The Temple of Justice, along with other government buildings on the Washington State Capitol campus, was designed by the New York architectural team of Walter Wilder and Harry White.

In January 1913, the inaugural ball of Governor Ernest Lister was held at the Temple of Justice, and the Supreme Court began meeting regularly in the unfinished building the same year.

[1] In his book Washington's Audacious State Capitol and Its Builders, architectural historian Norman Johnston (whose father, Jay Johnston, was the resident supervisor during the construction) offered a detailed description of the plans for the Temple of Justice: Matching the longitudinal dimensions of the [central] Legislative Building, toward which its main entrance faced in the group plan, the Temple of Justice was shown as a long rectangular building with shallow extended wings at either end.

Its neglected condition was described by the Tacoma News Tribune in 1955:[5] Housed in congested quarters in the basement of the Temple of Justice at Olympia is the Washington State Library which has become a maze of confusion because of lack of space.

No public reading space is available, books are piled high and narrow aisles are often completely blocked.By 1959 the situation had been remedied with the construction of a new state library at what would later be named the Joel M. Pritchard Building.