This book is an example of institutional history, which is a genre rather neglected, until recently. Unjustifiably so, since institutions have their own members, traditions, vested interests, craft skills. This means that their performance is significantly influenced by the internal dynamics, which are worth studying. The subspecies here – legal education – is starting to attract attention (see for instance: L. O’Malley, ‘Law’ in Tadhg Foley (ed.), From Queen's College to National University (Dublin, 1999), Thomas Mohd and Jennifer Schweppe (eds), 30 years of legal scholarship (Dublin, 2011)).

U.C.D. of course has a prehistory in the form of the nineteenth-century Catholic and Royal Universities and this is covered in the first chapter. Then, apart from two brief chapters, on the Law Library and the School’s accommodation, the bulk of the book is a chronological account, commencing with the Irish Universities Act, 1908, by which U.C.D. joined the former Queens colleges of Cork and Galway, as constituent colleges of the new, federal National University of Ireland. The book runs up to 2014. Nodal points include: the debate over the new curriculum in 1945 (mentioned below); the Commission on Higher Education in 1967 and the debate over the possible union of U.C.D. and T.C.D.; the move from Earlsfort Terrace (1972); the increase in student numbers and activism of the 1970s and 1980s; and the ‘internationalisation’ of the 2000s.

An unexpectedly high proportion of the book (about a third) is devoted to ‘praising famous men’ (they all happen to be men), that is, memoirs of the twenty or so leading personalities on the teaching staff, with particular though not exclusive reference to their part in the school’s development. These include: Swift MacNeil; Daniel Binchy; Seamus Henchy; and John Kelly (18,18, 6 and 12 pages, respectively). This is of course, not the only way of writing history. But it does provide vivid and palatable insights into the School’s development, in each generation. Given the hinterland of these  four personages (apart from their work at the school, they were respectively: Irish Party M.P. and protagonist in the debates on the various constitutional instruments proposed for Ireland; Irish minister to Germany, pre-Hitler; supreme court judge; government minister and racy novelist), they provide a rich harvest of ‘Osborisms’. I take this coinage to mean: vignettes  or nuggets of quirky facts, always historical, usually relevant, occasionally gamey. The Library chapter, for instance, opens with the following extract from a protest by some student library-users in 102: ‘...will the Library authorities think of installing efficient electric light? We are treated nightly to admirable imitations of a kettle boiling, interspersed with lovely violet and heliotrope effects.’

There  is also a good deal on: Joyceana; the debate over ‘The Plough and the Stars’; and leave of absence for colleagues who become public representatives. All this somehow prompts the tangential thought, did the intellectuals have more fun in those days? There is a good account (pp 138–43) of the Visitation (1959–60) initiated by John Kenny (then an ‘Assistant’), which ruled that appointments made by the U.C.D. governing body bypassed the N.U.I. senate. They were therefore illegal and had to be retrospectively validated. This was, no doubt, one of the episodes which led eventually to the reform of the N.U.I.

But strangely, there is no mention of the strong rumour surrounding the significant question of why John Kelly’s internationally-renowned The Irish Constitution was, in its first (1980) edition, almost completely lacking in critical comment on Irish judgments. The answer, which has been (orally) suggested, is that it was because the critical comments in his earlier work, Fundamental rights in the Irish Law and Constitution (second ed., 1967), on the high court judgment in the seminal case of Ryan v Attorney General [1965] IR. had produced a furious reaction from the judge in the case. The judge in question was Mr Justice Kenny, who, as it happened had left U.C.D., to go into full-time practice and then become a judge, a path take by many of the staff. He had left in 1960, two years before John Kelly (earlier an undergraduate there) joined the staff.

A recurring theme throughout the book is whether a university law school should concentrate on broader subjects, like Ethics, Jurisprudence, Roman Law and Constitutional Law, leaving to the institutions responsible for professional legal education, practical subjects like Contract or Property.  This was the position championed by, amongst others, Professor Daniel Binchy, in 1949 (pp 125, 270), enlisting Newman to his aid. By today, I suspect that most academic lawyers would respond by saying that it depends on how Contract or Property are taught. On the other hand, however, Lord Sumption of the U.K. supreme court is quoted (p. 225) as saying, in 2012:‘... something involving the analysis of evidence, like History or Classics or a subject close to pure logic, like Maths, is at least as valuable a preparation for legal practice as the study of law.’ This is an ancient debate and it is good to see that there is life in the old dog yet.

The focus in the book is on the staff and their relations with the college administration and the wider world; and not very much on the law students. A universal theme, in law schools, tension between part-timers (usually youngish, under-employed barristers) and full-timers (most of the staff, even professors, were part-timers well into the 1950s) is not addressed explicitly, but can be sensed in some of the episodes recounted.

So: an excellent, stylish, colourful account on an important subject.