Kim Nayyer

Associate Dean Kim Nayyer oversees the operations of Cornell Law Library and its services to the law school community. As the Edward Cornell Law Librarian, she is also responsible for representing the interests of the Law School Library within the Cornell University Library system. She is a Professor of the Practice, with extensive experience teaching legal writing and legal research courses. Associate Dean Nayyer teaches a seminar in comparative copyright; leads a colloquium on the critical evaluation of legal information; teaches legal research for the MSLS degree; and regularly supervises reading, writing, and experiential learning courses for JD and LLM students. Her research interests include critical information literacy in machine-manipulated environments; disinformation, digital citizenship, and data ownership issues and public online participation; the ethics of big data and artificial intelligence; comparative copyright and Indigenous knowledge protection; copyright and licensing issues as they affect libraries and access to legal information; and issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and decolonization in legal education, libraries, and professional leadership.

Before joining Cornell, she was Associate University Librarian for Law and Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Victoria in Canada, where she also had administrative oversight for the Copyright Office. In her law practice career, Kim worked as a litigation and research attorney for Canadian law firms, served as legal counsel for the Alberta Court of Appeal in Edmonton and Calgary, and led knowledge management and library management services for law firms. She also provided consultation services on US and Canadian copyright issues for many years. She clerked for the late Associate Chief Justice Jerome at the Federal Court of Canada/Cour Fédérale du Canada in Ottawa.

Kim engages heavily in external activities and has held numerous leadership and advocacy roles in legal education and legal information professional communities in both Canada and the United States, including but not limited to the Association of American Law Schools, American Association of Law Libraries, and the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit. Kim acted as pro bono counsel and a client representative for three Supreme Court of Canada interventions in copyright law appeals on issues affecting legal information and libraries in Canada and the USA, representing CALL/ACBD in two cases and CALL/ACBD and Library Futures Institute in the third. She has also represented the library and legal information perspectives for a parliamentary committee studying revision to Canadian copyright law. When serving in these roles, she has used her legal practice experience to prepare and deliver pro bono written and oral submissions.