The Law Library is staffed and funded primarily to serve the scholarly needs of the University of California students, faculty, and staff, and to provide a place for the study and research of law. Visitors not affiliated with BerkeleyLaw or the University are welcome to use the Library and many of its resources. However, priority service is given to University of California students, faculty and staff.
Although unaffiliated visitors may not check out materials, they may use them within the Library.
The Library cannot provide legal advice or discuss legal theories of pending cases. However, the Library does maintain a list of sources for obtaining general legal advice and referrals to attorneys.
A quiet environment must be maintained at all times in the Reading Rooms. For further information, you may also wish to consult the Library’s Code of Conduct.
Public Computing
For public patrons and other visitors, there are public computing terminals located throughout the Library which can be used to browse the Law Library Catalog and access other library databases and online legal research materials. There is a 15-minute limit for these computers when others are waiting.
These public terminals do not offer any word processing capabilities, and you must have a CalNet ID in order to do any general, non-research web-browsing on these machines. None of the campus libraries offer word processing capabilities to public patrons, but the Berkeley Public Library offers some computers with word processing capabilities.
If your research requires you to save digital content (journal articles or other documents) that you have accessed at a public terminal, you may save the file(s) to a USB key that you have brought from home. There are no printers available to public patrons and visitors.
CalVisitor is a Wi-Fi service intended for visitors to campus. It provides basic Internet access to websites and allows users to use VPN services to connect to their home institutions or enterprises. It does not provide access to proprietary databases and resources. No password or special configuration is required to access the CalVisitor network. Simply connect to the network and begin browsing. We do not provide technical support for this network.
The campus wireless network, Eduroam, requires a valid CalNet ID and passphrase.
For information on scanning/copying, please see the Scan and Print Services page.