Overlooking the scenic White Park in Concord, New Hampshire, the Law Library can fill your information needs at the UNH School of Law. Our students prepare for their legal careers with access to a world-class Intellectual Property Library and the main Law Library. The Law Library's three floors include varied study spaces including five study rooms, the main collection, the IP Library, the Kenison Room for rare books, and the Gire Archives.
The general legal collection offers domestic legal materials to support the law school's curricular and clinical needs for Social Justice, E-commerce and Technology, International Criminal Law and Justice, and an extensive collection of New Hampshire legal materials (to name a few of our collections). The Intellectual Property Library provides domestic and international materials in copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, and all of the neighboring rights of Intellectual Property. The Law Library has been developing curated collections of e-books for both our general legal collections and Intellectual Property Collections. All print, media, and e-book collections can be found in Library Search (online catalog) and our A-Z Database list.
The Law Library staff provides full-service support and instruction for JD (residential and hybrid), MIP, and LLM students guided by the faculty-approved Informational Literacy Plan, detailing legal research instruction throughout the curriculum. In addition to working closely with students and faculty on their research, we teach several topical for-credit legal research and information literacy courses throughout the curriculum. We also provide students and faculty with research training, research help, subject area LibGuides, and curated collections.
Keep up to date with the Law Library's events and news by checking out our Jury Notes blog. Please also visit the internationally acclaimed, IP Mall, an open-access resource containing unique collections in copyright, patent, trademark, licensing, etc.
The Law Library uses the Library of Congress (LC) classification system to organize its study aids, treatise and reference materials. While we do have small collections of other subjects, you'll notice that the bulk of the main collection's call numbers are K- or KF-something because the LC system assigns materials for law call numbers beginning with K. K is law generally; KF is specifically for law of the United States; KFN is specifically for the law of New Hampshire.
The Intellectual Property Library located on the third floor of the library. It also uses the LC classification system to organize its collection. Note: the subject of intellectual property spans many disciplines beyond law and the Law Library's intellectual property collection spans many other LC classes.
Click here for maps to the Law Library and the IP Library.
Click here to find core treatises by subject shelved in the classified section of the Law Library.
Click here for the Library of Congress Classification Outline for all subjects
Click here for an IP-specific classification outline.
The Law Library's collections (databases, e-books, print books, AV resources, etc.) are available through Library Search. The Law Library is building our digital collections (e-books and databases) to support our residential, hybrid, and graduate programs. The Law Library's present collection contains over 220,000 volumes in book and microform equivalent volumes. The Intellectual Property Library is located on the 3rd floor. The general legal collection including statutes, case reporters, treatises, historical materials, and more is located on the library's 1st floor. Books in the main stacks or the IP stacks can be borrowed for 14 days.
Casebooks for class readings, AV study aids, and citation guides make up our Course Reserve collection. These materials can be borrowed for 3 hours. Our legal-themed DVD collection is also stored in the Reserve area, behind the Circulation Desk. The DVDs can be borrowed for 14 days.
A small, general reference collection including legal dictionaries, directories, legal encyclopedias, and other reference materials is located on the second (main) floor adjacent to library staff offices. These items do not circulate.
The microform collection is located on the first floor of the library in a room just off the area by the Lexis printer.
The Law Library has a digital reader that will allow you to save your materials to a USB drive. Please ask a librarian for assistance.
The Law Library provides scanners and printers (for use by network-authorized users only) on the first, second (main), and third floors of the library. Students printing from their own computers will need to download software available here. There are also five student computers on the second (main) floor of the library.
Information on using the printers in the Law Library:
Borrowing:
Interlibrary loan is a set of cooperative agreements among libraries and library consortia that allows us to borrow needed materials that are not in the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law collection. UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law is a member of the NELLCO, the Boston Library Consortium, the New Hampshire College and University Consortium, and OCLC (The "Online Computer Library Center"), a worldwide consortium of over 16,000 libraries "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs"
Interlibrary borrowing is restricted to UNH School of Law students, faculty, and staff. We cannot borrow materials on behalf of alumni or attorneys.
Lending:
The UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law Library will provide interlibrary lending and copying services to other libraries in academic institutions, for-profit organizations, law firms, and public libraries. We do not accept requests from individuals. If you are not affiliated with an academic institution and wish to borrow material from the Law Library, please contact your local public library to place a request. We also lend items in our circulating collections to non-academic libraries.