The calendar says December 1st. Fall classes will be wrapping up soon and exams will be upon us. As always, the Law Library is here to support you and help you excel as you progress through your law school career. To that end, we've already started our limited access period and beginning this Friday, will extend our hours to allow for even more exclusive law student access to our library space.

So what is Limited Access? That is the term that we use in Law Library-land to describe the time when the Law Library is primarily limited to just law student use. Each semester, four weekends before the first exam, we post a monitor at the door of the library. That monitor will only allow law students into the library for studying. This means that the space cannot be used as a general study hall by undergraduates or students from other professional or graduate schools. We do allow legal researchers, government document users, and those that need to use our resources access to our collection - it's important to us that we maintain access to legal information and through that, access to justice.

How does the monitor at the froont door know that you are a law student? We provide law students with a Gargoyle sticker that you can place on your phone or WisCard. Then you can simply flash that at the monitor and you are in. If you forgot your Gargoyle sticker or haven't gotten one, the monitor also has a list of all enrolled law students which they can check to allow you into the library.

Gargoyle Sticker on WisCard - your new best friend
The Gargoyle Sticker - Your New Best Friend

Great! So what about extended hours? These are even simpler. When exam time rolls around, we want to make sure that all law students can study effectively and part of that is providing access to our space for longer periods of time. The Law Library is already one of the campus libraries with long hours, but we make them even longer starting on December 3rd (this Friday!). 

Normally, we open at 9am on Saturdays and Sundays. During extended hours, we'll open up at 8am instead. Normally, we close at 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays. But during extended hours, we'll stay open until midnight both nights. These means that we are open until midnight every day of the week from December 3rd until December 21st (when exams end). Below are our hours in handy chart form:

End of Semester hours from December 3rd to December 21st:

Sundays 8am-midnight
Mondays 7:30am-midnight
Tuesdays 7:30am-midnight
Wednesdays 7:30am-midnight
Thursdays 7:30am-midnight
Fridays 7:30am-midnight
Saturdays 8am-midnight

You can always find our current and upcoming hours on our Library Hours page here.

And of course, you can always contact a Reference Librarian for help with locating resources for your brief, finding study aids for that tough class, or just about any question you can think of. We'll be here from 9am-9pm Monday-Thursday, 9am-5pm Friday, and 1pm-5pm through the end of the semester.

Best of luck on your finals!

Submitted by Kristopher Turner on December 1, 2021

This article appears in the categories: Law Library

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