The Squire Law Library

The Squire Law Library, an affiliated library of Cambridge University Library (UL), is one of the UK’s leading academic law libraries. It maintains one of the largest collections of legal publications and resources in the country.

Established in 1904 and, since 1995, located across the top three floors of Law Faculty building on the Sidgwick Site, the Squire offers Law students a wealth of resources in a unique working environment.

There are study spaces for over 400 students, specialist legal collections available on the shelves and digital and electronic resources accessible on-screen. State-of-the-art computer facilities with printing, photocopying and scanning options are offered together with wireless networking throughout the library for easy access via personal computers and mobile technology.

Undergraduate Law students can chose how they wish to study and learn. The library holds a full set of material in print form to cover and support the needs of the law tripos. The coverage for English law is comprehensive with law textbooks and monographs (multiple copies in some cases), law reports, periodicals and legislation, commentaries and digests all provided on open access to students.

The collections also include an extensive array of resources for European Union law, public and private international law, English legal history and Roman law. The comparative collections for other common law jurisdictions and the civil law countries are also considerable.

Most students wish to access material electronically and there are an ever-growing array of electronic books, a significant collection of e-journals and the essential legal databases including the two most prominent services, Westlaw UK and Lexis Library. The latter two services, plus other databases, allow case law, primary and secondary legislation and journal articles to be read, printed or emailed at the touch of a button.

The Squire provides undergraduates with an experienced and authoritative reference service. It also offers all new students, at the beginning of their course, an opportunity to attend informative induction tours of the library and gives guidance and tuition where information literacy and legal research skills are concerned.

Other special features of the library include the Maitland Legal History Room, the Eminent Scholars Archive and a large collection of legal and political biographies.

In addition to the Squire, undergraduate students also have access to their college libraries which also house law collections. Others benefit from the electronic services which are networked university-wide by the Squire and the UL. In close proximity to the Law building are other social science and humanities faculties each with their own libraries and facilities including the Radzinowicz Criminology Library, the Marshall Library of Economics and the Seeley Historical Library. Overall, there are more than one hundred libraries across Cambridge University and the colleges.