Established 2006, The Daniel L. Wade FCIL-SIS Outstanding Service Award honors an FCIL-SIS member who has made outstanding contributions to the Section in the areas of section activity and professional service.
This year’s recipient is Jonathan Pratter, International & Foreign Law Librarian at the Jamail Center for Legal Research of the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law, in recognition of his three decades of service to the students and faculty at the University of Texas and the members of the FCIL-SIS. Jonathan joined the Tarlton staff in 1985. He serves on the editorial board of the Texas International Law Journal and the Boletin Mexicano de Derecho Comparado. Jonathan has written numerous articles and book reviews, many on Mexican law, and especially noteworthy is his GlobaLex article “A La Recherche des Travaux Preparatoires: An Approach to Researching the Drafting History of International Agreements. Jonathan is the recipient of the Carl H. Fulda Award from the Texas International Law Journal for his “contribution to the scholarship of international law,” and just recently a member bursary to attend this year’s IALL Conference in Berlin. Jonathan served as the ninth president of the FCIL-SIS, his term being 1993-1994. He has been a panelist on several programs at AALL annual meetings, most recently last year’s excellent “Mexican Law and Legal Research: Overcoming the Challenges for which he and Julienne Grant edited an extensive research guide to Mexican law and legal resources. He has been an active member of the FCIL-SIS and Int-Law for many years. Jonathan, thank you for all you have given your colleagues in the FCIL-SIS!
DipLawMatic Dialogues 
Recognition by your peers is the highest honor. When your peers are talented, skilled, dedicated professionals their recognition of you means all that much more. I didn’t realize my peers consider I have done something to merit the Dan Wade Outstanding Service Award from the FCIL-SIS. Now that I do, I am touched. I understand that sheer longevity has something to do with it. I’ve been doing this work now for almost 30 years. Roy Mersky sent me to Berkeley in 1986 to work with Tom Reynolds. I’m quite content to assume the role of a senior member of the profession. I hope that I can represent in some way all those working in the field of FCIL librarianship, whatever their age. More fundamentally, this award is a powerful testimonial that we work in a collaborative field. Quite simply, it would have been utterly impossible for me to accomplish anything in the field of FCIL librarianship without the collegial help of other members of this profession all over the world. I understand that this award is meant to recognize what I have contributed over the course of 3 decades. Just as valuable, it gives me an enormous incentive to take on work that remains to be done, and there is a lot of it. And as before, it has to be done collaboratively with colleagues who hold the same values of a service-oriented profession working to advance international legal information, foreign/comparative legal research method, and why not, international and comparative law themselves. FCIL librarians have an obligation to pursue this work. Nobody else can do it.
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