Historical Faculty

Richard A. Danner was the Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law, and Senior Associate Dean for Information Services. His primary academic interests were in legislation, legal education, and legal research and bibliography.  In addition to his administrative responsibilities, he taught a course on Legislation, focusing on statutory interpretation, and legal research and writing.

Danner wrote on the impacts of information technology on legal education and the profession of law librarianship, and on the effects of electronic publication on scholarly communication in law. His last research was focused on the role played by forms and structures of legal information on the history and development of U.S. law. He was the author of Strategic Planning: A Law Library Management Tool for the '90s and Beyond (2d ed. 1997) and Legal Research in Wisconsin (1980), and contributions to journals in law and librarianship. He was the editor of Toward a Renaissance in Law Librarianship (1997); co-editor (with Bernal) of Introduction to Foreign Legal Systems (1994); compiler of the International Journal of Legal Information Cumulative Index 1960-2002 (2003); co-editor (with Houdek) of Legal Information and the Development of American Law (2008; and co-editor (with Winterton) of the IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management (2012), which received the 2012 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award.

Danner was active in the affairs of the American Association of Law Libraries and the International Association of Law Libraries.  He was president of AALL in 1989-90, has chaired several AALL special committees and task forces, and edited AALL's Law Library Journal from 1984-94. He was first vice-president of the IALL from 2004-2010.  He has served on many site visits to other law schools on behalf of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, and the Association of American Law Schools. He served on the executive committee of the AALS from 2002-2004.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor's degree in political science in 1969.  Danner then served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, earning two bronze stars.  After completing his service he studied political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  However his next degrees were a master's in library science in 1975 and a Juris Doctor in 1979, both from the University of Wisconsin.  Also in 1979 Danner accepted a position at Duke Law.  He was appointed Director of the library in 1981.