Passion Projects in Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute to Igor Kavass and His Personal Mission to Acquire and Organize U.S. International Agreements

In December 2020, Oona Hathaway, Curtis Bradley, and Jack Goldsmith, law professors at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard, respectively, published their article, The Failed Transparency Regime for Executive Agreements: An Empirical and Normative Analysis, in the Harvard Law Review. The article reveals that the U.S. executive branch consistently fails to comply with federal requirements to report and publish the international agreements it makes with foreign countries. As a result, Congress and the American public regularly lack access to legal information to which they are entitled under federal law. Additionally, Hathaway, Bradley, and Goldsmith identify a particular time when our already-inadequate access to these agreements, which are binding under international law, further declined: in 2008, following the death of Igor Kavass. This article pays tribute to Igor Kavass, a law librarian who pursued a professional passion to acquire and organize U.S. international agreements for researchers all over the world. It shows how one law librarian’s passion project can lead to extraordinary advances in our access to legal information, but only so long as the individual creator remains active in the profession. The article seeks an association-level collaborative effort to identify and revive the passion projects of our predecessors that still have the potential in the modern era to fill a gap in our access to legal information, especially to primary source materials.