Carl A. Yirka

Professor Carl A. Yirka is the Director of the Julien and Virginia Cornell Library at Vermont Law School, where oversees a growing collection of over 369,000 volumes. With a career spanning thirty-six years at six law libraries, Professor Yirka has witnessed the transformation of the law library from a book collection, toward a digital era. He is particularly interested in the future role of books in law schools, legal scholarship, and law libraries.

A career highlight of Yirka’s was serving as the Program Director of the Vermont Law School-Petrozavodsk State University Law Faculty Legal Education Partnership. The Partnership combined the environmental expertise and resources of Vermont Law School, with Petrozavodsk State University, a major Russian university in Karelia, Russia. As Program Director, Yirka attained and administered two grants, totaling $500,000 from USAID/State Department to develop the Petrozavodsk legal clinic, distance-learning courses, and the environmental comparative law curriculum.  The program also funded faculty exchanges between the two institutions. Yirka was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Rijeka in Croatia where he taught United States Constitutional Law. At VLS, Professor Yirka teaches Advanced Legal Research and Comparative Law.He is also a Faculty-Fellow for VLS’s U.S.-China Partnership for Environmental Law and is a member of the board of the Vermont-Karelia Rule of Law Project. 

Among his other publications, his essay, "The Yirka Question and Yirka’s Answer" published in Spectrum, the monthly magazine of American Association of Law Libraries, discusses priority setting in academic law libraries. It won the 2008 Spectrum Article of the Year award.

Professor Yirka graduated with a BA from Columbia University, received his Masters in Library Science from Case Western Reserve University, and his JD from Indiana University.