Law Library

Library Information

About the Law Library

The Library supports the School of Law curriculum and provides all the basic primary and many secondary materials for researching U.S. federal law as well as law in the 50 states. These include federal, regional, and state reporters and digests; federal and state statutes and administrative regulations; treatises; and looseleaf publications.

A complete run of over 1200 periodicals, including all the law reviews published by accredited U.S. law schools, is maintained by the Library. In addition, the Library houses one of the few existing collections of the records and briefs of the Indiana Supreme Court and the Indiana Court of Appeals. Audio-visual materials, including over 1000 audio and video tapes produced both commercially and locally, are available in the Library.

Since 1978, the Law Library has been a selective federal depository for United States government information in various formats. Holdings include post-1970 Congressional materials and the reports and decisions of many government agencies. The Library also provides the bibliographic tools to facilitate access to these documents. Besides government documents, the large microform collection includes the U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs from 1974, the Readex U.S. Law Collection from 1984, the Congressional Record and Federal Register since their inception, the session laws of all states since 1981, and a full collection of Indiana session laws.

The basic arrangement of the Law Library collection is as follows. The Reference Collection, including primary Indiana material, and most U.S. law materials are located on the main level. Reserve materials and unbound periodicals are shelved in a room located behind the Circulation Desk and must be requested there. On the upper level are the remainder of the U.S. law material, all state materials and books on subjects other than U.S. law, such as British law, foreign relations, health, statistics, women's studies, history, and religion. Materials located on the lower level are the depository collection of government documents, bound periodicals, and microforms.

The Law Library collection is organized in the familiar Library of Congress classification system. The Library's online catalog, Galileo, provides access to the law collection as well as to the holdings of The Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources (University Library). Two public access Galileo terminals are located on the main floor and one on the upper level. Galileo is accessible from any networked terminal on campus and by dial-in, telnet, and World Wide Web access from remote locations.