by Kenny Berkowitz
For anyone who remembers the Cornell Law Library’s ground floor, the Hub feels like a revelation. It’s Cornell Law’s newest space, a place to write, study, and collaborate—and a powerful statement about how the Law School keeps evolving to meet the needs of its students.”
The library’s rows of stacks have been replaced with offices, meeting rooms, carrels, and open seating areas. At 8,000-square feet, nearly the size of two basketball courts, there’s more than enough room for quiet study, group projects, Zoom meetings, professional interviews, and casual conversations. On the north and east side of the Hub there are glassed-in hoteling offices for faculty and staff. On the south side of the Hub natural light filters through the windows over the updated study carrels. The central area includes six small meeting rooms and four larger meeting rooms equipped with AV technology. Also included are a bookcase of faculty publications, murals of the Gould Reading Room and Myron Taylor Hall, and a backlit photo of Cascadilla Gorge that changes with each season.
“I didn’t anticipate how beautiful the space would be,” says Jens David Ohlin, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law, who greenlit the project in his first decision as interim dean. “The architectural renderings couldn’t capture what it would feel like, and that’s what blew me away the first time I walked through.
“I love the way it looks, but more than that, I love that it’s making an impact on the life of the Law School,” he continues. “There’s a relationship between our physical spaces and the intellectual results they produce. With the Hub, students have a comfortable place to meet before classes and talk their way through the issues. They’re better able to prepare, they’re better able to collaborate, and all that work is translating into a new depth of progress in the classroom.”
Touring the space, Ohlin talks about the natural light, the warmth of the wood, and the high-tech presence of keypads to reserve the meeting rooms, glass walls, audio/video, touch-screen monitors, soundproofing, and internet connectivity to link the Law School to people all over the globe. The project, originally proposed by Ofer Leshed in 2018, foresaw the growing need for collaborative spaces, offices for adjunct faculty and visitors, and professional interview rooms, providing flexibility to adapt to the changing demands of students and faculty.
“From the get-go, we saw this could be a transformative place,” says Leshed, associate dean for administration and finance. “Over multiple brainstorming sessions, we received great ideas and input from our Law School community. This included having quiet study space away from all distractions, quiet study space where students could see others studying around them, and space to collaborate around traditional tables and work on projects. Students also suggested having a variety of seating options. The final design captures all that. It is gratifying to see a project from inception to completion, and see how heavily our community is using the space
In 2019, then-Dean Eduardo Peñalver brought Leshed’s idea to newly arrived librarian Kim Nayyer, with a proposal to move thousands of volumes out of the ground-floor stacks and make room for a new collaborative space. “It was quite a large project, and title by title, library staff needed to take down the old records and upload new records for every single volume,” says Nayyer, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian, Associate Dean for Library Services, and Professor of the Practice, who’d talked about adding group study space during her job interview. “The project was enormously time consuming, and it was very technically demanding, but it was one of the most productive collaborations I’ve ever experienced.”
Using data from student focus groups, interviews with library staff, and ten years of use surveys, Leshed and Nayyer steered the Hub through its early stages, emphasizing the importance of technology, adding collaborative space, upgrading carrels, outfitting meeting rooms with soundproofing, providing visual links to the outdoors, and ensuring furniture would be comfortable for a wide range of users.
Using data from student focus groups, interviews with library staff, and ten years of use surveys, Leshed and Nayyer steered the Hub through its early stages, emphasizing the importance of technology, adding collaborative space, upgrading carrels, outfitting meeting rooms with soundproofing, providing visual links to the outdoors, and ensuring furniture would be comfortable for a wide range of users. From there, the project advanced to the Building Committee, which proposed ways to link the entrance of the Berger Atrium and helped launch the bidding process, which was ultimately awarded to New York City’s Mitchell Giurgola Architects, who has also designed recent on-campus renovations to Bailey Hall, Stocking Hall, and the S.C. Johnson College of Business.
“The architects were very creative, very gifted,” says Kevin Clermont, who chairs the Building Committee. “It was the perfect relationship, where we came up with ideas and they found ways to improve on everything we suggested. For me as a frustrated architect, that made the process a very happy experience. All the details turned out far better than we’d envisaged, and now that it’s open, the meeting rooms are constantly in use. When students arrive at Cornell Law, they already know they have a beautiful, historic building. Then, when they step inside the Hub, it’s just so comfortable and colorful they’re blown away right off the bat. That’s a nice way to start your career.” For Clermont, the Hub feels like the culmination of decades of renovations at Myron Taylor Hall—“It completes what we’ve been doing since 1988,” he says—and looking back, it’s hard to remember the Giurgola contract was awarded more than four years ago, exactly one day before the University closed to prevent the spread of Covid-19. At the time, when it was impossible to know what would happen next in Ithaca or around the world, the Law School opted to believe students would one day return to campus to be with one another.
“The idea of building space for students to study in close proximity wasn’t an easy decision to make at the start of the pandemic,” says Ohlin. “Nor was authorizing a major construction project at a time when we were facing an uncertain future. But we took a leap of faith that the Law School would emerge with a robust, thriving, in-person academic culture. That students were going to want places to gather. To study. To read. To collaborate. That we needed a place like the Hub to become an essential building block of our post-pandemic strategy.”
We did, and it has. By the time the project was completed, library staff had worked 3,000 hours and moved more than 70,000 volumes, and since opening in fall 2023, the Hub has become the new center for social learning, with students using the space around the clock. “The Hub is genuinely the best place in the Law School,” says Jacqueline Hahn ’26, who uses the Hub’s carrels to study on her own, its smaller rooms to meet with members of her club’s executive board, its larger rooms for reviewing exams with classmates, and its lounge seating for eating lunch with classmates. “There wasn’t a day last year when I didn’t go to the Hub. It’s the main place for study groups, meeting with collaborators, or just reading between classes. We even have an expression, ‘DTH,’ which means we’re going down to the Hub. The mass population adores the Hub, and we think Cornell Law wouldn’t be the same without it.”
“I’m a big fan,” says Jade Ovadia ’25, who wrote last semester’s papers in the Hub, where she could easily test ideas with nearby classmates, and used the meeting space to prepare for Evidence, where she wanted to be ready if she was called to answer a question. “The Hub is definitely my preferred study space. It’s more social, more conversational. It’s where the different Law School communities come together to work together or alone, all at the same time, which I love.”
For Hahn, Ovadia, and Rory Confino-Pinzon, the Hub feels more comfortable than spaces designed for law students nearly a century ago. “The Reading Room feels too quiet for me, and the Commons feels too distracting,” says Confino-Pinzon ’26, “whereas the Hub is more intentional. We’re the Google generation. We’re used to accessing information at our fingertips, which the Hub lets us do. It has the technology we need, and it values the group work that’s so important in everything we do. There’s so much more of an emphasis on collaboration than there was in the past, even when you’re just having a discussion, and the Hub is preparing us for the workplace, which is a really collaborative environment.”
That, says Dean Ohlin, is exactly the point. “Law students don’t just want to read in isolation,” he says. “They want to collaborate with classmates who’ve read the same material. They want to discuss it before they get into the classroom, they want to talk through their ideas, and they want to be battle-tested before they come to class.
“So we built the Hub, and any time of day, students are in there exploring and debating the law,” continues Ohlin. “As dean, that’s a wonderful thing to see.”
Thanks to the generosity of our inaugural donors, spaces in the Hub have been named in honor of Jeffrey S. Feld ’83; Katherine P. Ward Feld, M.B.A. ’82, J.D. ’83; Mary Gail Gearns ‘85; and Mark Nozette ’74. To find out more about naming opportunities in the Hub, please contact Kevin Sackett at sackett@cornell.edu.
