Law library
Self-represented, or pro se, litigants (parties to a civil lawsuit or criminal defendants who do not have a licensed attorney representing them) also use law libraries.
In the United States, law school libraries may be subject to accreditation review by the American Bar Association Standards of Legal Education.
[1] Broadly speaking, there are three categories of law libraries in the United States: academic, public, and private.
Certain larger law firms maintain a private library for their own attorneys, but many firms in college towns and larger cities with universities simply dispatch their attorneys to local law schools to do legal research.
A typical law library holds a large number of works not seen in other libraries, including a full set of United States Reports, one or both of the unofficial U.S. Supreme Court reporters, the West National Reporter System, the West American Digest System, official reporters from various states, the Federal Register, volumes of American Jurisprudence, bound volumes containing issues of prominent law reviews from around the country, federal and state statutes and regulations (such as the United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations), and a variety of treatises, encyclopedias, looseleaf services, and practice guides.
In recent years, the advent of online legal research outlets such as FindLaw, Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and HeinOnline (or in Canada, CanLII) has reduced the need for some types of printed volumes like reporters and statutory compilations.
On the other hand, some university law libraries retain extensive historical collections going back to the earliest English reports.
As of 2015, the American Bar Association has propounded rules requiring each law school's law library to include among its holdings the following "core collection":[9] The ABA also requires a library's collection to meet the academic needs of the students and research and teaching needs of the faculty.
[9] The ABA further sets forth additional requirements, including the requirement that the law library have a full-time director who holds a law degree and a degree in library or information science or equivalent with extensive experience in librarianship.
The ABA also requires that the library have sufficient staff and facilities to attend to the needs of the institution.
[13] Some state and federal agencies maintain law libraries focusing on their regulatory areas.
New York and California are examples of states that have statutes requiring all their counties to maintain a public law library.
[27] Some law firms and corporate legal departments maintain in-house libraries, the size and content of which vary depending on the practice area and needs of the organization.
