In Memory of Sol Goldman

The Lillian Goldman Law Library, located within the heart of the Yale Law School’s Sterling Law Building, provides the Law School community with ready access to one of the world’s finest collections of printed legal materials, an expansive array of licensed digital resources, a growing collection of digitized and born-digital materials, and an exceptional law library staff.

The Law Library’s collections, both print and digital, include a wide range of texts and treatises emphasizing law and the social sciences and humanities, reflecting Yale’s traditionally broad approach to the study of law. The equally long-standing international interests of the Law School faculty and students are supported by a rich foreign and international law print collection, which is complemented by licensed digital resources selected in accordance with the geographic and subject matter interests of our faculty and students. The domestic law materials for countries other than the United States consist of primary and secondary sources for most European jurisdictions and many other countries, collected both in English and the vernacular.

The Law Library’s collection of US legal materials includes the reported state and federal court decisions, statutes and administrative rules, regulations, and decisions, both in digital format and in comprehensive historical print format. The library also maintains thousands of active serial titles, largely in digital formats, and receives nearly every newly published scholarly monograph in law.

The Law Library’s rare book collection is among the best of any law library in the world and includes very strong holdings of English and US legal history sources. In addition, the library maintains an unmatched collection of Blackstone editions. The rare book collection also has substantial holdings of European, Roman, and Canon law.

The Law Library’s nascent archives program focuses on preserving faculty papers, starting with those of Guido Calabresi, a preeminent scholar, former dean of Yale Law School, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and generous supporter of the law library’s archival program.

The Law Library is also a publisher. The Yale Law Library Series in Legal Reference and History, a collaborative effort with Yale University Press, publishes award-winning books of general interest to the legal community. The ever-expanding collection of oral histories of Yale Law School faculty can be found—alongside Law School faculty and student scholarship—on the library website’s eYLS platform in the YLS Scholarship Repository. In addition, eYLS contains e-books and document collections that are collaborative efforts between faculty and librarians. In 2024, the law library launched a free global open access legal scholarship repository, Law Archive, in collaboration with the Center for Open Science.

The Law Library digitized a wide range of Yale Law School historical materials in order to commemorate the school’s bicentennial in 2024, including a series of Law Library publications documenting the early history of the Law School from the founders to the mid-twentieth century, bulletins and catalogs from the nineteenth century to the present, and several student publications.

Members of the Law School community enjoy easy, integrated access to legal information in all formats. The Law Library’s online catalog provides access to printed collections and includes all of the library’s bibliographic records, with links to online versions of many of the same items. 

The Law Library subscribes to full-text sources of digital legal information including major commercial services, such as Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and HeinOnline. The Law Library facilitated access to legal artificial intelligence platforms to ensure that students are exposed to the tools they will encounter in practice. The Law Library hosted workshops and guest speakers to promote the responsible use of AI tools in law and in the legal research process.

The Law Library’s collections are complemented by the world-class collections housed nearby at other campus libraries, including Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which hold more than fifteen million volumes and information in all media, ranging from ancient papyri to early printed books to electronic databases.

The Law Library offers innovative services, training, and support to library users in their efforts to find information. In addition, professional librarians offer a wide array of legal research courses, workshops, and training programs for students, faculty, and staff throughout the year. The Law Library coordinates educational and enjoyable programs, such as book talks and Lattes with Librarians.

Interlibrary loan and document delivery services further facilitate student and faculty research and instruction. For materials not available at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, we provide free interlibrary borrowing services for members of the Law School community, enhanced by direct, seamless borrowing from other campus and Ivy League libraries. Yale University joined ReCAP, the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, in 2025, and we look forward to building this relationship to make more materials available to our patrons.