Edi law students start a campaign to ban non-law students from using their swanky new library

Law students at the University of Edinburgh have started a campaign to ban students who take other degrees from using the recently renovated Law Library, situated in Old College.

An open letter has been written to Professor Martin Hogg, the Head of the School of Law, in order to convey the "frustration at the lack of seating available in the Law Library" as a result of students of other schools taking over the somewhat picturesque study space, leaving the law students seatless.

The students referred to the issue of having to share the Law Library with their non-law peers as perhaps being "tolerable" if it were not the case that law students were required to make "such frequent use" of the legal texts which are kept in the library.

They concede that whilst it is possible to borrow the legal texts and work in alternate libraries on campus, it is "desperately inconvenient" to travel back and forth to the Main Library in George Square in between lectures and tutorials, which are predominately held in Old College.

A "possible solution" the students offer is to "impose a restriction on access to non-law students during peak hours", which "from observation […] appear to be from 09.00 to 16.00, Monday to Friday". This restriction, they argue, is not dissimilar to "even more prohibitive" restrictions already put in place by other schools over their designated study spaces on campus.

The letter has been forwarded around several Messenger group chats and provision has been made for students to add their name to the document should they support the cause. The link to the document can be found here.

With revision and May exams looming, it's understandable that the students are worried about the lack of seats available, especially when they're being taken up by those who are there mainly for the aesthetics as opposed to the students who actually need to trawl though the library's dusty texts that date back to what feels like the Stone Age.

The law students seem to be affected to varying degrees, however, with one student demanding for all "yahs" to be explicitly banned, and another commenting: "Since there are no attractive species in the law sphere, I personally enjoy the fact that foreign courses inhabit the Law Library as this enhances the gene pool”.