The dominant Irish historical narrative sees the history of Ireland, prior to Independence, as a series of revolts and risings that posed a direct challenge to the state with lulls in between. This emphasis on armed struggle, as Mary Kotsonouris points out in her seminal account of the Dáil courts, Retreat from Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic, 1994), has eclipsed in Irish historiography a quieter revolution based on civil disobedience. David Foxton's Revolutionary Lawyers furthers Kotsonouris's exploration of nonviolent resistance to the Union by usefully contextualizing the subversive court system that she writes about so eloquently in Retreat from Revolution within the broader framework of Republican legal strategy. Revolutionary Lawyers, which is based on extensive research into official and private records in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, outlines two seemingly contradictory strands of this legal strategy in the period between 1916 and 1923. One strand involved the “establishment of a rival legal system and court structure,” the efficiency and authority of which “was reinforced by a policy of ‘non-recognition,' boycott and ultimately violent obstruction of the Crown court structure in Ireland” (13). The second strand, which consisted of challenges to the legality of British executive action under British law, entailed the active participation of the Irish revolutionary movement in the crown courts. The structure of the book follows the familiar chronology of Irish history over the period, starting with Easter Rising and concluding with the Civil War.

Foxton is a barrister and Queen's Counsel. Consequently, Revolutionary Lawyers offers many fascinating insights into the legal intricacies of what is aptly referred to in the book as the “legal front” of the War of Independence (16). Foxton's professional connections are perhaps also the reason why the aspect of Republican legal strategy that interests him the most is the extent to which this strategy (and the strategies employed against it) threatened or undermined official law. Indeed, every event in Irish and British history that figures in Revolutionary Lawyers is examined primarily in relation to its ramifications on the crown legal system. Hence we are told that “it was military justice which suffered most adversely” when suspect convictions occurred (384). One is tempted to say in response that while military justice may well have suffered as a result of possible miscarriages of justice, we should surely be more concerned with the suffering of those who were executed for crimes they may not have committed.

This central concern with the crown legal system also results in some notable omissions in Foxton's analysis of Sinn Féin courts. In his introductory chapter, Foxton provides an informative history of the workings of official law in Ireland but fails to provide a similar historical account of alternative court structures. Elsewhere in the book he states that “the concept of a rival court structure had its origins in the informal land arbitration courts established by Daniel O’Connell” (187). Traces of unofficial courts and other subversive legal practices that can be found in accounts of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland suggest, however, that alternative law has functioned as a fundamental component of Irish agitation since at least the emergence of whiteboyism in the 1760s. These traces include a report by a select committee of 1825, which stated that previously there had been “committees sitting when there was some great work to be done, as the burning of a house, or the murder of a man; the matter was discussed and decided there” (cited in Donald Jordan, “The Irish National League and the ‘Unwritten Law,’” Past and Present, no. 158 [1998]: 159), W. Steuart Trench's detailed description of his 1851 trial before the Ribbon Society in Realities of Irish Life, and Clifford Lloyd's claim in his Land War memoir that the “people no more sought redress at the magistrate's court, but applied to that of the Land League for the adjustment of their disputes and the redress of their grievances, real and imaginary” (Clifford Lloyd, Ireland under the Land League: A Narrative of Personal Experiences [London, 1892], 79).

Furthermore, since Foxton's attention is firmly focused on the impact of a “conflict between two competing concepts of legality” on the crown legal system (13), Revolutionary Lawyers does not explore the extent to which rival legal structures in Ireland offered a genuine alternative to “British” law. In chapter 4, we are told that the first Dáil land court sat in public in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, on 17 May 1920 and was reported quite favorably in the Irish Times. Kevin O’Shiel, a young barrister at the time, wrote about this case in one of a series of articles on the Dáil courts that was published in the Irish Times in 1966. From O’Shiel's account, we learn that the Dáil land court at Ballinrobe involved the seizure of land and that the judgment was in favor of the landowners and against the claimants, who ranged from a landless laborer to an eight-acre congest. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Irish Times, the organ of the landowning ascendancy, would have tentatively approved of the case's outcome. O’Shiel also included in his article the response of the claimants who, following the judgment, were heard to announce that this is “no Sinn Féin court” and that it was “worse than the British” (cited in Heather Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland: From “Unwritten Law” to the Dáil Courts [Dublin, 2005], 126). Alternative law in Ireland had traditionally been closely affiliated with what was commonly referred to as the “unwritten agrarian code,” protecting rights of occupancy and imposing severe penalties on those who took over evicted holdings. Dáil courts, by contrast, adopted the ethos and value system of the legal institutions they were displacing, prioritizing rights of property ownership over rights of occupancy. This is the “retreat from revolution” referred to by Mary Kotsonouris in her study of the Dáil courts.

Notwithstanding the subtitle of Foxton's Revolutionary Lawyers: Sinn Féin and Crown Courts in Ireland and Britain, 1916–1923, it is the crown legal system that is at the center of Foxton's study. The only aspects of the alternative legal system and court structure that are dealt with in any depth are those that directly affected “British” law. In its exploration of the impact of Republican legal strategy in its entirety on the crown legal system, Revolutionary Lawyers does, however, offer genuine insights into the Republican movement's attempt to combine “doctrinaire abstentionism with a pragmatic interaction with the institutions of the British state” (9).