Library & Networked Information Systems

The Utah Court Briefs collection contains public record briefs submitted to the Utah Supreme Court and Utah Court of Appeals and supplied to the University of Utah and BYU Law Libraries by the Courts for the purposes of legal scholarship and academic research. The Law Libraries offer this collection as a public service encouraged by the Utah Courts. For additional information, please contact the Repository Administrator at hunterlawlibrary@byu.edu.

Researchers unfamiliar with legal procedure may learn more via the US Courts, Utah Courts, and other internet resources. These sites also provide additional information:

• Utah Self Help Resources (for parties representing themselves)
• Utah Rules of Appellate Procedure
• Federal Rules of Practice and Procedure

The judicial opinions (case decisions) based on the briefs in this Digital Commons collection may often be found at the Utah Courts website or by using the Google Scholar case law search. Basic legal research information is available through the BYU Law Library’s libguides, as well as the BYU and UofU Law Libraries’ onsite print and electronic resources (click the library links for details about library programs, resources, reference hours, and directions). Reference assistance is available for visitors to both libraries.

The Library has installed a limited number of legal research computers near reference for general public access. Resources such as Westlaw Patron Access and HeinOnline are available, as well as selected CCH and ProQuest Databases. Please ask a reference librarian for assistance in using these resources.

Please be aware that we no longer have public-access printers, so results need to be saved to email or a USB drive.

The Library has a limited number of legal research desktop computers in the reference area for public use. Resources such as Westlaw Patron Access and HeinOnline are available, as well as selected CCH and ProQuest Databases; and OIT-licensed campus resources can be utilized following proper authentication.

We no longer have public-access printers, so results need to be saved to email or a USB drive.

The BYU Law Digital Repository contains open access copies of the scholarly works of Law School faculty, annual reports and other official publications, and the online archives of the various legal journals published at BYU Law.

Open-access consortia seek to make high-quality academic work available throughout the world at minimal cost to students, academics and scholars of all levels. The full archives of the BYU Law Review, BYU Journal of Public Law, BYU Education and Law Journal, and BYU International Law & Management Review are available through the Law Review Commons. Other publications such as the Clark Memorandum, Advocate (and annual reports), Life in the Law and the scholarly works published by Law School Faculty are all accessible to researchers through the more-expansive Law Commons. The Digital Commons network includes works from all areas of scholarly and academic inquiry, and contains millions of individual articles produced at hundreds of universities.

Digital Repository Readership

Scholarly articles and other works uploaded to the repository by BYU Law have accessed and downloaded almost 3.5 million times since the repository was established. We average over 750,000 downloads/year from over 200 countries/regions by thousands of institutions and individuals.

A map displaying readership activity
for the first 6 months of 2024. ≫

Resources

Legal Technology Training

Library-sponsored technology training sessions teach you skills you will use in practice: such as case management systems, e-discovery, trial presentation software, AI tools and more.

Learn More

Law Library Events Calendar

Resources

Interlibrary Loan

The resources don’t stop here. Using Interlibrary Loan, you can request materials from across the nation and around the world.

Make a Request

Who we are

The Law Library conforms to the BYU Privacy Notice.

Our website address is: https://lawlibrary.byu.edu.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

We do not use Comments on this site.

Accounts

If you have an account on this website, an anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. Gravatar images may be displayed in the administrative interface and as part of author information. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Data from contact forms are collected and retained for internal use only. Your name and email address may be required for us to contact you and track resolution of your request. Any data from contact forms is used only for such responses and for internal evaluation of our own performance.

Cookies

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

BYU Cookie Preferences may be removed or edited at https://infosec.byu.edu/cookie-prefs.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

We use analytics to review website usage and performance. For this purpose, we send service providers anonymized website use data. These data do not contain personally identifying information, but may use http networking information to track repeat visits from specific IP addresses.

Who we share your data with

If you choose to use our website to access licensed subscription resources, we may send authentication credentials to the off-site content provider you choose to utilize. Content providers will follow their own privacy policies.

Our parent organization has access to our website resources and data. We do not share data with anyone outside of these circumstances.

Registration data

For users that register on our website (if any), we store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, you can ask to review your data, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we delete your account and erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

We do not send your data to anyone other than under the circumstances noted above.

Your contact information

We collect contact information only for the purposes of responding to inquiries and requests and to permit authenticated access to licensed resources.

Send Us a Message

Thank-you for submitting your request/comment.

The appropriate library department should respond to you within a couple of days. Feel free to contact hunterlawlibrary@law.byu.edu if you don’t hear back after 3 working days.

BYU Law Faculty/Students – please reach out to Reference directly for quick research help.

Thank-you for submitting this request. You should receive a confirmation email shortly.

Do you need permission to use additional resources?

The Digital Services Librarian is available to help with course-related copyright permission requests. When requesting assistance, please submit bibliographic and course information as soon as possible. The BYU Copyright Licensing Office has obtained blanket permission to use many educational materials for the whole campus. In the absence of a blanket license, we will attempt to acquire copies of ebooks for students to access. The final option, individual licensing through the Copyright Clearance Center, almost always involves royalties that must be paid by students.

Educational uses are not, per se, Fair Uses. An educational use is most likely to be considered fair when it is one-time, last-minute, does not involve fiction or drama*, and is limited in scope. In those circumstances, obtaining timely permission is recognized to be difficult. But even the Fair Use of  copyrighted items should be reported to the Digital Services Librarian for record-keeping.

Please be aware that the Law School never assumes that using teaching materials more than once will be considered fair. And “consumables” (such as worksheets or problem sets) are never eligible for Fair Use.

Fortunately, in the United States many primary legal materials are deemed to belong to the public domain. Federal and State statutes, regulations and case opinions are increasingly available online as well as through LexisNexis and Westlaw. It is also generally reasonable to link to openly-available secondary resources without asking permission or paying royalties. Taken together with available LexisNexis and Westlaw resources, it is often possible to completely avoid making actual copies of most materials needed for preparing and teaching law classes.

Faculty should contact the help desk for assistance in preparing an interactive syllabus with links to required or recommended readings for any Law School class (“deep” links to LexisNexis or Westlaw resources may be included). The form below should be used to request permission processing for paper or electronic copying.

* A separate provision, §110 of the Copyright Act, exempts the use of many audiovisual formats for face-to-face classroom teaching. In interpreting §1201, the U.S. Librarian of Congress has ruled that capturing short excerpts of digital works for use in education can be a permissible circumvention of technical protection measures.

Quick FAQs

More FAQs

Email

You may email us your reference question at reference@law.byu.edu. BYU Law faculty and BYU Law students will receive first priority for responses, and we strive to respond by the same business day. For public patrons, we will attempt to answer reference questions within two business days, and we remind you that we cannot offer legal advice; we can provide answers to brief, factual research questions and resource inquiries. For example, we can help identify and locate legal materials or provide guidance in using legal resources or tools.

The hours that reference services generally are available via email are listed here.

Reference Desk

The physical reference desk on the main floor of the BYU Law Library is open. See the hours for this service here. You may also make appointments to receive in-person reference services with a law librarian by emailing reference@law.byu.edu.

Additionally, many virtual reference options (like emailing, submitting a reference question, and calling) are available to both the BYU Law community and other BYU and community patrons to receive reference services. The hours that virtual reference services generally are available via the reference department are listed here.

Submit a Reference Question

Patrons may use the Contact Us form to submit reference questions. We will attempt to answer reference questions within two business days. We remind you that we cannot offer legal advice. We can provide answers to brief, factual research questions and resource inquiries. For example, we can help identify and locate legal materials or provide guidance in using legal resources or tools. BYU Law faculty and BYU Law students will receive first priority for responses.

Call

To receive reference services by talking with a reference employee over the phone, call 801-422-6658. The hours that reference services generally are available via calling are listed here. If a reference employee does not answer, feel free to leave a voicemail because it is checked regularly. You may also email us your reference question at reference@law.byu.edu. The option to text a librarian is no longer available at BYU.

J. Reuben Clark Law School and Hunter Law Library

The Law School is committed to the enforcement and protection of copyrights as both a legal and an ethical imperative. A copyright is a set of exclusive rights that vests in the author of an original work of authorship (including literary, musical, dramatic, pictorial, sculptural, and motion picture works). The copyright attaches upon the work’s creation (when it is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression”); current law does not require the formalities of registration or of a copyright notice such as the “©” symbol. The exclusive rights covered by copyright include the right to (1) copy or reproduce the work or portions of the work (including by making electronic copies); (2) prepare “derivative works” based on the original; (3) distribute copies of the work or portions of the work (including by electronic means); and (4) publicly perform or display the work.

Any faculty member, staff member, or student who intends to copy or distribute any material that is not in the public domain and is, therefore, protected by copyright must first receive copyright clearance from the law school’s Copyright Coordinator under the procedures set forth here, unless the copyright is held by that faculty member, staff member, or student. Copyright clearance is required even if the material is believed to be covered by the doctrine of fair use, and even if permission has already been secured from the holder of the copyright by the individual faculty member, staff member, or student. “Copying” and “distributing” include not only making and distributing hard copies, but also making any digital or electronic copies, posting such copies on the internet or the law school’s web page, or distributing copies via e-mail.

Any faculty member, staff member, or student seeking copyright clearance must contact the law school’s Copyright Coordinator. Requests for clearance should be submitted on a form approved by the Copyright Committee. The request should be submitted as far in advance of the use of the material as is reasonably possible (preferably at least one month in advance). The form for the written request may be completed in hard copy or on the law school’s web page, and will require the person submitting the request to (1) identify the copyrighted works in question by author, title, publication date, journal citation (where applicable), publisher (if known), and ISBN/ISSN (if known); (2) describe the nature of any copying and/or distribution (e.g., hard copies, scanning, uploading, etc.); (3) identify the name of the course and number of students to whom the material will be distributed; (4) indicate whether the person submitting the request has ever previously received permission to use the material in question, and attach any documents memorializing such permission; and (5) indicate whether the person submitting the request believes that a fair use privilege applies, and provide a brief justification for such privilege.

Many single copies made purely for research purposes will be covered by the doctrine of fair use, particularly where only a portion of the original work is copied. For such uses, the Copyright Coordinator may provide clearances that may cover certain uses, without requiring specific clearance requests for each individual copy.

If a faculty member disagrees with a decision of the Copyright Coordinator, appeal may be made to the Associate Dean for Faculty & Curriculum.