Frustration over lack of seating
A group of law students at the University of Edinburgh have launched an ambitious campaign, which if successful, would see their non-law studying peers banned from using their newly-renovated library.
With another hectic exam season fast-approaching, law students at the Scottish Russell Group university have written to Professor Martin Hogg, the head of the School of Law, in order to express their “frustration” at the apparent lack of seating in the law library. This is on account of students from other schools taking over the study space, which recently benefited from a multi-million-pound five-year renovation project.
The letter, seen by student website The Tab, suggests imposing “a restriction on access to non-law students during peak hours”, which appear to be from 9pm to 4pm, Monday to Friday. The seatless students, in true lawyer fashion, go on to argue that their proposed limitation on non-law students is no more “prohibitive” than those already in place at other faculties.
Confirming he’d seen the letter, Hogg told Legal Cheek: “[T]he matter will be raised and discussed at a meeting of the law school this week. I am hopeful that we will be able satisfactorily to address the concerns raised by the student body.”
Elsewhere, the letter explains, law students require frequent access to legal texts, which can only be found in the law library, and that if that weren’t the case, the seating issue would perhaps be “tolerable”.
On why they can’t simply borrow the books and work elsewhere, the students claim this is “desperately inconvenient”, given that this requires them to travel back and forth between the law school, where the vast majority of their lectures take place, and the university’s main library.