Law Library

Greetings from the Roanoke Law Library, your source for legal information and resources in the Roanoke Valley. The Roanoke Law Library has over 18,000 legal volumes available for public research. The Roanoke Law Library also provides free access to Lexis Advance, a sophisticated online legal research database where you can search statutes and case law for all fifty states and federal materials.

The Roanoke Law Library legal collection is non-circulating except for a small collection of basic primers on legal subjects published by NOLO and the West Nutshell series. The Roanoke Law Library is a branch of the Roanoke Public Library system and all general public library activities are also available here. You can return books or have books sent here from other Roanoke Valley Library branches, photocopy materials, send faxes, and reserve our conference room for meetings.

The library provides free public access to computers with Internet access and Microsoft Office productivity software (the user must have a valid Roanoke valley public library card). Printing is $0.10 per page.

The law library’s collection is searchable in the Roanoke Valley Libraries online public access catalog.

History of Roanoke Law Library

The collection was originally started by the Roanoke Bar Association in 1925 exclusively for the use of its members. In 1976, the Roanoke Public Library began administering the law library and the library was officially opened to the public.

Since 1976, most of the law libraries budget is generated by the filing fees collected from civil cases in the Roanoke City courts (per Virginia Code 42.1-70).

Today the library is located in the Roanoke City Courthouse at 315 Church Street in downtown Roanoke.