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Navigating Legal Scholarship: Interlibrary Loans

A Student's Guide to Articles, Comments, Notes, and Paper Courses

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Preliminaries

Each journal should designate one individual per article as the official requester for ILLs to the law library. Cite-checkers must refer to the provided checklist and then forward their ILL requests to this designated requester. The official requester will review the requests and submit them to Philip Johnson for processing.

The first step in finding materials for your source and citation assignments is to identify the type of resource you need. Are you looking for a book, a journal article, or a government publication? If you're having trouble understanding a citation or abbreviation, consider consulting the Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations or ask a reference librarian for assistance.

UIC Law Library Services for Journals

Reference Librarian Assistance

  • Assistance and guidance on citations
  • Assistance with library resources, including the library catalog, electronic databases, and microforms
  • Advice on locating hard-to-find sources, such as interlibrary loan

UIC Law Library Resources

  • Available print resources in the library catalog
  • Digital resources in the A-to-Z list of journals
  • Online PDF articles of exact print copies: Hein Online (A repository of many law review articles in PDFs of the original print version, especially articles pre-1980)

Library Services for Journals from other libraries

WorldCat

WorldCat lists items at libraries worldwide and is especially useful in finding books. At the top of each record, you can find the OCLC number needed for interlibrary loan requests.

Visiting Other Libraries

Our library is in partnership with several academic law libraries in Chicago, including Chicago-Kent, DePaul, Northwestern, Loyola, and the University of Chicago. With your UIC ID, you can access these libraries. You are allowed to view materials and make copies, but you cannot check out items in person. If you need to borrow an item, please submit an ILL request following the procedures outlined below. 

Additionally, the Cook County Law Library, the Seventh Circuit Library, and the Harold Washington Library of the Chicago Public Library are open to the public.

Borrowing from Other Libraries

ILL is a cooperative system that allows us to borrow items from other libraries on your behalf. If you request an ILL, you are responsible for returning the item, except in the case of photocopies. Our interlibrary loan system does not allow librarians to set a specific loan period for items; each lending library determines its own limits. Typically, books are loaned for a duration of three to four weeks, and each loan will have a due date.

To ensure timely borrowing, please place your ILL requests as early as possible; we cannot predict how long each individual request will take. While it can sometimes take up to four weeks for items to arrive, books available locally often arrive within one week.

Unavailable Items for ILL

Libraries typically do not loan the following materials: reference books, rare books, loose-leaf volumes, books on reserve, multi-volume sets, textbooks, study guides, CD-ROMs, DVDs, entire issues or volumes of law reviews, journals, newspapers, and items that were published very recently. For these types of materials, it may be more efficient to contact the author directly.

Please note that your request will not be processed if the item is available in the library’s print or electronic collection, if another request for the same item has been submitted recently on behalf of the same journal, or if the item can be found at Harold Washington Library, which is located just across the street.

Is your cite from a book (or a chapter or section in a book)?

  1. Is the item available through the law library? Check the Library Catalog. If the item is checked out, has one of your fellow cite-checkers already pulled the source? Can you request the item through I-Share?

  2. Is the book available at the Chicago Public Library – Harold Washington Library? Check WorldCat. If so, you should visit Harold Washington to check out or photocopy the source yourself. ILL requests from this library take a very long time, and it will be much faster if you retrieve the resource yourself.

  3. Is the cited information from a rare or old book? Check HeinOnline's Legal Classics (navigate to this collection using the menu on the left side of the HeinOnline home page).

  4. If you have not been able to find the source, ask a reference librarian for help.

Is your cite from an article?

Is the article available through the law library? Search for the title of the journal in the A-Z Journal List. The A-Z list will tell whether we have access to the journal electronically or in print.

Tip: Almost all major law review articles are available as PDFs (including graphs, tables, and illustrations) in the HeinOnline Journal Library.

Search Law Journal Library by Citation

Vol.
 Abbreviation
 Page


If you cannot find the article, ask a reference librarian for help.

Is your cite for a government document, i.e., statute, debate, regulation, presidential statement

  1. Check relevant databases in HeinOnline.

  1. Check the Library Catalog.

  2. Check ProQuest Legislative Insight.

  3. If you cannot find the source, ask a reference librarian for help.

Is your cite for a court filing?

  1. If it is for a recent case, check the court's website.
  2. Check the state and federal dockets available on Lexis or Westlaw.
  3. If you are unfamiliar with this process or cannot find the source, contact a reference librarian for assistance.

Is your cite from another type of source?

  1. Check the Library Catalog.
  2. Check Google (seriously - you'd be amazed at what you can find there).
  3. If you cannot find the source, ask a reference librarian for help.