Library Costs as a Percentage of Law School Budgets

Based on the budgets reported to the Consultant on Legal Education of the American Bar Association, both the average and the median percentage of law school budgets designed for the law school library have been about 18% for at least ten, and perhaps as many as thirty, years. The 20-22% reported by Swords and Walwer for the early 1970s appears to be an anomaly. Rather than relying on one benchmark for all law schools, a more reliable guide would be to distinguish by size of the fulltime student body or size of the library collection or both. Most law schools with fewer than 700 students and a library of fewer than 170,000 volumes devote 20% of their resources to library support. Law schools with a full-time student body of more than 1,000 provide, on average, less than 15% of their resources to their libraries