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The Goodson Law Library provides a variety of services to support Law School faculty scholarship and teaching.

You may coordinate any of these services by contacting the Reference Services Desk by email or phone (919) 613-7121, as well as the direct contacts listed below. Governing faculty are encouraged to coordinate services through their liaison librarian.

Reference Desk Service

The reference desk is staffed from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Mondays through Fridays. Please note from 9:00 am to 11:00 am and 3:00 to 5:00 pm, the reference desk is staffed remotely. Reference support is available via email, phone, or Zoom (request an appointment by email or join the meeting room between 9:00 am and 11:00 am or 3:00 pm and 5:00 pm).

Liaison Librarian Program

All governing faculty, Visiting Assistant Professors, faculty holding joint appointments with a primary appointment to Law, and clinic directors are formally assigned an individual librarian to serve as their liaison for library support. Your liaison librarian will be your best contact for information about what the library can offer in terms of library services and for specific research needs, but you are also welcome to contact the reference desk for more urgent requests. Your liaison librarian will reach out to you toward the beginning of the semester to talk about how the library can best support your work. Contact the reference desk with questions about the Liaison Librarian program.

Faculty Research Assistants Program 

For short-term, discrete research projects during the academic year, all Law faculty may request the services of law student research assistants. For academic year 2023-24, we have hired 6 talented upper level law students who are available to assist you with your research. Follow this link to learn more about the Faculty Research Assistants Program.

Training & Orientation

The law librarians can provide basic and specialized research training for you, your academic assistants, or other members of your research team, including fellows and support staff of academic centers & programs. 

Empirical Research Support

The Empirical Research and Data Services Department provides empirical research support for the Law School community. For an overview of existing services and resources, please visit the Empirical Research Support page.

Borrowing Law Library Materials

Library

Loan Period

Maximum Total Checkouts

Law

To May 31 of the academic year for Standard Loan; 1 week for Reserve

200

Ford

To May 15 of the academic year

Perkins/Bostock

To May 30 of the academic year

Lilly

To May 31 of the academic year

Routing Services

We can send you the most recent copies of subscribed print periodicals or books when they arrive in the library. To request routing of a particular title (or to modify your existing routing list), contact Collection Services (cir@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7128).

Routing is conducted twice per week. Please return all routed materials to the library or a designated return bin.

Alert Services

Many publishers allow us to set up periodic electronic notifications to you about new books, journal articles, cases, amendments to statutes, and working papers in your areas of interest. To set up an alert, contact Reference Services (ref@law.duke.edu or (919) 613-7121). Here are some of the major services we can set up for you:

  • "New Titles": Biweekly email notice of new books and journals that the library has recently purchased in your selected subject areas.
  • HeinOnline SmartCILP: Weekly email notification service for law journal tables of contents and/or selected subjects.
  • SSRN & BePress Working Papers: Both of these products allow you to read the newest works of scholarship before they are published. 
  • Lexis/Westlaw/Bloomberg Law: Periodic searches for new legislation, cases, journal articles or news articles at an interval of your choosing (e.g. daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly etc.).
  • IFLP: A monthly service providing alerts for new articles matching subject or regional interests, language, and other criteria. Most of the journals are published outside of the U.S. and many are not indexed in other resources.

Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery

If you need an item you don’t see in our catalog or want an article you can’t find, we usually can obtain it for you from another library. You can use our online form, email the Interlibrary Loan department (ill@law.duke.edu).

SSRN Postings

The Goodson Law Library can assist with posting your working papers and forthcoming scholarship to the Social Sciences Research Network, where it can be listed in topical e-journal alerts. For more information, please contact Reference Services (ref@law.duke.edu or (919) 613-7121).

Scholastica Journal Submission

The Law School maintains an institutional account to the journal submission service Scholastica. During the account creation process, faculty should use their @law.duke.edu address to connect to the Duke Law administrative account and avoid submission fees. For more information about the account creation or submission process, please contact Associate Director for Administration & Scholarship Jennifer Behrens (behrens@law.duke.edu) and/or Head of Scholarly Services  Wickliffe Shreve (shreve@law.duke.edu).

Faculty may also recommend account creation for individual Law School students who wish to submit their work from the Duke Law Scholarly Writing Workshop, Student Paper Series, Capstone projects, etc. Subsidized JD and LLM students are limited to 20 total submissions per paper; SJD students are limited to 40 submissions per paper. Student authors will be removed from Law School coverage when the subsidy limit is reached or shortly after graduation, whichever comes first.

Recent Faculty Scholarship

The Library works with you to provide wide access to your scholarship through the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, and through submission to other major repositories such as SSRN. In addition, we regularly gather and publish notices of your recent scholarship, including a monthly "Sharing Scholarship" email of recently-published faculty scholarship and the SSRN Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series. To notify us of items you want included in any of these resources, please contact the Library's Scholarship Team at scholarship@law.duke.edu.

Duke Law Scholarship Repository

The Goodson Law Library maintains the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, which aims to include comprehensive holdings of the final versions of all works by current Duke faculty members for which authors have permission to self-archive, as well as scholarship produced by Law School research centers and programs. To submit an addition to the repository, please contact your liaison librarian or the Scholarship Team (scholarship@law.duke.edu).

Scholarship Tracking

Library staff can provide information about options for locating citations to your publications. We can offer guidance on the creation of individual author profiles within such sites as Google Scholar and HeinOnline. For more information about scholarship tracking options, please visit Scholarship Tracking Sites or contact Reference Services.

Call for Papers/Conference Identification

Library staff can assist with locating relevant calls for papers, conferences, and colloquia on topics of interest. Some popular resources for this information include the Legal Scholarship Blog and the AALS Upcoming Symposia calendar. For assistance with locating calls for papers or symposia/conferences on a particular topic, please contact Reference Services.

 

Research Lectures & Tutorials

If you would like to arrange a lecture or tutorial on legal research for one of your courses, please contact Reference Services (ref@law.duke.edu or (919) 613-7121).

Research Resources for Sakai Course Sites

We can add both static and dynamic research information to your Sakai course site, including RSS feeds and research guides created specifically for your course. A proxy link builder is also available for you or your assistant to add direct, stable links to readings and other resources.

Textbook Selection Resources

The Library's guide to Publisher Inspection or Review Copies provides links for faculty who wish to request publisher review copies of textbooks under consideration. A guide to Free and Low-Cost Educational Resources is also available with links to open access and low-cost casebooks and textbooks on legal topics, as well as information about platforms for faculty considering creating their own Open Educational Resources (OER) materials. For more information on these topics, please contact Reference Services (ref@law.duke.edu or (919) 613-7121).

Course Reserves

The library provides one copy of all required course texts, with exceptions, that current law students may borrow for up to four hours at a time. We get course reserve titles from the textbook survey faculty submit before each semester. The library does not purchase casebook supplements or books of rules/statutes, even if they are required as these materials are available from other library-owned resources.

Suggest Services or Resources

If you have an idea for an additional way that the Library can assist Duke Law faculty, please contact Library Director Alex Zhang. We also welcome your suggestions for items we should purchase for the collection, which can be directed to Reference Services by email or phone (919) 613-7121.