Contact Information
Biography
Julie Graves Krishnaswami serves as the Director of the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University, Gormley Law Library and an Assistant Professor of Law. In this role, she oversees the operations and strategic direction of the law library while fostering a robust research and instructional program. She teaches courses on legal research and writing.
Professor Krishnaswami’s teaching and scholarship focus on legal research pedagogy, statutory and regulatory research, and the critical evaluation of legal information. She has co-authored influential scholarship, including The Secret History of the Bluebook (Minnesota Law Review, 2016) and The Shadow Code: Statutory Notes in the United States Code (Law Library Journal, 2020), which have advanced understanding in critical areas of legal research. She contributed a chapter to Legal Research Unbound (Hein 2025), a comic book for law students titled Critical Information Theory: A New Foundation for Regulatory Research. Professor Krishnaswami is also currently one of the authors updating the seminal legal research treatise, The Foundations of Legal Research (West Academic), scheduled to be published later this year.
Before joining Kline School of Law at Duquesne University, Professor Krishnaswami was the Associate Law Librarian for Research Instruction and a Lecturer in Legal Research at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, where she taught Advanced Legal Research, Research Methods in Statutory and Regulatory Research, and Introduction to Legal Research Methods and Sources. She was also a frequent guest speaker on research strategies and methods in doctrinal and clinical courses. Before entering academia, Professor Krishnaswami clerked for the Honorable Susan L. Reisner of the New Jersey Superior Court’s Appellate Division and then practiced law at Lite DePalma Greenberg & Afanador in Newark, NJ, where she focused on complex appellate and managed discovery in class action litigations.
Professor Krishnaswami is an active member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), reflecting her commitment to advancing the field of law librarianship and legal research education, as well as her ongoing engagement in national conversations on legal information policy and law library practices.
Education
- B.A. in History, Reed College (1999)
- J.D., City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law (2004)
- M.L.I.S., Pratt Institute (2008)
- M.F.A. in Visual Arts, Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) (2021)