The reading and exam period is from Thursday, April 21 through Friday, May 6, 2022.
During the reading and exam period you must make a reservation to use a library study room. Mandatory study room reservations begin on Thursday, April 21 at 8:00am; at that time, all study rooms will be locked, and you must go to the first-floor circulation desk to charge out the key to the room at the time of your reservation. The link to the study room reservations is on the library webpage.
Study Room Policies:
Study rooms are for the use of groups oftwo or more students.
Study rooms may be reserved for the current day and three days ahead.
The default reservation time is 2 hours, although study rooms may be reserved in 30-minute time slots; your time slots must be contiguous. Use the grid to select your start time and use the drop-down box to select your end time.
Study room use is limited to 4 hours per user per day to ensure availability for all users.
You must use your brooklaw.edu email address to reserve a study room.
Study rooms are subject to availability and reservations may be modified by library staff at any time.
Library Hours for the Reading & Exam Period:
Thursday, April 21-Thursday, May 5: 8:00am – 2:00am. The circulation/reserve desk closes at 12:00am
Friday, May 6: 9:00am – 10:00pm.
Reminders About Noise & Food in the Library:
Please keep your voices down in reading rooms and study rooms. Your colleagues are also studying.
If you need a space for discussion, the collaboration areas are: the Bernsen reference & reading room (1st floor), the Nash reading room (3rd floor) and the study rooms.
Drinks are allowed in the library. Please use the law school’s designated dining areas for eating.
Brooklyn Law School is a smoke and tobacco free campus. Smoking or vaping is not permitted anywhere in the school, which includes the library. If you have any questions, please read Brooklyn Law School’s Smoke and Tobacco Free Policy on BLSConnect.
As you start preparing for finals, remember that the BLS library has an extensive collection of study guides. The Lexis Digital Library hosts the popular Understanding series as e-books which you can easily access through your Lexis+ account. Just go to the homepage, click on the small dots to the left of the Lexis+ logo and select Digital Library. Use your BLS credentials to log in and navigate to Browse Library on the left.
For those interested in practicing or researching in the field of family law, the library recently published a
research guide for family law resources. The guide focuses on the law of New York State. It includes links to practice aids, treatises, and blogs and news sources for researching New York family law. There are also quick links to the relevant titles in the New York state statutory code and to case law databases focusing on family law. This summer, if you are interning with a family law organization, it would be useful for you to become familiar with both the news sources and the secondary sources listed.
Whenever you are researching an issue, whether for a paper or a note, one of the most efficient ways to get started is to find a research guide. The BLS librarians have created dozens of research guides, available on the library’s homepage (just click on the Research Guides tab), including guides on Career Resources, Paper Topic Selection and Development for International and Foreign Law, Federal Legislative History Research, New York Civil Practice, Researching Copyright Law, and Antitrust and Competition law.
Our latest guide summarizes resources for researching climate change and environmental law . This guide includes links to books, treatises, databases, major environmental treaties, blogs and news sources for researching U.S. and international climate change and environmental law. As noted in a recent report issued by the UN Environment Programme , there has been a rapid increase in climate change litigation with over 1,500 cases filed in 38 countries as of July 2020. Our research guide includes links to climate change litigation databases and other resources that will assist students researching this burgeoning field of law.
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision allowing SB8, Texas’s restrictive abortion legislation which effectively bans all abortion after 6 weeks (and undermines nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent established by Roe v. Wade) to go into effect, some students may be interested in researching the laws addressing reproductive rights nationally and internationally. This post will focus on some international sources of law regarding reproductive rights and right to safe legal abortions.
UN Treaty Bodies
The Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights published an information pamphlet on abortion summarizing the opinions and comments of UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies. The pamphlet contains several helpful endnotes to primary source documents issued by UNHR bodies addressing abortion.
OHCHR: Human Rights Council
The UN Human Rights Council Working Group on discrimination against women and girls issued a 2016 report on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice on its mission to the United States of America in which it expressed regret that American women have “seen their rights to sexual and reproductive health significantly eroded…” (para. 28) and noted that “ever-increasing barriers are being created to prevent their access to abortion procedures.” (para. 68)
If you need to do any type of foreign or international law research, the Law Library of Congress (law.gov) offers a trove of (free!) resources that will be invaluable to your research. Recently, the Law Library redid their website, making it easier to navigate. Below is a summary of the resources available on law.gov.
TheResearcher Resources tab takes you to a page with links to the Library’s Research Guides, Guide to Law Online, the Legal Research Institute, Congress.gov, the Library’s blog, In Custodia Legis, databases, and story maps which are interactive web applications that describe the Library’s collections through narrative, multimedia, and interactive maps.
Legal Reports The Law Library of Congress produces reports on foreign, comparative, and international law in response to requests from Members of Congress, Congressional staff and committees, the federal courts, executive branch agencies, and others. Selected reports are provided for the public for reference purposes. This can be a great brainstorming resource if you are looking for a foreign, international, or comparative topic to write on. Some recent reports include: Citizenship through international adoption; Children’s online privacy and data protection in selected European countries; and Legal provisions on gender equality. You can browse these reports or search for reports on a specific topic using the search feature on top of the page.
Reference Librarians at the Law Library of Congress If you have any questions about a resource or obtaining a source of foreign or international law (or any law), you can ask the reference librarians at the Library using the Ask the Library feature. The Law Library of Congress employs experts in different areas of the law and countries and is thus well-equipped to provide guidance on finding sources on a wide variety of topic areas and jurisdictions.
In honor of National Library Week and all the exciting adventures that books take us on, the library is highlighting a few resources that explore the adventures to be had in New York City. So, now that the weather is warming up, you can have some socially distant fun.
Compilations of New York City Events and Places to Explore:
Whether for a class, a note topic, or just for the sake of staying informed, you no doubt want to keep up with today’s current events. The BLS Library offers a wide variety of subscription news sources to the BLS community. Explore just some of the resources we have below and if you have any questions about accessing any of these sources or others, just ask a librarian at askthelibrary@brooklyn.edu. Happy newsing!!
NEW YORK TIMES
Students and members of the BLS community are entitled to a free subscription to the NY Times. To register, go to https://nytimesineducation.com/access-nyt/, choose Brooklyn Law School from the drop-down, and then follow the instructions to register. For your initial registration, you must either be on campus or go through Brooklyn Law School’s proxy server (see Proxy Server Instructions) AND you must use your brooklaw.edu email account to register. Once you have registered, you can use your login name and password to access the site from anywhere. Each year you will need to login from on-campus or using the proxy server in order to keep your access active.
FINANCIAL TIMES
…and students and the BLS community also have access to the Financial Times! To create your FT.com account, follow the instructions at this link: https://join.ft.com/63059ceb-a0f6-4354-9471-4154de1e50da . Next, you will be sent an email with password creation info. (NOTE, there might be a delay before receiving the email). Once you have created your account, go to www.ft.com and sign in with your account details to access unlimited content and tools.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
While we do not have student subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, you can access the Wall Street Journal on ProQuest and Lexis+.
Wall Street Journal: access via ProQuest (Proxy Server required) or via Lexis+ (login required).
LEGAL NEWS
Finally, for legal news, check out these sources below:
