What this Library is
America’s School Trust Library is an Oregon nonprofit public benefit corporation, Oregon Registry No. 259005891, formed in July 2026. It collects, verifies and publishes the record of the school trust lands the United States granted to the states at statehood — what was granted, what was promised, what happened to it, and what the courts have said about it. Beginning in 1785, Congress set aside land in every township — the six-mile survey square the country was laid out in — to support the public schools; roughly twenty states still hold those lands and their funds today. The Library publishes in the open, corrects in public, and keeps a numbered corrections ledger anyone can read. Everything is free: no fee, no account, no affiliation. It takes no side in any case or campaign.
It is not asking you for money. It asks for documents and hands.
schooltrusts.org
The law of this field is not gathered anywhere
It is old and settled in its main lines, and a lawyer who wants to read it has to reconstruct it from six decisions of the United States Supreme Court spanning 137 years, the enabling acts and constitutional clauses of roughly twenty states, and a century of state cases that nobody has ever put in one place.
The Library is gathering them. Its reference work on school-trust law — a hornbook, in the old sense: one ordered statement of a field’s law, every proposition tied to the authority it rests on — is in first draft, published as it is built, with its gaps marked as gaps.
That draft needs lawyers. Not for a case. For the citations.
Why the citations are the point
Two entries from the Library’s corrections ledger, both from this month:
Entry 020, September 3, 2026: a sentence attributed to the United States Supreme Court in Ervien v. United States was not in the opinion. It was withdrawn from two pages.
Entry 021, September 6, 2026: an Oklahoma case, OEA v. Nigh, had been described using a quotation from a trial judge — in a case that had no trial.
Those are errors a lawyer catches in an afternoon and a lay reader never catches at all. The Library’s method uses AI assistance and says so on every page. That method has produced real work and it has also produced real errors of exactly this kind, which is why the seat below exists: the method needs a human check with a name on it.
The work that is actually available
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Verify one footnote. Read the case, confirm the citation, confirm it has not been reversed or superseded, and say whether it supports the proposition it is cited for.
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Build one state’s list. Take a state you know and assemble its cases and authorities, each one checked, each one tied to what it stands for.
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Write one case summary. Eight hundred words on a significant school-trust decision — facts, holding, what it means for beneficiaries — in language a school-board member can read.
Each is bounded: small enough to finish, serious enough to show judgment. Work that is accepted carries the name of the person who did it.
The Library publishes claims about what courts have held. The Law Librarian is the person who can say, on the record, that a citation has been checked against the reporter — and who is accountable when one has not been.
What it asks. Own the citation standard: every claim tied to a primary source, every pin verified against the official reporter, subsequent history stated, nothing published on a secondary source’s say-so. Sit as the second signature on the Verified shelf — the part of the catalog whose items a second, independent reviewer has checked against the source and signed for — so that no item reaches it on one person’s reading, and decline when it should be declined. Take the corrections that come in from outside, decide them on the merits, and credit the sender. When a correction is made, satisfy yourself that it has reached every page citing the item, not only the page that prompted it. Sign an annual disclosure.
What it does not ask. No litigation support. No brief-writing. No opinion on the merits of any pending case.
Under the bylaws it is a professional role, not automatically an officer or a Director: a one-year term, uncompensated, renewable. If the seat is vacant, the Verified shelf does not grow. That is the point of it.
A person who would enjoy finding this Library wrong is precisely the person for this seat.
Write two paragraphs to the Library at library@schooltrusts.net, addressed to the Secretary, Kenneth Magee. For this seat two paragraphs is plenty; there is no form to fill in.
In the first, say what you practise or teach and where. In the second, say what you would take on — the seat, or one citation, or one state’s list — and roughly how much time you have. An honest “a few hours a quarter” is a real answer.
If you think the Library’s method is unsound, say that instead. It is a useful answer and it will be read as one.
Two Director seats are also open, on the same terms: one-year, uncompensated, renewable, with a signed annual disclosure. They exist so that the Library’s decisions are made by people who did not build it.
One honest limit
The Library has not yet filed its application for federal tax-exempt recognition; it is being prepared. No federal tax-exemption determination has been issued, and until one is, the Library does not describe contributions as tax-deductible.
