Geeklawyer spent this morn­ing in the High Court and the after­noon in the library. Well, some of it any­way. Most of it was spent in the George in the Strand on the piss with a highly enter­tain­ing lady bar­ris­ter who should have known bet­ter but who will remain nameless.

That said the rest of the time was spend in Mid­dle Tem­ple library research­ing eso­teric laws of min­i­mal inter­est to any­one but a bar­ris­ter about to come to blows with an oppo­nent of an oppo­site but incor­rect and less well researched mind.

You can, there­fore, imag­ine Geeklawyer’s blank hor­ror when he dis­cov­ered, via CharonQC’s blog, that two half-witted trea­sur­ers have had the bark­ing mad idea of merg­ing the Mid­dle and Inner Tem­ple libraries. Frankly one’s jaw drops at moments like this. Whether the out­rage at the van­dal­ism to the his­tory of either Inn out­weighs the dam­age to the Inns mem­bers is unclear; what is clear is that a nanosecond’s reflec­tion would reveal the inher­ent idiocy of the pro­posal. Both Inns have won­der­ful and com­ple­men­tary libraries: both libraries have calm reflec­tive study spaces for stu­dents and prac­ti­tion­ers to pore in a leisurely uncramped way over an ample sup­ply of texts.

Geeklawyer has always found the librar­i­ans to be knowl­edge­able, keen to help and expert in locat­ing hard to find nuggets: plus how to do dif­fi­cult techy stuff like oper­ate pho­to­copiers prop­erly. He has never had to ask them to feed him grapes and wine but he is pretty sure they would do so if asked.

A merged library would, at a stroke, deprive mem­bers of the sin­gle most tan­gi­ble ben­e­fit of Inn mem­ber­ship. Yea, we know that one is sup­posed to be bound by the broth­er­hood of the Inn: the smug unspo­ken assur­ance that we are not as the Gadarene herd pass­ing along the Strand: nor yet by the occa­sional Domus night where we try to pick up hot Bar totty hopefuls.

The real­ity is most of us only give a fly­ing fuck about the stuff that earns us money: the abil­ity to get legal knowl­edge; hav­ing a com­pre­hen­sive and coher­ent col­lec­tion of well tended texts admin­is­tered by expert legal librar­i­ans who care about it and who make it all acces­si­ble. Geeklawyer would add that this atti­tude is not his — he does value Lincoln’s Inn.

As a mem­ber of the mod­ern com­pet­i­tive Bar Geeklawyer under­stands the need for effi­ciency and cost cut­ting. But as a fre­quent user of both libraries he utterly rejects the sort-sighted notion of false sav­ings that will deeply dam­age fine insti­tu­tions by leav­ing us with an under­stocked cramped resource and har­ried staff too busy to devote their time to mem­bers needs.

At the moment it looks like this asi­nine pro­posal is merely that and one the Inns did not con­sulted mem­bers on. Geeklawyer would urge all library users to write to the Inn trea­sur­ers and oppose the idea in the strongest pos­si­ble terms: “Really, this sim­ply will not do” or per­haps even stronger lan­guage but with­out going over­board and becom­ing ungentlemanly.