John Cannan

Faculty Scholarship Librarian
Legal Research Instructor

Biography

John Cannan serves as the faculty scholarship librarian. He received his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and practiced historic preservation and land use law in Baltimore. After obtaining his MLS from the University of Maryland, College of Library and Information Science, he was an assistant law librarian at the Montgomery County (MD) Circuit Court Law Library and a legal information analyst at the Law Library of Congress. Before coming to Villanova Law, he was a reference and instructional services librarian at the Drexel University Kline School of Law, where he developed and taught courses on intellectual property legal research and health law legal research. He is a frequent writer on legislative history as well as other legal and legal research topics. His article A Legislative History of the Affordable Care Act: How Legislative Procedure Shapes Legislative History, 105 L. Libr. J. 131, 163 (2013) was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2492, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015).

Practice Experience

• Research and Instructional Services Librarian, Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University
• Legal Reference Librarian, Law Library of Congress
• Adjunct Professor, University of Maryland School of Law, Baltimore, MD
• Assistant Librarian, Circuit Court for Montgomery Country, Rockville, MD
• Library Assistant, University of Maryland School of Law, Thurgood Marshall Law Library, Baltimore, MD
• Associate, Law Offices of John C. Murphy, Baltimore, MD