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San Francisco Law Library
Welcome to the San Francisco Law Library's website. The Law Library is open to the public in three locations:
- Civic Center (Main Library)
415-554-6821
401 Van Ness Avenue, Room 400 - Financial District Branch
415-882-9310
685 Market Street, Suite 420 - Courthouse Reference Room
415-551-3647
400 McAllister Street, Room 512
- For information about our Services, please click here.
- For information about our Hours and Locations please click here.
2008 Summer Holiday Schedule
Monday September 1st 2008 ~ Labor Day Holiday
All locations CLOSED ALL DAY
Check out our new Self Help Web Page! We hope that it will help you locate online self help resources, to help you help yourself in legal matters!
NEW web links are posted frequently, and can be found here:
UPDATED!: San Francisco Court ACCESS Center(Assisting Court Customers with Educational and Self-Help Services) ACCESS is a multilingual court program for people who do not have a lawyer and need legal information. They will give legal information, NOT legal advice. The ACCESS center can: Give you information in many languages and help you understand your legal options; help you represent yourself; help you fill out legal forms, follow court procedures, find resources or a lawyer; and show you how to research the law.The ACCESS Center is located at 575 Polk Street, Room 001 in San Francisco, near the McAllister Street courthouse. There is an Information Line (NOT a live person) that can be reached by calling (415) 551-5880, and they are now also offering email assistance for certain types of cases, and if they cannot answer your question they will send you to someone who can. Click HERE for their email flyer, or email your questions to: access@sftc.org.
FREE LEGAL HELP! Did you know that there are many places to receive FREE LEGAL HELP? The law library can point you in the right direction, and to the appropriate time and place.
One example is the Legal Advice and Referral Clinic (LARC), which is held at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on the 2nd Saturday of every month, from 10:30 AM until 12 PM. This free legal advice clinic is open to all. It is very popular, so it is advised that if you go, arrive early, as it is first come, first served. The LARC clinic is staffed by members of the Volunteer Legal Services Program of the Bar Association of San Francisco, and is an invaluable FREE LEGAL RESOURCE. Please click on one of the links in this paragraph or contact a reference librarian at the law library for more information on this or other free legal assistance events or organizations.
Get help from a law librarian live, in real time, at the ASK NOW website! Click here or on the logo to go to the webpage.
NEW! We have a specialized sub-collection at our Branch location that deals with Law Practice Management. This sub-collection is courtesy of a generous donation by the Bar Association of San Francisco, and is maintained by Reference Librarian Ruth Geos. Please click HERE to view a list of the items in this sub-collection.
DOCKET RESEARCH! We have a new web page, all about case documents! Please visit our new DOCKET RESEARCH page for details on the process of obtaining documents filed in cases in Federal courts, California courts, and local San Francisco County courts.
NEW: 2007 Legislative Summary: Special edition of Court News by the Judicial Council of California. Summaries and index of the nearly 90 bills passed in 2007 California legislative sessions that affected the courts or are of general interest to the legal community. This is prepared and published by the Judicial Council of the California, Administrative Office of the Courts and the Office of Governmental Affairs.
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courtadmin/documents/2007legsummaryoga.pdf
NEW:Active Court Related Legislation: current 2007-2008 session (from the Judicial Council of California, Administrative Office of the Courts): This web page categorizes all current legislation for California into 34 different court related topics, ranging from Appellate to Trial Court Funding. A handy portal for all court related current legislation, even if that legislation did not pass.
NEW on this site: Now, the year end legislative summaries of prior years (1999-2007) are available through this page, as well as legislation status charts for the same years. These charts, put out by the Office of Governmental Affairs, show the status of all legislation the Policy Coordination and Liason Committee (PCLC) has taken a position on or reviewed on behalf of the Judicial Council in that year.
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courtadmin/cr-legis.htm
NEW: Introducing HeinOnline! The law library now offers access to HeinOnline with full-text access to over 350 legal journals, selected "legal classics" textbooks, the Federal Register (from 1936 to present), treaties and agreements, US Attorney General opinions, US Presidential documents, US Federal Legislative History materials, and more. The contents are searchable via full text or phrase searching, or by author/title. Additionally, these image-based databases allow you to browse each volume, and to see the clickable table of contents for each. All pages look as they originally appeared in hardcopy, including all charts, graphs and photographs. HeinOnline may be accessed in the library only. Please ask a librarian for more information; we will be happy to get you started on your research!
California Jury Instructions Resource Center: This site, hosted by the Judicial Council of California, provides access for the plain English language civil and criminal jury instructions. These jury instructions accurately convey the law using language that is understandable to jurors. There are separate links, one each for Civil and for Criminal: each link takes you to a resource center for the jury instructions, which in addition to the jury instrucitons also contains such resources as correlation tables, a user's guide, applicable rules of court and contact information.
California Civil Jury Instructions (CACI): Click here to go to the CACI resource center. http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/jury/civiljuryinstructions/
California Criminal Jury Instructions (CALCRIM): Click here to go to the CALCRIM resource center. http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/jury/criminaljuryinstructions/
Here is a great new resource - online legal glossaries! This website, from the Sacramento County Superior Court, has a legal glossary available in English, and 11 other glossaries that translate the English terms into other languages. Check out this invaluable new resource! Perhaps you would like to go directly to the .PDF glossary of your choice? We are now providing direct access to the glossaries:
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English/Urdu (in 6 parts: go to the main page here, then select which part you need)
The California Roster is now published online. This resource contains extensive listings for California government, with categories including Constitutional Officers (and complete history of those offiicers); the Senate and Assembly; the Judicial Branch; State Agencies, Departments, Boards and Commissions; County Officials; Incorporated City and Town Officials; Unicorporated Areas; California US Government; and Roster of the United States. This resource is updated frequently (last update, Feb. 2007), and it can be reached here.
Special notice for students and anyone interested in legal research:We have a new legal research guide, devoted to online investigation and legal research, titled What Every Law Clerk Should Know. The guide was written by A.T. Kippes, Esq., an attorney and legal resource instructor, who generously made this invaluable resource available to our library users. You may find this guide by clicking HERE:
What do YOU think of the San Francisco Law Library? Please click here to be taken to our online survey page. We appreciate any and all participation, as this helps us to provide the best possible services to meet our patrons' needs.
We are featuring a new self help web page, LawHelpCalifornia. This page organizes many areas of legal information in an easy to use format, and is oriented towards low- and middle-income individuals and their advocates. The site also focuses on free and low cost legal service programs, and has links to court agencies throughout the state.
California Public Law Libraries: This new website, from the Council of California County Law Librarians, collects an expansive amount of online legal resources, and presents it in an accessible and easy to navigate format. Among the attributes of this site are: a link to the AskNow live online virtual reference program, an excellent self help page (which can be navigated in English, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, German, French, Japanese, Korean and Chinese!), a mini research class, extensive legal links, and a way to locate your nearest county law library.The Law Library now also offers access to forms from all US states, organized by practice area! This is a link to the Bar Association of San Francisco's Legal Forms Center with over 75,000 FREE legal forms and documents!
The Law Library now offers the California Judicial Council Forms and the San Francisco Local Court Forms on the public terminals via our Electronic Resources page. See our What's New page for more details.
NEW! The Judicial Council of California has made available a popular publication for kids, entitled "What's Happening in Court" in both English and, now, en Espanol! Click on either English or Spanish to go to the page.
en espanol
Translate our Site into Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese at http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?
(Enter our address: http://www.sfgov.org/sfll )
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