Prof. Balfour Halevy

This comprehensive oral history interview traces Professor Balfour Halevy’s journey from his early education in England to becoming one of Canada’s most influential law librarians. Born in Brighton in 1933 to parents who ran a Jewish boarding school, Halevy studied law at King’s College London, earned a Master of Civil Laws at Tulane University, and briefly taught at the University of Wales before discovering his calling in law librarianship at Columbia University under Miles Price. After serving as law librarian at SUNY Buffalo, Halevy was recruited in 1967 to build what would become Canada’s largest law library at Osgoode Hall Law School when it affiliated with York University.

Halevy’s 33-year career at York was marked by extraordinary achievements in collection development and professional leadership. Starting with a million-dollar capital grant, he and assistant librarian Diana Priestley transformed a cramped student library into a world-class research collection through innovative acquisition strategies, including memorable warehouse operations during the transition to York’s campus. Halevy played pivotal roles in establishing professional standards for Canadian law librarianship, helping found the Canadian Association of Law Libraries, developing the KF-modified classification system still used by many law libraries, and serving on the Canadian Law Information Council. His work on the comprehensive Bibliography of Canadian Law represents a lifelong scholarly contribution to legal literature documentation.

The interview provides invaluable insights into the evolution of law libraries during the computer revolution, the transformation of legal publishing, and the challenges of serving diverse academic and professional legal communities. Halevy’s candid reflections on collection building, professional relationships with book dealers, and the ongoing tension between print and digital resources offer a unique perspective on five decades of change in legal information management.

This description was written by AI and may contain some inaccuracies.