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Alternative Visions of Legal Biography: an Abstract

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

David Sugarman

Abstract

David Sugarman reflects briefly on developments regarding legal biography and considers the future role and value of biography within the legal community and especially in the context of socio-legal research.

Keywords

biographylegal biography

Information

Type
Legal Biography
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 16 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

Biography is booming. Shakespeare, Pepys, Jane Austen and Steve Jobs for example, have all been the subject of recent biographies that have sold millions, as have celebrity biographies and autobiographies.

While political biographies are not in the same league sales-wise, they remain popularFootnote 1. Artists, philosophers, historians and even economists, from Bagehot and Beveridge to Warhol and Wittgenstein, have all attracted a steady stream of high quality biographies.

At first blush, the contrast with legal biography in Britain is striking. The once popular biographies of illustrious lawyers and judges, typified by Marjoribanks' biography of Marshall HallFootnote 2 and Lewis’ biographies of Lords Atkin and HailshamFootnote 3, appear to be in decline. Apparently they are selling less, and certainly fewer are published today than in the previous two hundred years. Perhaps contemporary lawyers and judges are less colourful, lack the popular notoriety and have become more narrowly professional than their counterparts of yore? Perhaps they have been eclipsed by a different notion of “celebrity”, publication and the media?

One could also point to the invidious comparison between the quantity and quality of legal biography in, say, contemporary Canada and the USA relative to Britain. While the best of legal life writing harnesses historical empathy with a commitment to the careful and conscious scrutiny of the past, the worst tends towards hagiography.

However, change is in the air. High-quality British academic legal biography, pioneered by Heuston and Stevens in the 1960's and ‘70's, has grown and established a small, marginal, but discernible niche in the world of scholarship, albeit, a precarious oneFootnote 4. Work illustrative of this biographical turn includes Auchmuty on Gwyneth Bebb, Beatson and Zimmermann on German-speaking émigré lawyers in twentieth century Britain, Dukes on Kahn-Freund, Duxbury on Pollock, Lacey on Hart, Parry on Hughes Parry and Prest on BlackstoneFootnote 5. Institutional initiatives at LSEFootnote 6 and CambridgeFootnote 7 also indicate that a struggle is under way to sustain legal biography in Britain as never before. Thus, we may be witnessing a turning point, although only time will tell.

To date, the bulk of legal biographies have focused on the lives of the elite; most often white, male judgesFootnote 8. Court officials, womenFootnote 9 and other “outsiders”, litigants, the diverse audiences of the law beyond the judiciary and lawyers, legal communications and legal objectsFootnote 10 have tended to receive short shrift. While the history of law firms has added considerably to our understanding of legal practice, and the inter-play between the public sphere and the private sphere in legal lifeFootnote 11, the impact of these histories has been largely confined to the realm of business history. The approaches adopted, and the source material utilised, by legal biography tend to be less diverse than the best of contemporary life writing. Important sources – such as autobiography, obituaries and eulogies, advertisements, oral historyFootnote 12, visual materialFootnote 13 and objects – are frequently neglectedFootnote 14. The physical and sensory textures of everyday legal lifeFootnote 15 receive scant attention. Consequently, legal biography has been largely cut-off from, and seen as irrelevant to, intellectual, social and pictorial history, and the “humanities turn” in socio-legal scholarshipFootnote 16.

Like all historical writing, legal biography is an epistemologically problematic endeavour. While some biographical source material will be readily available, other material may be fragmentary, elusive, scattered and unreliable. Legal life writing takes us into a realm of evidential and interpretative uncertainty normally beyond the comfort zones of those trained in the certainties of lawyers. The connections, if any, between source material and legal lives, are invariably complex and contradictory, and usually open to a welter of interpretations.

Moreover, legal biography may not be good for your academic career. At its best, legal life writing is labour-intensive and, therefore, expensive, like works of outright history. It fits ill within the current regime for assessing the quality of research at UK educational institutions.Footnote 17

Despite its undoubted difficulties, legal life writing provides a vital resource for understanding the ideas and culture of the legal community, and their place within the wider world. In the paper of which this is an abstract I consider why the acceptance of legal life writing has been belated and contested. I also suggest ways of expanding the repertoire of legal biography and, therefore, socio-legal scholarship. I provide insights into “what legal biography adds?” My objective is to support a perspective in the making: a broader, more pluralistic, conception of life writing that transcends the traditional stark dualisms between internal and external legal historyFootnote 18, and top-down and bottom-up approachesFootnote 19. I also hope to stimulate the interest of, and engagement with, socio-legal studies (especially those associated with the humanities-turn in socio-legal studies), the law in society movement, as well as the human sciences and even lay audiences.

References

Footnotes

1 Margaret Thatcher, Mao, Indira Gandhi, Churchill, Harold Wilson and the Queen are just some of those who are the subject of recent best-selling biographies.

2 Marjoribanks, E., Famous Trials of Marshall Hall (London: Penguin, 1989).Google Scholar

3 Lewis, G., Lord Hailsham: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1998)Google Scholar and Lord Atkin (Oxford: Hart, 1999).Google Scholar

4 Heuston, R. F. V., Lives of the Lord Chancellor, 1885–1940 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar and Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1940 – 1970 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Stevens, Robert, Law and Politics: the House of Lords as a Judicial Body, 1800 – 1976 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979).Google Scholar

5 Auchmuty, R., “Whatever happened to Miss Bebb?: Bebb v The Law Society and women's legal history”, (2011) 31 Legal Studies 199–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beatson, J. and Zimmermann, R., (eds.), Jurists Uprooted: German-Speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dukes, Ruth, “Constitutionalizing employment relations; Sinzheimer, Kahn-Freund, and the role of labour law” (2008) 35 Journal of Law and SocietyCrossRefGoogle Scholar 341- and “Otto Kahn-Freund and Collective Laissez-Faire: An Edifice without a Keystone?” (2009) 72 Modern Law Review 220–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lacey, Nicola, A Life of HLA Hart, The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Parry, R. Gwynedd, David Hughes Parry – A Jurist in Society, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Duxbury, Neil, Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prest, W. R., William Blackstone : law and letters in the eighteenth century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/projects/legalbiog/lbp.htm

7 Eminent Scholars Archive (University of Cambridge) http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent_scholars/

8 Only a relatively small number of judges have been the subject of sustained, modern biographies: see Polden, Patrick, “Judging Judges. The Reputations of Nineteenth-Century Judges and their Sources”, in Musson, Anthony and Stebbings, Chantal (ed)., Making Legal History. Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 53–71.Google Scholar

9 Cf. R. Auchmuty, “Whatever happened to Miss Bebb?”, ibid and “Early women law students at Cambridge and Oxford”, (2008) Journal of Legal History 63–97Google Scholar; Polden, P., “Portia's progress: women at the bar in England, 1919–1939”, (2005) 12 International Journal of the Legal Profession, 293–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Women have received more sustained attention in Canada and the United States.

10 Cf. Sugarman, David, “Beyond Ignorance and Complacency: Robert Stevens' Journey Through Lawyers and the Courts”, (2009) 16 International Journal of the Legal Profession 7–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar (which is a biography of a book about law); MacGregor, Neil, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, Allen Lane, 2010).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Slinn, J., A History of Freshfields (London 1984)Google Scholar, and idem, Linklaters and Paines: The First 150 Years (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Belcher, V., Boodle, Hatfield and Co. (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Dennett, L., Slaughter and May (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Cobb, W., A History of Grays of York (York, 1989)Google Scholar; Davis, P., Number 1 (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Scott, J., Legibus: King, Thorne and Stace (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Thirlwell, A., A Century of Practice: Isadore Goldman and Son (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Jackson, C., A Cambridge Bicentenary: The History of a Legal Practice, 1789–1989 (Bungay, 1990)Google Scholar. For a useful overview of this new field see Slinn, J., “The Histories and Records of Firms of Solicitors,” (1989) 22 Business Archives 58.Google Scholar

12 Cf. David Sugarman, “In His Own Voice: H.L.A. Hart in Conversation with David Sugarman”. Online blog published by Oxford University Press to accompany the publication of the online audio interview, “Hart Interviewed: H.L.A. Hart in Conversation with David Sugarman”. The interview is broken down into nine parts, available for streaming and download http://blog.oup.com/2012/12/h-l-a-hart-in-conversation-with-david-sugarman/

http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/law/hart/ The interview is also accessible via the YouTube playlist. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3MAPgqN8JWiLdUqgmrQMzhao6b-RrS49. The text of most of the interview was originally published as “Hart Interviewed: H.L.A. Hart in Conversation with David Sugarman” (2005) 32 Journal of Law and Society 267–293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Cf. Baker, J. H., “History of the Gowns worn at the English Bar.” (1975) 9 CostumeCrossRefGoogle Scholar 15-; Evans, R., The fabrication of virtue: English prison architecture 1750 –1840 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Dickinson, H. T., Caricatures and the Constitution. (Cambridge, Chadwyck-Healey, 1986)Google Scholar; Hunt, Alan, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Regulation (London, Macmillan, 1995)Google Scholar; Douzinas, C. and Nead, L., eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Evans, D., “Theatre of Deferral: The Image of the Law and the Architecture of the Inns of Court.” (1999) 10 Law & Critique 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mulcahy, Linda, Legal Architecture: Justice, Due Process and the Place of Law (Oxford, Routeldge, 2001)Google Scholar; Graham, Clare, Ordering Law: the Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914 (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar; Raffield, P., Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Sugarman, David, “Images of Law. Legal Buildings, ‘Englishness’ and the Reproduction of Power”. In Schulze, R. (ed.) Rechtssymbolik und Wertevermittlung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004) 194–225Google Scholar; Moran, Leslie, “Judging Pictures: A Case Study of Chief Justices, Supreme Court of New South Wales”, (2009) 5 International Journal of Law in Context 255–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodrich, Peter, “Specters of Law; Why the History of the Legal Spectacle has Not Been Written”, (2011) 1 UC Irvine Law Review 773–812Google Scholar; Musson, Anthony, “Visual Sources” in Musson, Anthony and Stebbings, Chantal (eds.), Making Legal History. Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 264–283.Google Scholar

14 Gwynedd Parry's otherwise valuable discussion of legal biography neglects these sources: Parry, R. Gwynedd, “Is legal biography really legal scholarship?” (2010) 30 Legal Studies 208–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Cf. Goodrich, Peter, “Eating Law: Commons, Common Land, Common Law.” (1991) 12 Journal of Legal History 246–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For example, the following journals: Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, founded in 1988; Law, Culture and the Humanities (Sage), founded in 2005; and Law and Humanities (Hart), founded in 2007. There also exists a Law and Humanities blog at http://lawlit.blogspot.co.uk/. See, further, Feenan, Dermot, “Foreword: Socio-legal studies and the humanities” (2009) 5 International Journal of Law in Context, 235–242CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Melanie L. (2009) “Socio-legal studies and the humanities –law, interdisciplinarity and integrity” (2009) 5 International Journal of Law in Context 243–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 This is likely to be the case for UK based scholars given the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the new system for assessing the quality of research at UK educational institutions and the role of ‘impact’ in assessing research excellence: see http://www.ref.ac.uk/ . See, generally, Peter Scott, “Why research assessment is out of control”, The Guardian, 4 November 2013.

18 On the distinction between internal and external legal history, see Gordon, Robert W., “Introduction: J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography.” (1975) 10 Law and Society Review 9–55.Google Scholar

19 On “top-down” and “bottom-up” histories see, for example, Eley, Geoff, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, E.P., The Essential E. P. Thompson. (2001)Google Scholar; Stearns, Peter N., “Social History Present and Future”, (2003) 37 Journal of Social History 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar