The CUNY School of Law Library is fully integrated with the Law School’s philosophy and approach to legal education. The Law Library’s collection has been carefully planned and designed to support the Law School’s public interest law orientation and innovative curriculum. With special emphasis on practice and public interest law materials, the Law Library is well-equipped to support the clinical and theoretical focuses of the Law School’s curriculum.
The Library facility includes approximately 22,500 square feet and provides seating for 200 students. In keeping with modern law library practice, there is a heavy emphasis on providing materials in electronic format that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, using computers or other electronic devices. The Law School’s subscriptions to Bloomberg Law, HeinOnline, Lexis, Westlaw, and other research services provide a wealth of primary law materials, legal treatises, law journals, and non-legal resources in electronic format. The Law Library’s print collection includes 13,000 hard-copy volumes and 148,000 microform volume equivalents. In addition to the electronic and print materials available through the CUNY School of Law Library, a large electronic resource network available to all CUNY undergraduate and graduate schools provides access to over 450,000 e-book titles and 100,000 electronic serial titles that are linked in the Library’s online catalog.
Legal Research courses are developed and taught by members of the Law Library’s professional staff who hold the ranks of Associate and Full Professor. The required first-year Legal Research course provides unusually thorough training in both hard copy and online legal research, culminating in a final research assignment that requires students to apply and reinforce their new skills through experiential learning. This learning process continues in cooperation with the required first-year Lawyering Seminar course, where students must do their own legal research as part of a semester-long case simulation. Advanced Legal Research course electives for 2L and 3L students provide additional, more specialized research training opportunities.
