About the Library
About the Law Library
Staff
The Library employs seven librarians, six of whom have J.D. degrees and teach in the Law School; ten full-time support staff members; and several part-time student employees.
Facilities
The library space consists of 32,443 square feet, encompassing two floors with beautiful views of the Sandia Mountains. The Library can seat 434 people, and includes 316 Law student carrels equipped with power and data ports. The collection is housed on 48,646 linear feet of shelving space—the equivalent of more than nine miles of shelving. During the academic year, the Library gate count reaches 10,000+ visits per month, with the Library open to the public an average of 90 hours per week.
Resources
The Library houses the largest academic legal research collection in the State of New Mexico with more than 417,000 volumes in print and microform format, placing it in the “large” library category under ABA accreditation standards. The Library licenses more than two dozen databases for online legal research, nearly all of which are available to the public from within the Law Library building. The Library offers eight computers for public access to Internet legal resources and legal research databases. A separate computer lab is available for Law students and legal research instruction.
Services
In a typical year, the Reference librarians answer nearly 6,000 questions at the Reference Desk, with 20% of the questions coming from practitioners and alumni, and another 45% from public citizens who come to the Library to do legal research. The Reference librarians offer an average of 75 presentations, tours, and research lectures to more than 1,000 attendees every year. The librarians support a popular and busy Faculty Research Service that offers document delivery and research services upon request for the Law School faculty, including a librarian-supervised pool of four part-time Law student research assistants. Each year the Library checks out or renews more than 20,000 items and loans more than 400 items to other libraries around the country.
