How to put the legend out of the plot

Question

I have a series of 20 plots (not subplots) to be made in a single figure. I want the legend to be outside of the box. At the same time, I do not want to change the axes, a

Answer 1

In addition to all the excellent answers here, newer versions of matplotlib and pylab can automatically determine where to put the legend without interfering with the plots, if possible.

pylab.legend(loc='best')

This will automatically place the legend away from the data if possible!

However, if there is no place to put the legend without overlapping the data, then you'll want to try one of the other answers; using loc="best" will never put the legend outside of the plot.