Facilities
The Law School
The Law School places a special value on the design of its facilities. Housed in the Laird Bell Quadrangle facing the historic Midway and the other buildings of the University of Chicago, the Law School is a set of buildings of notable architectural distinction, designed by the late Eero Saarinen.
The Quadrangle is massed around an open court and reflecting pool and includes a courtroom complex, the Kane Center for Clinical Legal Education, a two-level classroom building, the Benjamin Z. Gould Administration Building, and the D'Angelo Law Library.
The design of the Quadrangle promotes informal and frequent exchange between faculty, staff, and students. The library tower, symbolizing Chicago's scholarly core, is at the center of the Quadrangle. Faculty offices are arranged around the working floors of the tower so that students studying in the library have easy access to the faculty. The custom at the Law School is for the faculty to work with their doors open and for students to drop in on faculty at any time without going through secretaries or other staff. On the ground floor of the library tower is the Harold J. Green Law Lounge, the "town hall" of the law school. Containing the law school café, tables, chairs, and informal sofa seating areas, the Green Lounge is a central crossroads where faculty, staff, and students gather, meet, and talk between classes, for coffee breaks and meals.
The D'Angelo Law Library
The D’Angelo Law Library provides comprehensive access to legal scholarship and information through one of the finest print and online collections in the country. The Library occupies five floors in the central tower of the Laird Bell Quadrangle. Its unique design—bookstacks and student study space surrounded by faculty offices—is a physical expression of the Law School's community of scholarship, teaching and learning. The print library, numbering nearly 700,000 volumes, includes a comprehensive common law collection, extensive civil and international law collections, current and historical sources of law and commentary, and casebooks and study aids in support of the Law School curriculum. Law students, staff and faculty also have access to the 7 million print volumes of the University of Chicago Libraries.
The Library’s online collection contains 540 databases in a variety of disciplines and access to all of the major legal databases, including LexisNexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, Hein Online, BNA, and CCH IntelliConnect, among others. Wireless network availability throughout the building and login access from off campus provide unlimited access to all Library databases. Librarians connect faculty, students, and staff of the Law School with the Library’s resources through in-person consultations and the D’Angelo Law Library's Web page, at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/law/. D’Angelo staff work closely with patrons to locate materials throughout the University of Chicago library system, on the internet and around the world. D’Angelo librarians are also legal research instructors, through the Bigelow program, Advanced Legal Research courses, and other sessions, supporting the Law School curriculum and preparing students for their experience in legal practice.