Emory Law School Website

Becoming a Proxy or Research Assistant

Law Faculty may designate various students to be either their proxy borrower or research assistant.  These are different statuses with different privileges, so often a student may be both a proxy and an R.A. for the same professor.  A professor may have any number of proxies and/or research assistants at one time, and a student may serve one or both of these roles for multiple faculty at one time.

• Proxies may check out materials in their professors’ name at all campus libraries.  Once a student is a proxy for a faculty member, the privileges are good all over campus.
• Research Assistants are assigned one or both of the following: print allowances at the Law Library, and/or a copy/print card to do research with or on behalf of the professor.  The copy/print cards will work for copying at the Law Library, and will work for copying and printing at all campus libraries.

In order for a student to become either a proxy or a research assistant, they need to have a form for these privileges filled out by the professor and returned to Circulation.  The forms are available from the Circulation desk, just ask the desk attendant, or they can be downloaded and printed from here. 

Once this form has been completed and returned, it will take about 1 work day to be processed.

InterLibrary Loan and Proxies/Research Assistants

We recommend that faculty place their own InterLibrary Loan requests or work with their library liaison to do so.  We suggest that faculty do not ask research assistants or proxies to place ILL requests in their name. 

There are two reasons for this: first, it is probably not a wise idea to share Emory ID numbers for security reasons, and second, the loan rules of InterLibrary Loan are different for faculty and students.  Faculty members may request up to 3 renewals and will not be assessed late fees, whereas students may request only one renewal and will be charged 50 cents per day in late fees.

Transferring Library Materials

Please remember, library materials checked out in your name which accrue overdues or replacement charges are your responsibility until they are returned to the library.  We ask that you not loan library items to other patrons.  If you have an item and another person wishes to use it, please return to us so we can check it out to them so all courtesy, overdue and recall notices will reach the correct patron.