Library Collections

The cardinal principle guiding the library's collection development policy is support of the curriculum and faculty research.

U.S. Law

The library has a comprehensive collection of :

• Federal statutes, legislative history materials and case reports

• All law school and commercial law reviews and journals indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals

• State statutes as well as official reports, where available. 

The library has current digests and one major secondary source for the following states only:

• California

• Florida

• Maryland

• Massachusetts

• Michigan

• New Jersey

• Ohio

• Pennsylvania

• Texas

The library also has:

• New York state legislative history material and New York City primary and secondary sources

• Treatises and monographs for subjects that comprise a major component of the curriculum or where there is substantial faculty research. These subjects include:

  • antitrust and trade regulation

  • bankruptcy law

  • business

  • civil procedure

  • civil rights law

  • constitutional law

  • corporations

  • criminal law

  • election law

  • environmental law

  • federal courts

  • intellectual property

  • jurisprudence

  • labor law

  • legal history

  • professional responsibility

  • tax law

The library collects at an instructional level for many other areas, including:

• accounting

• civil litigation

• communications law

• family law

• real property law

• trusts and estates

and at a basic level for almost all other areas of American law, such as,

• admiralty law

• health law

• immigration law

Foreign Law Primary Materials

Generally, the library aims to collect all current primary source materials (codes, statutes, regulations, court decisions, jurisprudence), and standard finding tools for jurisdictions for which it has primary responsibility among the Northeast Foreign Law Libraries Cooperative Group, for major jurisdictions of the world and as many others as it is possible to acquire, concentrating on:

• Western Europe (France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland)

• Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia and Romania)

• Latin America (Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico)

• Commonwealth countries

  • English language only, except for French material on Canadian law (Quebec)

• Selected jurisdictions of Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan)

The library relies on its participation in the Research Libraries Group and the Northeast Foreign Law Librarians Cooperative Group, which engage in cooperative collection development for foreign law, for those jurisdictions whose materials we do not collect. Each library within these groups focuses upon certain jurisdictions, while all the libraries collect from the major jurisdictions.

For non Anglo-American jurisdictions, the library collects mainly in English, which is always preferred, but also in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and other Slavic languages. The collection is not strong for Africa, except for English materials on Nigeria and South Africa. Collecting for East Asia and South Asia is only in English.

Secondary Materials

Scholarly treatises in English and the vernacular are collected intensively for Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Commonwealth countries and in English only for China and Japan. For other jurisdictions, treatises tend to focus on:

• civil law and procedure

• commercial and business law

• criminal law and procedure

• environmental law

• human rights

• patent, trademark and copyright law

• private law

• taxation

• trade

For the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the library tries to maintain almost all the scholarly academic periodicals, as well as other leading journals on specific topics (civil and criminal law, labor law, business, taxation, legal history).

For non Anglo-American jurisdictions, the library tries to have a broad collection of foreign law journals and reviews, in English and vernacular, as budgetary conditions allow. The core consists of French, German, Italian, Belgian, Swiss, and Austrian periodicals. In general, periodicals must be listed in a major index to be purchased.

Comparative Law

The library collects comparative law materials to support the curriculum and research, predominantly in English, in which the United States is one of the jurisdictions studied or in which two or more legal systems are compared. The library also acquires the most important comparative law journals published in the U.S. and throughout the world and major loose-leaf sets, such as Constitutions of the Countries of the World.

International Law

The library aims toward comprehensiveness for current English language materials in public international law to support the wide variety of subjects in the curriculum, faculty research, and the New York University Journal of International Law and Policy. The library also has a strong collection in international human rights.

In general, the collection contains all primary sources and substantial periodicals and monographs from major publishing houses. Treatises for the subjects covered are collected in English and vernacular. The library's goal is to have all international journals published by American law schools and the leading law periodicals produced abroad, in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as a wide range of yearbooks, essays and festschriften. International law loose leafs are acquired in certain fields.

International organizations.  The library has an extensive collection of monographs, journals, looseleaf services, and finding tools to support the strong curricular and research interest in international organizations, in particular the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization. The library has official documents of these three organizations as follows:

• The library is a designated depository for documents of the European Union. Click here for a guide to researching European Union law. 

• The library buys selected United Nations official records, the UN Treaty Series, the ICJ reports, and selected other UN materials in paper. The library also has the extensive Readex microfiche collection of UN documents and AccessUN, the online index to the microfiche. The library subscribes to the UN ODS, an internet database of UN documents from recent years to the present. Click here for a guide to finding UN documents in the law library. For UN materials not available in the law library, patrons may consult the UN depository at the NYU Bobst Library.

• The library buys the World Trade Organization dispute settlement reports, as well as other WTO publications. Click here for a guide to researching the WTO and former GATT.

The library collects court reports of the:

• International Court of Justice

• Court of International Arbitration

• Court of Justice of the European Communities

• European Court of Human Rights

• Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Electronic Legal Databases

In the field of International and Foreign Law we subscribe to a variety of legal databases and services required by the teaching needs of the Law School. Priority is given to those products that are used as primary sources, such as Treaty Series, Legislation and Jurisprudence for those jurisdictions mostly used in our academic environment, Indexes, etc. New subscriptions should be suggested on individual bases by professors, as they are required in the teaching process. Application, ordering and evaluating such new subscriptions involve time, money, availability, hardware and software evaluation, and trial stages. Proposals should always be made in advance. 

The library subscribes to a large number of electronic legal databases, both in the domestic law area as well as in the foreign and international area.  In addition, the law school community is able to access electronic resources that Bobst Library subscribes to on behalf of the university community.  The following links lead users to these collections:

Domestic law databases for the law community
Foreign and international law databases for the law community
Bobst Library's databases for the university community

Legal Periodicals and Ejournals

The Law Library has an extensive collection of legal periodicals. We subscribe to most periodicals indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals and in the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals. Our focus is on journals published by academic institutions, with some holdings of major practitioner-oriented material. The library relies on Bobst, the university's main library, for most non-law periodicals.

The Law Library also subscribes to a number of legal periodicals online, often referred to as E-journals.  In addition, Bobst Library's ejournals collection is available to the university community. The following links lead users to these collections:

Ejournals for the law community
Ejournals for the university community

The Law Library is beginning to provide ejournal links in its Julius Online Catalog to materials for which we own both a print copy and have access to an electronic version as well.  This will enable users to search a particular title in Julius, and ascertain from the same screen whether the library owns the print version, the online version or both.  Harvard Law Review is an example of such a title.

Print periodicals are shelved in several different locations in the library. A few rules of thumb should help library patrons locate the periodicals they need.

Finding Periodicals

1. Check JULIUS first. Do a title search in JULIUS using the periodical title as your search term. If the library owns the title, JULIUS will provide you with a call number, a room location (such as Bound Periodicals, Lasdon Collection, etc), and the volume of the most recent issue received.
   

2. Click on "Latest received," which will indicate whether the issue is bound or unbound.  JULIUS provides the location for bound and unbound issues of a periodical.

Reserve

The Reserve area is located on the B2 level of the Law Library. It is an open reserve area, in which library patrons obtain their own materials. It houses unbound periodicals, hornbooks, nutshells, major treatises, and other materials for which there is high demand.

Library patrons are encouraged to use reserve materials in the open reserve area. There is study carrel seating and photocopy machines. If patrons want to take materials out of the area, they must be checked out.

Government Documents

For staff assistance in identifying and locating documents, contact Jeanne Rehberg.

United States Government Documents

The library holds many of the law-related documents published by the United States government, including documents of the President, executive departments, Congress, the courts, and federal agencies. As a designated United States Government Documents Depository, the library receives selected documents for free from the Government Printing Office, and it also purchases additional documents and related indexes. The library provides free public access to the depository.

Click here for a guide to finding U.S. government documents in the library.

International Document Collections  See International organizations above.

Bobst Library

The Bobst Library, which is the main library on the NYU campus, is a depository for United States government documents and United Nations documents.

Media Center

The Golding Media Center houses the video, audio, and microform collections of the library as well as video playback equipment, audio playback and recording equipment and microform reader/printers.

Video Collection

The extensive video collection includes panel discussions on practicing various types of law, and in-house productions which support the curriculum of the clinics, the lawyering program, and individual faculty. All production work is handled by the video services department of the law school.

Audio Collection

The audio collection consists of panels and seminars, Sum and Substance Review tapes, and class reviews, and a legislative history walking tour.

Microform Collection

The large microform collection includes Supreme Court Records, Briefs, and Oral Arguments, New York Law Journal, 19th Century Legal Treatises, United Nations Documents, and a Congressional collection from 1789 to the present. Indexes to the Congressional material and the United Nations Collection are available on CD-Rom.

Microform Scanning

The Two of the micorform reader/printers enable users to scan the film or fiche and save the digitized images on removable media, or email them.

 

The Media Center is staffed by Calvin Hudson, Media Center Coordinator.

• The Media Center is open during all library hours. See Law Library Hours.

.