Overview

The Library of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History is one of the world’s leading legal history libraries with a treasure trove of source material and secondary literature. Its collections also include a wealth of non-legal literature in the fields of philosophy, theology, historiography, political, economic, social and intellectual history.

The Library possesses some 320,000 volumes, of which half or more form part of our historic book collections. The library collection grows annually by approx. 10.000 volumes. In addition, there are some special collections, especially legal dissertations, microfilm copies of medieval manuscripts and legacy archives gathered by legal experts.

The print collections, microfilms and microfiches are fully documented in the electronic catalogue( webOPAC). Licensed electronic journals are filed in the Electronic Journals Library . The library also offers access to other online resources such as databases and electronic text corpora.

The library is available to all those engaged in academic work. As a reference library only, no books are lent out. Information regarding the use of the facilities is available here.

Various digitization projects have been undertaken with the goal of converting a part of the library’s inventories into electronic form. This material, with added searchable metadata, is available free of charge on the Internet. The Digital Library omprises the results of these projects.