Law Librarian Who Chases Words Shares Some in Parting
Fred Shapiro is known to readers and word-lovers far beyond Yale Law School for uncovering the source of quotations and the origins of words4 and phrases5. But for nearly four decades, has helped to build the collections and promote research at the Lillian Goldman Law Library. He recently retired as the associate director for collections and special projects. He has also been a lecturer in legal research.
Some of Shapiro’s own scholarship concerns legal scholarship itself. He has analyzed law articles and book citations to compile a list of the most cited legal scholars of all time6. Other papers of his have similarly looked at the most-cited articles7 and books8.
Shapiro’s reputation as a quotations expert comes largely from the books he’s edited — most recently, “The New Yale Book of Quotations9” in 2021 — and from his annual list of notable quotes for The Associated Press10. What sets his books apart is his research. Through his pioneering use of online databases of historical books and newspapers, Shapiro has been able to find the rightful source of quotes that had long been misattributed.
Those same research methods have earned Shapiro esteem from the Oxford English Dictionary, considered the foremost authority on the English language. That wasn’t always the case. Shapiro told an audience at a 2008 panel11 how, back when he was a law student, the publication responded to one of his many unsolicited corrections with a polite request to stop. The OED now welcomes his offerings and gives him a special mention12 on its contributors page.
In this Q&A, Shapiro shares some highlights from his career, explains his complicated relationship with technology, and tells what’s next.
You’ve published papers on legal and nonlegal topics, uncovered the true source of quotes13, helped to correct the historical record, and contributed to the definitive record of the English language. What work from your time at Yale Law School makes you most proud?
With regard to my library work, I am most proud of enhancing the Yale Law Library and Yale Law School traditions of promoting scholarship, and of enhancing the Yale Law Library tradition of ambitious collection-building that serves the needs of the school and of the larger academic and legal communities. With regard to my own scholarship and research, I am most proud of being the foremost contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary and the pioneer of online research into the origins of words and quotations.
When you started here in 1987, the internet as we know it didn’t exist and many of the research tools were have now were not yet available. What has it been like to experience so many big changes in legal research?
I have a contradictory relationship with technology. On the one hand, I am something of a Luddite and am critical of the rapidly growing replacement of intellectual research with mechanical and unreliable methods such as “artificial intelligence.” On the other hand, I am an MIT graduate14 and have employed full-text online searching perhaps more than anyone else on the planet.
I was the first person to use online historical databases for linguistic research, starting before I even came to Yale, and have continued to do this as a contributor to the “Oxford English Dictionary” and the forthcoming “Oxford Dictionary of African American English.” My books “The Yale Book of Quotations” and “The New Yale Book of Quotations” also involved a great deal of online research to trace quotations to their origins. An example of this kind of scholarship is my discovery that the term “African American” was used in a 1782 sermon, 53 years before any other known use. The New York Times wrote this up in a prominent article15.
Some of your best-known work — your books on quotations, your annual list of notable quotes, and your contributions to the OED — is not strictly related to legal research. How have these pursuits fit in with your other work as a law librarian?
One of the pleasures of my being at Yale Law School has been the fact that faculty and students often come to me with historical questions about words and quotations, both legal and nonlegal, so that my extralegal interests and talents are not really so extralegal. One instance of a faculty request was [Dean] Heather Gerken asking me about whether an Oscar Wilde quote she discussed in a Yale Law Journal article16 was authentic. (It was not.) This sticks in my memory because she referred to “the legendary Fred Shapiro” as her source.
The Law School has been a pretty humanistic place. And there are strong connections between the infrastructure of the law and the infrastructures of lexicography and reference publishing.
As is well known, the faculty and students of Yale Law School have wide-ranging extralegal interests. These encompass, not only public policy and the social sciences, but also history, philosophy, literature, etc., so that my forays into such fields have not been regarded as irrelevant. And, of course, legal history is a humanistic field that is unquestionably relevant. My work furthering legal-historical scholarship is exemplified by the Making of Modern Law17 digital resources, which I played the lead role in planning and implementing.
What’s the future of your projects and what’s next for you?
I continue to enjoy contributing to the Oxford English Dictionary and also have become probably the leading contributor to the forthcoming “Oxford Dictionary of African American English.” In addition, I am planning on compiling a book to be called “American Falsehoods: Finding the True Words of American History.” The book would demonstrate that, time and time again, the iconic texts of American politics and culture have been misquoted or misattributed.
Can you give us a preview of the new book?
Perhaps the most striking discovery in the book will be the fact (researched by me together with another scholar) that the person who is universally credited with writing the Pledge of Allegiance could not possibly have written it18 and appears to have blatantly lied about its origination.
