Campus and Library Facilities
In December 1985 the College of Law moved to its current facility 7214 St. Charles Avenue. The state of art structure, approximately six blocks from the main campus, doubled the available library space and afforded the opportunity for increase use of classroom technology. A new 16,000 square foot addition to the Law School building has now been completed. With this new addition the College will have over 116,000 thousand square feet of classroom, library and office space.
The law library collections of approximately 335,000 volumes and microform equivalent supports the curriculum and researches needs of the College of Law faculty and students. Its working collection includes source materials and finding tools for all US, federal and state jurisdictions as well as from many foreign countries. Due to the civil law tradition of Louisiana, the law library collects substantial materials on French, Quebecois and Scottish Law. The library is a US government documents depository and a depository of Louisiana State documents as well as WTO documents.
In addition to conventional resources, the library has extensive computer facilities in place to access information outside the confines of the library. The Online Catalog Library Center service permits the library to access a national bibliographic database of more than 10 million publications, most of which may be borrowed by using the computer terminals located in the library. The LEXIS and WESTLAW services allow the library to access the two largest legal databases in the nation, which contain court decisions, statutes, and regulations on both federal and local levels; court decisions and statutes of France, the United Kingdom, and the European Communities; and articles from regular and legal newspapers and journals.
Both LEXIS and WESTLAW are currently offering students personal passwords which enable them to access the systems from home computers, as well as from the library’s computer labs.
The College of Law is also committed to acquiring for each country from which an LL.M. student comes – to the extent to which we do not have this already – a core of primary materials (such as Civil Code, Commercial Code, Code of Civil Procedure and Code of Criminal Procedure as well as selected secondary materials) to allow students to keep up on the law of their home countries and provide comparative insight to their fellow LL.M. and J.D. students.
For LL.M. students who elect the thesis option we will acquire additional foreign and comparative materials as needed – although our foreign materials are already extensive.
