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Statutory Protection of Library Materials

IN HIS FIRST LECTURE on The Forms of Action at Common Law, published posthumously in 1909,the English legal historian F.W. Maitland urged that, “we should guard ourselves against the notion that ...it was the office of the King’s own court or courts to provide a remedy for every wrong.”’ Maitland’s advice is as appropriate in the United States today as it was in England seventy-five years ago, especially in the case of American libraries. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the statutory and legal remedies available to library administrators for the protection of their institutions, their employees and their collections. The discussion will focus only upon those remedies that are specific to libraries and will exclude, for the most part, the larger body of law found in the criminal, corporate or municipal codes of the several states. The discussion will be necessarily general because libraries differ so much from one another in the circumstances of their establishment, their governance and their collections. And, because there is no consistency in the laws governing library operations from state to state, it will not be possible to make anything more than some generalized recommendations about when library administrators have no alternative but to seek a legal remedy.