My favorite place to study: the IALS Library
As exam season nears, I’ve been spending more time reviewing lectures and notes. Also, there isn’t any teaching in April so that students can prepare for exams in May and June. I’ll let you know my experience with take-home assessments in due course.
This short post is about my favorite place to study in the entirety of London: the IALS Library. Let me tell you why.
The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies or IALS is actually not part of King’s. It’s affiliated with the University of London. But LLM students from King’s, Birkbeck, LSE, QMUL, SOAS and UCL can join their legal library at Russell Square for free.
They offer bookable 6-hour study slots, which is longer than the short 3-hour slots at King’s libraries. And there is no weekly limit. King’s has a 4 slots limit.
All desks are large and socially distanced, and have a power/USB outlet, which is not always the case at King’s.
The view from every desk is amazing and sunlight shines slightly dimmed through large windows. King’s libraries have quite a lot of enclosed rooms without sunlight.
It’s super quiet inside. I even (unintentionally) jump scared a few people turning corners and got jump scared myself, because it’s so quiet.
They have a humongous legal collection covering all major jurisdictions in the world. Especially the EU, US and Netherlands collections are very valuable to me. Their financial law collection is also very strong. Even more obscure or older books are available for the legal philosophers and legal historians out there. I have found books here that I couldn’t find in King’s collection database.
Their physical collection is physically accessible with COVID safety procedures in place. King’s legal collection at the Maughan Library isn’t physically accessible.
Their legal librarians are friendly and very helpful in finding books. At King’s, I waited 7+ weeks for one book request to be processed, after which I gave up and canceled the request.
Russell Square is a nice place to have lunch and coffee. Just watch out for swarms of overly aggressive city pigeons.
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