United States Law Collection
One of the primary functions of the Law School is to train candidates for the Juris Doctor degree and for admission to the Bar. To that end, the Library provides access to information concerning the law of the United States and its several jurisdictions. The Library acquires, in print or in microform, the text of all federal and state court reports, statutes and regulations, Congressional debates and hearings, and federal administrative reports and decisions, as well as all of the digests, indexes, citators, and other finding aids necessary to gain effective access to this vast body of literature. Much of this material comes to the Library free of charge under the U.S. government's federal depository program. The Library subscribes to all periodicals indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals and to most of those indexed in the Legal Resource Index. It purchases copies of all significant treatises and monographs on most topics of federal or state law. In collecting state law, emphasis is placed on the ten most populous states (California, Georgia, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey), as well as Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Louisiana. Materials published for the practicing lawyer are usually not acquired, unless they give special insight into an area of the law not covered in depth by the scholarly literature, or unless they support the clinical education programs of the School.
Legal education and research have always required access to literature outside the law, and this is even more the case today, as the study of the law becomes an increasingly interdisciplinary enterprise. The Library relies on the other libraries of the University to acquire most of this literature and duplicates those collections only when frequent access by Law School faculty or students is expected. This is true primarily in the areas of business, economics, criminology, constitutional history, government, and the study of certain social issues such as civil and human rights, race relations, abortion, and euthanasia.
The Library's holdings of United States federal and state law are significantly augmented by access to the Lexis, Nexis, and Westlaw databases. Much of the information in these databases duplicates material which the Library owns, but there are an increasing number of resources available electronically which the Library does not own. Publications of some state regulatory agencies, such as insurance commissions, or federal agencies with limited jurisdiction, are examples. Westlaw also provides access to the DIALOG databases, many of which have direct relevance to legal research.
The Library has access to substantial amounts of law-related information through databases and full-text resources available on the World Wide Web through the University Library's HOLLIS gateway and also through the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).
The current United States law collection is housed in Langdell Hall. Maps and a description of the classification scheme used for the collection are available.