Delving into the history of the monumental Victorian gothic revival library building that once overlooked Middle Temple Garden, from its construction to eventual destruction during the Second World War.
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The history of the physical library buildings have been extensively documented over the last 400 years, but this month we will be exploring the impact that librarians, porters, students and even thieves have had in the Library’s past.
The Library collects legal texts in certain specialist subject areas such as banking, commercial law and arbitration, competition, employment, insurance, professional negligence and shipping, amongst others.
We are also the specialist library for ecclesiastical law, and we offer access to a full range of legal resources for EU and American Law
This edition reveals previously unknown details of a theft at Middle Temple Library in 1735 and the subsequent investigation conducted by the Inn – a dramatic tale involving staff, the judiciary, booksellers and bookbinders which ultimately uncovered a larger-scale offence.
Although we know that the Inn had a small library prior to 1540, an early account about the Inns of Court states that Middle Temple ‘had a simple library in which were not many bookes besides the law and that library by meanes that it stood always open, and that the learners had not each a key unto it, it was at last robbed of all the bookes in it’!
European Union and Member States
For fifty years, Middle Temple Library has maintained and developed a nationally significant collection of European legal materials. The collection continues to evolve in tandem with important legislative and judicial shifts within the European Union, as well as the UK’s ever-changing relationship with it: from its membership in 1973 to its withdrawal in 2020.
The European collection is located on the third-floor in the Library and comprises the following materials:
The Library subscribes to electronic journals, law reports and the legal databases listed below. Access to subscription-based resources is only available in the Library, apart from Bloomsbury Professional Online, Kluwer Arbitration, Lexis Practical Guidance and Oxford Legal Research Library which can be accessed remotely, upon application to the Library, by Middle Temple members who hold a practising certificate as a barrister in England and Wales AND are on the
All of the Library’s materials (including the majority of the law reports and journal titles contained in our subscription databases) can be located by searching our online catalogue. The catalogue may be accessed online, via any of the Library's computer terminals, or by using the search box embedded in this page:
Bibliotheca illustris Medii Templi Societatis, 1700
