
appointed for a three-year term to the Association of American Law School's
Library Committee and has served twice as an ABA site inspection team member.
Besides administering the library and doing independent research, Professor
Callister teaches
Cyberlaw
and Infosphere and
Advanced Legal Research: Transactional Law.
He also participates in
Solo and
Small Firm Practice,
Bridging
the Gap: From Classroom to Practice, and
Humanity,
Emotion and the Law.
Prior to becoming a librarian,
Professor Callister practiced law for nine years at the firm of Callister & Callister in Glendale, California near Los Angeles. His
practice areas included qualified retirement plans, estate planning, tax, business and professional organizations, and business transactions.
While there he published several articles or chapters on tax law, including an
article on charitable remainder trusts in the ABA and Georgetown's Tax Lawyer
and a chapter on pension law in CCH's Federal Tax Service.
While at Brigham Young University, Professor Callister interrupted his studies to serve a two-year mission for his church in the Netherlands
and Belgium. Professor Callister is married to Virginia Callister. Together, they have three sons, ages 18, 13 and
10.
For recent research publications, see Callister's BePress Author page at
http://works.bepress.com/paul_callister/ or, alternatively, SSRN's Author
page at http://ssrn.com/author=347799.
Pictures of trips for work are located at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11367532@N07/. For Callister's reading list (for work and pleasure), see
http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/373737.
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