Law Library

For 125 years, Georgetown Law Library has been a valued and dynamic institution, dedicated to serving learners, teachers, and practitioners of the law.

The library first took form within the U.S. Capitol under Georgetown Law's first dean, Charles W. Hoffman, who served simultaneously as the law school's sole librarian and as Law Librarian of Congress. Since 1887, the library's holdings have grown from a fledgling collection of faculty textbooks and treatises to more than 1.2 million print and electronic volumes, supporting the education and research needs of the second largest law school student body and faculty in the nation.

Georgetown Law Library has served patrons at five locations within the District of Columbia, and as one of the first law libraries to launch a website in the early 1990s, now reaches worldwide with leading online services and materials. The library remains on the cutting edge in digital collections and information delivery, creating and expanding online repositories through the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, D.C. Historic Preservation Law Project, and Dataverse, and authoring products such as the award-winning Georgetown Law Library Tutorials and Research Guides.

Today comprising the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library and the John Wolff International and Comparative Law Library, Georgetown Law Library is the premier research facility at the heart of the Law Center and a respected innovator in legal education, academia, and librarianship nationwide.

Please explore these pages to learn more about the 125 years of Georgetown Law Library – the law library of the future since 1887!