Lillian Goldman Law Library

In Memory of Sol Goldman
The recently renovated Lillian Goldman Library is located within the heart of the Yale Law School complex, providing the Law School community with ready access to one of the world’s finest collections of printed legal materials. These collections are complemented by access to a growing array of online sources, as well as the strong interdisciplinary collections housed nearby at more than twenty-five other campus libraries, including the Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The newly renovated and expanded law library supports the needs of twenty-first-century legal researchers by integrating access to print and online sources throughout the library.

The law library’s print collections include an especially rich assortment of texts and treatises emphasizing law and the social sciences, reflecting Yale’s traditionally broad approach to the study of law. The long-standing international interests of the Law School are also supported by a 200,000-volume foreign and international law collection. The basic U.S. materials include most of the reported state and federal court decisions, published statutes and administrative rules, regulations, and decisions, together with related finding aids. The domestic law materials for countries other than the United States consist of primary and secondary sources for most European jurisdictions and a number of other countries, collected both in English and the vernacular, with an emphasis on English language materials for secondary sources. To keep printed law current, the library maintains approximately 10,000 active serial titles and receives nearly every newly published academic press title in law. The library’s rare book collections have strong holdings of English legal history sources, including a superb collection of Blackstone editions.

Research at Yale is supported further by the diverse collections of other campus libraries, which hold more than ten million volumes of books and serials, spanning nearly all areas of human knowledge. These libraries are fully available to all members of the Yale Law School community.

The library’s computer services department provides members of the Law School community with easy, integrated access to legal information in all formats. The library organizes access to its large selection of online resources through a series of Internet-based Web pages. Its online catalogue, MORRIS, enhances access to printed collections and includes all of the library’s bibliographic records, some with links to online versions of the same documents. MORRIS also provides access to the major legal periodical indexes and provides convenient links to the online catalogues of the Yale campus libraries as well as other major and regional law libraries. Full-text sources of digitized legal information include the major commercial services, such as LEXIS and WESTLAW, supplemented by numerous CD-ROM and Internet-based resources, including a growing number of digitized documents loaded by the library.

Library hours and services are structured to meet the research demands of the Yale Law School community. Services are provided by a talented professional staff of librarians, lawyers, and computer specialists who offer training, support, and advice to library users in their efforts to find information. Individual reference support is offered most weekdays until late evening and at reduced hours on weekends. In addition, the professional librarians offer a wide array of legal research training programs throughout the year.

Interlibrary loan, document delivery, and paging services further supplement the needs of researchers. For materials not available at the Lillian Goldman Library, the library provides free interlibrary borrowing services for members of the Law School community, and the rich resources of the other Yale campus libraries are made readily available to Yale Law School users through a free campus document delivery service.

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