Rebecca A. Mattson

Head of Faculty and Research Services and Professor of Legal Research

Rebecca Mattson is the Head of Faculty and Research Services and Professor of Legal Research at Penn State Law. As head of faculty and research services, Professor Mattson provides leadership within the H. Laddie Montague, Jr. Law Library in planning and implementing scholarly support and research services. She manages a robust pool of library research assistants and provides annual training for faculty research assistants. Professor Mattson manages the Penn State Law eLibrary, the law school’s faculty scholarship repository, as well as the Penn State Law Legal Research Paper Series, and provides enhanced support for faculty scholarship and research. As the administrator of the eLibrary, she is the primary library liaison with law school journals, assisting in training, site development, and publication. In addition, Professor Mattson teaches Legal Research Tools and Strategies, the 1L legal research course, and Researching Administrative Law, an upper-level research course.

Professor Mattson is actively involved in the American Association of Law Libraries. She is a past Chair of the Research Instruction and Patron Services Special Interest Section (RIPS-SIS) and the founding Chair of the Teaching the Teachers Conference for Law Librarians planning committee and serves on the planning committee for the main conference. Additionally, she has served as the Chair of the Special Interest Section Committee of Chairs, on the Annual Meeting Program Committee, and on many committees in both RIPS-SIS and ALL-SIS (Academic Law Librarian Special Interest Section), and she was the recipient of the 2024 RIPS-SIS Service Award. Professor Mattson’s research interests include legal research pedagogy, legal research competency and assessment, and preservation of historical legal documents. Prior to coming to Penn State Law, she served as a law librarian at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, a research librarian at Harris Beach, PLLC, and as an attorney editor for West/Thomson Reuters.