University Street, in Montpellier (Hérault), the Student legal library is a real institution. This small shop, where books have been sold for almost a century, specialized in law in the 1980s. Since then, future lawyers, trained just a stone’s throw from here, at the faculty, and locals flock there to buy their Codes and manuals. But if time seems to have stopped in this bookstore, something has changed in recent weeks: the owner.
Bérénice Weill, a former law school student, took over the reins of the boutique. And it is, a little, thanks to the Covid-19. Graduated in Master 2 Environmental Law in 2014, she used her Codes in a consulate in Mexico, at the Court of Appeal of Guyana, in a town hall, then in a start-up in the legal tech. Then, “for pleasure, but also for work”, the young woman embarked on tourism, as a travel planner (travel organizer). When the pandemic broke out, “it stopped everything. Then the regulations changed all the time, it was not pleasant, neither for us, nor for the customers”, confides Bérénice Weill.
The former owner is “delighted”
She then learned that the bookstore from her student years was for sale. “I knew the faculty, the professors, the neighborhood, the bookstore… I wanted to get involved in something related to law. I wanted to have my business, my business. And the idea of working among books appealed to me a lot. The former owner, of course, was delighted that her shop remained a bookstore, and did not become a bank or a snack bar. “I would have stayed until it was sold as a bookstore! smiled the one who had been running this business since 1985. “I’m delighted! »
Especially since betting on the book at Amazon time may seem damn daring. But if students and lawyers are loyal to the bookstore, it is, of course, for the advice that we offer them. In duet with Séraphim Herbillon, the other bookseller of the shop, Bérénice Weill ensures: “Our big advantage is that we are both lawyers, she confides. We both went to law school. We know each other. »
“The Codes are a working tool for a lawyer. Like the hammer for a workman”
And the law books, “we want to see them first, we want to leaf through them. Students sometimes spend ten or even fifteen minutes choosing between several. “For the same subject, there may be five or six textbooks, which may all have the same title, continues Séraphim Herbillon. On Amazon, we only see the cover page, and the back cover. And that’s all. Nothing, or almost, on the structure of the works.
As for digital books, they are not widespread in the law. And, “the dematerialized law books, it is complicated, to work, explains the bookseller. The Codes are a working tool for a lawyer. Like the hammer for a workman. Having it on paper is much better. As for textbooks, students can leaf through them, highlight them…”
The new owner of the Student Law Library has another great challenge to take up: the computerization of the shop, she confides, sitting in front of a magnificent old-fashioned cash register. “All the inventory, we did it by hand. All that there! she smiles, pointing to her stall. She wants to bring the bookstore up to date, while “keeping, of course, its old spirit, which is very popular”.