Overlooking the scenic White Park in Concord, New Hampshire, the Law Library is your information center at the UNH School of Law. Our students prepare for their legal careers with access to a world-class Intellectual Property Library existing within a larger 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 and provides targeted collections in Social Justice, E-commerce and Technology, International Criminal Law and Justice and an extensive collection of New Hampshire legal materials.
The 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 also teach a variety of 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 law of New Hampshire.
The Intellectual Property Library located on the third floor of the library also uses the LC classification system. However, 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 that are shelved in the classified section of the Law Library.
Click here for Library of Congress Classification Outline for all subjects
Click here for IP-specific classification outline.
The Law Library's collections of databases, e-books as well as print and AV resources, are available through Library Search. The Law Library is investing in our digital collections (e-books and databases) to better 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 IP Library containing our print IP collection 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.
Casebooks for class readings, AV study aids, citation guides, hornbooks, and our legal-themed DVD collection are on Reserve shelved behind the Circulation Desk. Ask the desk attendant for the material to check out these materials.
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.
The microform collection is housed 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 which 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.
Borrowing:
Interlibrary loan is a set of cooperative agreements among libraries and library consortia which allows us to borrow needed materials which are not in the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law collection. UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law is a member of the New England Law Library Consortium, the New Hampshire College and University Consortium and OCLC (The "Online Computer Library Center"), a world-wide consortia 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 and law firms, as well as 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 library to place a request. We also lend items in our circulating collections to non-academic libraries.