Teresa Miguel-Stearns

Teresa Miguel-Stearns is Associate Dean, Legal Information Innovation and the Director, Law Library & Professor of Law. She has been directing the Law Library since April 2020. Prior to her current appointment, she held a variety of positions within the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School since 2005, including Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Deputy Director, Associate Law Librarian for Foreign and International Law, Bibliographer for Iberia and Latin America, and Reference Librarian. Miguel-Stearns’s areas of interest in research and teaching include Latin American law and politics, legal research, foreign and international law, and the history of law librarianship.

Miguel-Stearns led a team of librarians to collaborate with other organizations to create and launch GOALI—Global Online Access to Legal Information. GOALI is the fifth module in the Research4Life platform. Research4Life is a public-private partnership of librarians and publishers that delivers licensed research and scholarship to institutions in developing countries at low or no cost.

Miguel-Stearns also co-founded ALLStAR (along with her husband, Steven Stearns), a data collection and analysis tool for U.S. academic law libraries, in 2014. In partnership with NELLCO and colleagues around the country, ALLStAR was launched in 2016 with over 3,000 data points including many years of pre-loaded ABA and Association of Research Libraries (ARL) data. ALLStAR is now the primary method for law libraries to capture, share, compare, and analyze data, which allows libraries to benchmark, learn and implement best practices, and more strategically allocate resources. The ALLStAR team received AALL’s “Innovation in Technology Award” in 2020.

In 2017, Miguel-Stearns founded SELA Bibliotecarios, an annual meeting of Latin American law librarians held concurrently with Yale SELA each June. In 2017, the inaugural meeting convened in Quito, Ecuador and included law librarians from participating SELA institutions in Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina, and the U.S. In 2018, the conference in Puerto Rico included law librarians from San Juan’s two law schools and Argentina. Miguel-Stearns’s long term goals are, among others, to create a network of law librarians throughout Latin America and increase the profile of law librarians and the profession of librarianship throughout the region.

Miguel-Stearns is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in law libraries. An alumna of Knowledge River (University of Arizona) and the ARL's Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce, she led Yale University Library’s Diversity Counsel and AALL’s Latino Caucus. She has also participated in AALL’s Diversity Committee, and sponsored ARL’s Symposium on Strategic Leadership in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Miguel-Stearns earned her J.D. from the University of Richmond School of Law and worked as a public defender for close to eight years before earning her M.A. in library and information science from the University of Arizona.