Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

The Law Library
is credited with revolutionising the methods of law teaching can
be produced as a witness against the fallacious belief that learning
mostly takes place in classrooms.
In 1992 the Harvard Law School Library, probably the best collection
in the world, was reported to contain almost one and three
quarter million volumes. The estimated holdings of the two principal
legal academic research libraries in the British Isles were for
the Bodleian Law Library at Oxford about 250,000 volumes and
for the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London about
215,000. 3 The most recent prescription for recommended holdings
for academic law libraries in England and Wales specified an initial
capital expenditure of about £500,000 and an annual upkeep of
£30,000 for reference works and a further £6000 for "textbooks". 4
These figures become more impressive if considered in the light
of three apparent paradoxes. First, law books are notoriously long,
heavy and expensive; yet the interpretation of legal texts—one kind
of legal reading—can involve as careful analysis of every phrase,
word or punctuation mark as any form of textual analysis. Sir Roger
Casement, it is said, was "hanged by a comma". 5
A second apparent paradox is that there is likely to be hardly
any overlap between the contents of an orthodox law library and
the stock of a general book shop. Most law libraries contain mainly
law books in a narrow sense. You are unlikely to find in many law
libraries Crime and Punishment or legal novels or popular accounts
of famous trials or the works of Kant or most other kinds of "books
about law" that were mentioned in the first chapter. A law student
who wishes to gain a broad general education about law will, no
doubt healthily, have to visit other sections of the university collection
or a good public library. Almost the only overlap between the
stock of a good general book shop and an average university law
library is likely to be students' textbooks and casebooks. But the
former tend to be a bastard form of law book; the latter are mainly
a substitute for using the library. Thus law libraries are among the
most extensive and expensive kind of library despite the fact that
they tend to adopt rather narrow definitions of what constitutes
legal literature.
There is one further apparent paradox. It is often said that books
are the lawyers' tools; the library, their laboratory. Yet ancient
legend and recent research both suggest that the great majority of
practising lawyers devote very little time to consulting, let alone,
reading law books. Thus one survey suggested that partners in solicitors'
firms in a major Scottish city spent less than fifteen minutes
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