Following is a selection of some of the most important library resources available to lawyers in the UK. These resources are drawn from my “Legal Sites and resources for Lawyers” section at www.venables.co.uk/sitesh.htm#journals and all links are available there. Note that descriptions of free case law resources and current awareness resources are not included in this article but can be found separately on my site at www.venables.co.uk/caselaw.htm and www.venables.co.uk/aware.htm as well as information on legal publishers at www.venables.co.uk/publish.htm.
The Law Society’s library collection and catalogue is a guide to the extensive collection of books, journals, legislation, law reports and other material held in the Society’s archive collection. The collection has over 55,000 volumes to consult within the library or they can provide extracts from most of the collection via their document supply Lawdocs service. There is a vast collection of law reports and legal journals available and there are complete runs of local, public and private acts. There are also extensive parliamentary holdings including Hansard debates from 1804 onwards and House of Commons papers from 1801. There are over 19,000 legal practitioner textbooks dating from the 16th century to the present including 3,500 current ones. There are more than 1,100 journal titles dating from the 18th century to the present and the library currently subscribes to over 60 legal journals. There is online access to an extensive collection of journals via services such as LexisLibrary and Westlaw. There are also law reports, Government and Parliamentary publications and EU materials. You have to register to obtain most of the content – Law Society members can register as well as anyone working for members of the Law Society, such as trainee solicitors and legal information professionals.
Inner Temple Library provides library services to barrister, judicial and student members of all four Inns of Court (Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn and Middle Temple) and the catalogues for all the libraries can be accessed from here. Resources include a comprehensive collection of English legal materials, specialist Scottish & Commonwealth collections, an enquiry service (in person, by telephone and by email), a range of legal research databases and a daily current awareness service. The individual libraries can also be accessed directly, as below.
Gray’s Inn library provides over 75,000 print resources, both current & historical. Their core collection includes primary, secondary and local legislation, law reports, legal journals and magazines, encyclopaedias, text books, and legal databases. They also have a collection of Northern Ireland and EU law (excluding the law of Member States), retain the major Scottish and Irish reports and have good collections of Human Rights and European Union law. The key specialist collection of the Library is international law which provides comprehensive coverage of international treaties and public international law topics as well as materials relating to international commercial arbitration.
Lincoln’s Inn Library holds about 150,000 volumes, the core of which is a comprehensive range of English legal materials for the practitioner and bar student with Chancery practice a speciality. Within the British Isles, materials on the Channel Islands and Isle of Man are a speciality – the other jurisdictions in the UK only receive fairly basic coverage. The Library also holds extensive collections of Commonwealth legislation and law reports. The Library holds a virtually complete set of all Parliamentary papers and debates from 1801.
Middle Temple library holds approximately 250,000 volumes, covering all aspects of British, European and American law. They have an enquiry service staffed by specialist legal librarians, who are able to help with enquiries made in person, on the telephone, by fax or by email. There is also a document delivery service, and downloadable research guides.
The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) was founded in 1947. It was conceived and is funded as a national academic institution, attached to the University of London, serving all universities through its national legal research library. Its function is to promote, facilitate and disseminate the results of advanced study and research in the discipline of law, for the benefit of persons and institutions in the UK and abroad and it subscribes to a number of legal database services. A range of current awareness, indexing and full text services is provided, offering access to legislation, case law and electronic law journals for key jurisdictions.
Latest law and criminology books published in the UK is a section on the Law School site at the University of Edinburgh. The pages are updated frequently and are designed to provide an easy way for legal researchers to keep up to date with the latest publications. The site gives full details of publisher and so on but you can also buy the books via an Amazon link. Edinburgh Law School receives a small commission for all books sold in this way but there is no extra charge to the person buying. All commission earned is used to buy additional books for the Law Library.
FLAG (Foreign Law Guide) is a free database housed on the IALS site, covering international legal resources held by UK law libraries in Universities and research institutes including the British Library, the Advocates Library and the National Library of Wales. There are 10,000 records relating to the resources held – many often previously not widely known about. Note that this is a guide to where the printed – often historic – collections are held, not a guide to online resources (many of these historic resources will never be available on the internet). The database was compiled by a partnership of libraries led by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London and has been financed by UK higher education funding bodies. The study took some years to complete and involved a shelf by shelf study of each library’s contents. It is now kept up to date by an annual review of changes to the stock of all contributing libraries. It is possible to select not only the country, the type of legal material and the area of law, but also the region in which a collection is held (so you can find the nearest source of the material).
The Institute for Law and the Web (ILAWS), based at Southampton University, was established as a research centre in 2006 to examine the legal issues, problems and opportunities associated with the Internet, the web and digital technology. It now has six full time members of staff, four visiting research fellows and several research students. The group offers research and teaching strength in intellectual property law, IT law, Internet law and public sector digital law. They work closely with colleagues in the University of Southampton and beyond in disciplines such as cyber security, psychology, web science etc.
The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society (FLJS) is a socio-legal think-tank affiliated to Wolfson College, Oxford and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. It aims to study, reflect on and promote an understanding of the role of law in society, through programmes such as:
- The Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions
- European Civil Justice Systems
- Regulation, Law, and Governance Courts and the Making of Public Policy
- Consumer Rights in China
- Law, Film, and Literature and
- Contemporary Issues.
Previous research projects have looked in detail at the institutional basis for the modern welfare state and the rule of law in China and Chinese Law & Business.
FLARE (Foreign Law Research) is a collaboration between the major libraries collecting law in the UK: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), Bodleian Law Library, Squire Law Library, British Library and School of Oriental and African Studies. It is working to improve the coverage and accessibility of foreign legal materials at the national level and to raise expertise in their use. The work is currently focused on improving national coverage of the law of the transition states of central and Eastern Europe and building a distributed national collection of official gazettes.
Electronic Law Journals Project (ELJ) is designed to promote a discursive electronic culture in the publication and reading of law journals within the academic community. It was established by the CTI Law Technology Centre at the University of Warwick in 1995 to promote the development of an electronic legal culture in academic journal reading, writing and publishing. There is free online access to two original peer-reviewed law journals, information about publishing in electronic journals, daily updated news features, conference diaries, a mailing list and a comprehensive listing of other electronic law journals. The first ejournal, Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT), was launched by ELJ in 1996 and has since been relaunched as The European Journal of Law and Technology (EJLT) as a refereed open access journal focusing on issues of law and technology in a European context. Other journals have followed.
Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations provides an index of abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering international and comparative law. A selection of major foreign language law publications is also included. The database mainly covers law reports and law periodicals, but some legislative publications and major textbooks are also included. There are 12,500 abbreviations for over 7,000 titles. It can be searched either from abbreviation to title or from title to abbreviation.
Current Legal Research Topics Database Project from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) Library of the University of London, lists the subjects of research currently being pursued (i.e. provisional dissertation titles) by students registered for research degrees in law (eg PhD, MPhil) at higher education institutions in the UK.
Jurist: Law Professors’ Network, housed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is the world’s only law school-based comprehensive legal news and research service, reaching an audience of 20,000 visitors a week. It is powered by a mostly volunteer team of about 60 part-time Pitt Law student reporters, editors, and Web developers. The data base is produced as a public service for the continuing legal education of its readers and law student staffers. It uses the latest Internet technology to track important legal news stories and materials and present them rapidly, objectively, and intelligibly in an accessible, ad-free format, based on their substantive importance rather than on their mass-market or commercial appeal. It is entirely non-commercial and ad free. It is also free to access, with no registration or subscription fees.
Roman Law Resources provides information on Roman law sources and literature, the teaching of Roman law, and the persons who study Roman law. The site is available in English and German. Users are invited to submit any materials or information which might interest other users. The site is maintained at the Aberdeen School of Law.
Delia Venables is joint editor of the Newsletter.
Email delia@venables.co.uk. Twitter @deliavenables.
Image: Law.gov by opensource.com on Flickr.
