The Center for the Study of Law and Society maintains a small non-circulating library of interdisciplinary socio-legal journals (and some disciplinary journals) and books, mainly through donations. We also house bound copies of most of the doctoral dissertations of graduates of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program.
Journals include: American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, California Law Review, Criminal Justice Abstracts, International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency; Justice System Journal; Law and Policy; Law and Social Inquiry; Law & Society Review; Punishment & Society; Social Justice; Theoretical Criminology.
We keep current issues of most of these journals and generally maintain ten years of back issues; we have a complete set of the Law & Society Review, and our set of Law & Social Inquiry goes back to Volume 15 (1990). Most journals are donated by affiliated faculty.
We also have several series, including: the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (donated by Center director Lauren Edelman), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences, and the complete new International Library of Essays in Law and Society published by Ashgate.
A special section of the library, which we call the “red dot” books, is reserved for books authored or edited by Center affiliated faculty, visiting scholars, and alumni of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. These are primarily recent books donated by the authors, many of whom are leading law and society scholars. We encourage and welcome donations, as this is our main avenue for keeping our unfunded library current.
CSLS received the wonderful library of Professor Sheldon L. Messinger, former vice-chair of the Center, donated by his sons after Shelly’s death in 2003. Shelly’s library is particularly strong in criminology and sociology.
All the holdings except the dissertations, the journals, and some of the series are cataloged in Lawcat, the Boalt Hall Law Library’s online catalog, http://lawcat.berkeley.edu/.