The Library’s comprehensive collection covers Anglo-American, foreign, comparative, and international law, and includes legislation, court reports, and appropriate administrative material from all U.S. jurisdictions, Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Europe, and most African, Asian and South American countries.
The Library is a depository for documents of the European Union, and was the first such depository in an American university, in 1957. It is also a selective depository for U.S. government publications, and extensively collects documents of international intergovernmental organizations.
The Library seeks to provide a complete, worldwide collection of primary material, and a research-level collection of secondary and research resources in print, microform, and computer formats.
There is special depth in the collections relating to indigenous people, including Native Americans; French
coutumes; pre-Soviet Russia; early American session laws and court reports; Roman law; foreign law, and international law. The Library has the complete microfiche set of
19th and 20th Century Legal Treatises, with full cataloging: and has all United Nations documents on microfiche, as well as microform and paper League of Nations documents.
See also, Former Director Margaret Leary's "Building a Foreign Law Collection at the University of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960." Law Library Journal vol. 94, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 395-425.
Read the Law Library's current
Collection Development Policy.
(Revised August 27, 2014)