I think it's fair for me to say that across sectors among law libraries budgets are decreasing and there's less funding available to purchase in particular packaged resources or digital resources or licences or continuing resources, which are very common in law, so books that are supplemented. We pay annually for additional supplements to the same book.
What I can say is that there is also, in my personal experience, definitely an increase in monograph purchases. One outcome at the University of Victoria of our exit from Access Copyright is that we tend to proceed when we reproduce materials by either fair dealing or permissions—the permission may be associated with a fee or it may not be—or the library often orders extra copies, purchases extra copies of the books. Law books are very expensive and that is one reason that we tend not to require students to purchase them. However, just this past term, for the first time ever, I required all my students to purchase a book on legal writing because it's an excellent book and I knew that I would want to assign more readings than fair dealing would allow for that book. Again, I worked out a really good arrangement with the publisher for a reasonable cost for the students.
Generally speaking, I'm not sure if it's the case for other academic institutions, but our monograph budget is not going down, and we're trying to get it to go up. The problem is the pressures from the larger academic packages that bring our commitments to those to a greater ratio or greater percentage of our acquisitions budget. A similar situation exists in law society libraries and legal firm libraries where many of the large subscription products are simply not purchased in print anymore because they're too expensive.