Housed in a 1980 addition to the Law School, the Tarlton Law Library of the Joseph D. Jamail Center for Legal Research is the seventh largest academic law library in the United States and the finest legal research center in the Southwest. The collection of more than one million volumes has both breadth and depth, with particular emphasis on legal materials from English-speaking jurisdictions. The library receives more than 5,700 periodicals, including at least one copy of every American law review. It also has a comprehensive collection of reporters, statutes, and treatises to meet the demands of a large faculty and student body.
Complete historical and current coverage is offered for the statutes and court reports from all fifty states. Texas materials have a special prominence in the collection. Other U.S. material includes all federal court reporters, statutes, and administrative regulations. Records and briefs filed in the U. S. Supreme Court from 1832 to the present are available; in 1960, the library became one of only fifteen depositories for these official documents from the Court. The Law Library was designated a U.S. government depository library in 1965. Thus, all Congressional committee prints, hearings, and reports, as well as many publications from federal agencies, form a vital part of the total collection.
The Library's collection of foreign and international legal materials is also extensive. Reporters, statutes and periodicals from the Commonwealth countries are available, including old and rare volumes. There are working collections from many other countries, with special strength in primary legal materials from Latin American and Western European nations. The Law Library is also a depository for European Union documents and Canadian federal publications and acquires many United Nations publications. A suite of rooms in the Law Library houses rare books, manuscripts, law school archives, and special collections of materials ranging from a fifteenth century Roman law codex to the papers of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark of Texas.
The Library has one of the finest interdisciplinary collections among the nation's law libraries. Recognizing the needs of contemporary legal scholarship and law practice, the Library acquires books and periodicals in such diverse subjects as business, medicine, criminology, psychology, political science, philosophy and environmental studies. These materials facilitate the intensive research conducted in a large academic law library. The Library has more than one million microform items in the media collection, which includes audio- and videocassettes, microfiche, and microfilm. Reader/printers are available to produce hard copy prints from microforms. A unit is also available for scanning microform documents in machine-readable formats.