Few libraries outside the United States have either the means or the need to acquire complete holdings of American legal materials. The many capacious series of law reports, legal periodicals and legislative materials which comprise the bulk of American legal literature may in any event be beyond their reach for reasons of cost and space. If foreign libraries are interested in American legal materials at all they have limited objectives. All they need are small collections of monographs with a broad reference capability. In terms of their ideal criteria such collections are envisaged to consist of no more than several hundred basic books which might have the collective effect of presenting a comprehensive overview of the major areas of American law at a sufficient level of analytical depth to satisfy the immediate research needs of a lawyer or a legal scholar in a foreign country.