Library Services for Faculty and Staff

The Public Services librarians are experts in legal research. We spend many hundreds of hours per year assisting faculty with their research and are always ready to take on more. If you need assistance with your research, whether it be an in-depth legislative history or simply tracking down an article, please contact us at lawref@uw.edu. 

We have created legal research guides on a number of common topics, such as researching case law, statutes, and secondary sources. Research guides are lists of librarian-recommended resources on your specific topic, and are an excellent starting point for any legal research project. See our research guides here.

UW Law faculty and staff may have Public Services librarians post papers for them. Contact Mary Whisner (whisner@uw.edu) and Maya Swanes (mswanes@uw.edu). More information is available on our SSRN guide. 

Public Services librarians can help you become a more efficient researcher or show you how to navigate the library's latest database acquisitions. Please let us know if you'd like to schedule a training session for any of the specialized databases offered to you.

A listing of the databases available to UW Law faculty can be found here.

Need to find information in disciplines other than law? Contact us at lawref@uw.edu or check out the UW Libraries' Research Guides available here.

Research Publications staff and Public Services librarians are available to check the Bluebook formatting of footnotes in UW Law faculty ready-to-submit manuscripts. This service handles articles and book chapters. 

Note: We do not typically offer this service for articles that have already been accepted for publication. 

Need access to the Bluebook? Contact the library (lawref@uw.edu) and ask for a free 90-day trial to the online versions of the 20th and 21st editions of the Bluebook!

Procedure:

1. Send your nearly completed manuscript as a Word attachment to an email message to lawref@uw.edu. Use the subject heading: Bluebooking.
2. Note any known problem citations or specific questions.
3. Allow 2-3 weeks from the date of submission to the return of the cite-checked manuscript. We will make every effort to complete jobs more quickly. Long articles, articles containing multiple citations to foreign language sources, and some other articles may require a additional time.

We will:

1. Correct and reformat Bluebook citations in footnotes.
2. Provide a detailed list of questions about mysterious, unidentifiable, or problematic citations.
3. Highlight typographical and grammatical errors that we happen to find. (Note: we will not be proofreading the manuscript but we will note problems in the text if we notice them.)

Note that this service focuses on correcting Bluebook citations, not creating them. It does not encompass finding sources, source-gathering and cite-checking, or editorial proofreading (as book and law review editors do). You may ask Research Services for assistance in finding sources at earlier stages in researching and writing the article.

Your research assistant should be first in line for assisting you with creating Bluebook citations.

Please note that we generally cannot check and correct footnotes or endnotes in other citation styles, such as MLA or the University of Chicago.