Together with its position as an official Documentation Centre for the European Union and its significant expenditure on foreign legal materials, this means that the BLL adds more than 10,000 new items to its stock each year.

The BLL collection supports the teaching and research of Law at the University of Oxford, and shares Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies with the Social Science Library.

The BLL collection has been built up over a period of four centuries, both from the legal deposit intake, and from specific purchases based on recommendations from academics and researchers alike.

The BLL holds full sets of previous editions of major UK legal monographs on the open shelves.

It receives over 2,000 serial titles per annum, including law reports, legislation, journals and looseleaf services from all the jurisdictions held in the collection.

[citation needed] The Law Library staff provide an extensive teaching programme to all postgraduate and undergraduate students.