> What's in the collection?
IALS Library is the national research library for law, with particular strengths in the law of the UK, Commonwealth countries, the European Union, individual European jurisdictions and the United States. Public international law and comparative law are also very well covered. We work closely with other major law libraries to ensure that, across all sites, we have all the materials necessary for in-depth research, and also with the University of London to ensure that we hold complementary materials for LLM research.
To help identify which libraries hold material for different jurisdictions, please consult the
FLAG database, which contains collection descriptions of primary materials in print format for foreign jurisdictions held in UK libraries.
Please see our
Foreign & International Law Collections Guide for more information about our foreign and international law holdings.
> Can I recommend a book for you to buy?
Please do let us know if there is a book you need which we haven’t got by filling in our online
book recommendation form. If we decide to buy it for our collection we can let you know when it arrives. Otherwise, we can help you locate the book in another library.
> Do you have LLM examination papers?
The IALS has a complete set of intercollegiate LLM examination papers stretching back to our foundation in 1947. As well as this complete hardcopy set, papers since 1995 have been digitised and made accessible through a database, which can be found in our Electronic Law Library. These papers relate to the previous, intercollegiate system in place at the University of London. Since 2006, when the individual colleges withdrew from the intercollegiate system to offer their own LLM programmes, IALS Library has not received examination papers. As IALS is open to all University of London LLM students, there would be no effective means of ensuring that only students of a particular college could access the exam papers of that college. For recent examination papers, please contact your college.
> Do you have electronic resources and can I access them offsite?
Our electronic collections can be split into four broad categories:
Subscription databases
All of the electronic resources we subscribe to are listed on the
Law Databases page of our webstie and are available onsite for academic research. See our
Databases Guide for further details. Remote access to electronic resources (from outside the Library) is made available on the basis of your type of IALS institutional membership in compliance with each service supplier's licence. Use the filter option on the Law Database page of our website to check which resources you are entitled to access remotely. Contact us if you need more assistance with offsite access or experience problems accessing our electronic resources.
Digital collections
IALS is committed to digital content creation and provision from its own collections and through co-ordination of content-building with other law libraries and subject specialists. The IALS Library Catalogue gives direct access to digital copies as PDF files as well as the details of the print originals. You can learn more on the
Digital Collections page of our website.
Open access collections
The
IALS Community on the School of Advanced Study’s shared e-repository known as
SAS-Space contains work by the Institute’s academic and library staff, students, visiting fellows and associated legal scholars. For example, there are copies of IALS MA and LLM student theses, a collection of articles from our journal Amicus Curiae and its predecessor IALS Bulletin. Much of the material is made available for academic use under an attribution-non-commercial-share alike creative commons licence.
Online legal research tools
The Institute has developed a range of online legal research tools as part of its mission to serve the legal research community across the United Kingdom. See the
Digital Resources page of our website for further details.
> Do you have digital collections?
IALS is committed to digital content creation and provision from its own collections and through co-ordination of content-building with other law libraries and subject specialists. Please see the
Digisation Projects page of our website for further details.
> Do you have an electronic repository?
The
IALS Community on the School of Advanced Study’s shared e-repository known as
SAS-Space contains work by the Institute’s academic and library staff, students, visiting fellows and associated legal scholars. For example, there are copies of IALS MA and LLM student theses, a collection of articles from our journal Amicus Curiae and its predecessor IALS Bulletin. Much of the material is made available for academic use under an attribution-non-commercial-share alike creative commons licence.
If you want to search across international scholarly electronic repositories use
OpenDOAR, a freely available Directory of Open Access Repositories, which has international coverage. A search on this service includes materials help in the IALS Community on the SAS-Space electronic repository.
