Lincoln's Inn, Legal institution in Holborn, England.

Lincoln's Inn is a legal association in the Holborn district that trains and employs barristers in its own buildings. The estate stretches across eleven acres and includes offices, gardens, a chapel, and listed houses and courtyards from different periods.

Law teaching moved to Holborn after a papal bull of 1218 barred clergy from teaching common law and Henry III's 1234 decree banned legal schools in the City of London. Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, encouraged lawyers to settle there, and the Inn was formally organised soon after his death in 1310. Its black books of council minutes begin in 1422, and a 1464 decree requiring a Reader's lectures made it a formal place of legal education.

The Inn's name is thought to come from Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, who encouraged lawyers to settle in Holborn. The Old Hall, in use by at least 1489, hosted revels, moots and feasts, and also served as a courtroom. Today members still dine together in the Great Hall, and the Library, first mentioned in 1471, holds Sir Matthew Hale's manuscripts, left to the Inn at his death in 1676.

Entry is from the gatehouse on Lincoln's Inn Fields or from Chancery Lane; the nearest Tube stations are Holborn and Chancery Lane. The estate lies across the road from the Royal Courts of Justice and the LSE. Parts of the inn are working chambers, so visitors keep to the courtyards and gardens.

The Tudor gatehouse still displays the coat of arms of Sir Thomas Lovell above its entrance, placed there between 1518 and 1521. Many visitors pass through the gate into the courtyards without noticing this detail overhead.