It is often said that Ireland is still awaiting its Holdsworth. In fact scholars have been lamenting the lack of a comprehensive legal history of Ireland long before William Searle Holdsworth wrote his monumental, if flawed, History of English Law. Calls for the creation of a comprehensive text on Ireland's legal past have been heard since at least the 1840s. The nineteenth century historian James Hardiman exhorted future scholars by emphasising the “abundance of recorded materials” awaiting them. (Tracts Relating to Ireland, vol. ii, (Dublin 1843), p.14). Alas, much of this source material was lost forever during the Irish civil war in 1922 with the destruction of most of the legal documents stored in the Public Record Office located at Dublin's Four Courts.

The perception that scholarship on Irish legal history remains in a relatively undeveloped state provides the context for W.N. Osborough's An Island's Law – A Bibliographical Guide to Ireland's Legal Past. This work attempts to compensate for the absence of a general textbook by creating a complete bibliography of works written in a field that has seen astonishing growth in recent decades. The volume brings together two bibliographical guides published in the German journal Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte in 1986 and 2008 and adds new material that brings the survey up to 2012. The resulting volume provides an indispensible guide to Ireland's legal past from the early medieval period to the present.

Osborough's guide divides Irish legal history into key subject areas, for example works on the Irish courts, legislation and local government. The guide also covers historical works on areas of substantive law, such as the law of property, constitutional law, criminal law and ecclesiastical law. The important works in each division are examined in order of the chronology of the subject matter concerned. The obvious advantage of this approach is that it ensures that the book will be a useful resource to scholars with broad and narrow interests in Irish legal history. The utility of this bibliographical guide is enhanced by the inclusion of an index of authors in addition to a general index dealing with subject matter.

Even the most casual reader will not fail to be impressed by the lifetime of careful research that has provided Osborough with an unrivalled depth and breadth of learning in this field. Yet this volume is no plodding list of important works. It is written in the lively prose that readers have come to expect from this author. Scholars set on examining a very narrow area of legal history will find themselves diverted far beyond their intended area of research by tempting anecdotes that accompany the description of many works. These include a sad tale of abuse of power in the early modern period that resulted in the hanging of two jesters in Co. Limerick (p. 71). The appalling conditions suffered by the eighteenth century builders of Dublin's Four Courts are described in key quotes. (p. 93) Stereotypes of implacable Irish hostility to the common law courts are challenged by a number of early modern verses that focus on the virtues, rather than the vices, of particular judges. These eulogies are particularly striking by virtue of being written in the Irish language (pp. 89–90).

It cannot be denied that there has been a flowering of works on Irish legal history in the last few decades. Osborough has described the period following 1970 as “the breakthrough years”. This breakthrough has produced a number of works that can already be considered classics. Osborough provides a list (p. 10) that includes such publications as Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish law (Dublin 1988) and G.J. Hand, English Law in Ireland 1290–1324 (Cambridge 2008). Yet Osborough's guide also exposes many remaining lacunae in the field. It is unsurprising that much of the scholarship that emerged in “the breakthrough years” is centred on criminal and constitutional law. A quick skim of the volume will reveal the brevity of the sections on commercial law and labour law.

Obviously the guide will date with the passage of time. It is unfortunate that the volume was published too late to include an assessment of Andrew Lyall's tour de force in The Irish House of Lords – A Court of Law in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin 2013). Nevertheless, long-term interest in the guide will be enhanced by the scope of the challenge laid down by Osborough to future toilers in the field. Osborough stresses the need for more comparative works in order to place Irish legal history in a wider context. He also recognises the need to create works that provoke interest beyond the narrow ranks of specialist legal historians. It should be noted that Osborough himself has taken steps in this direction in his fascinating Law and the Emergence of Modern Dublin (Dublin 1996) and Literature, Judges and the Law (Dublin 2008). The creation of additional works that reach out to a wider readership may be of greater significance to the development of the field of Irish legal history than quixotic quests for an “Irish Holdsworth”.

The recent flowering of Irish legal history, in particular since the creation of Osborough's first bibliographical guide in 1986, could be seen as reflecting the political development of Ireland in recent decades. It is worth noting that Irish legal history has provided a useful focus of cooperation between the north and south of the island before such initiatives were entirely fashionable. This is reflected in the inclusive nature of the Irish Legal History Society that was founded by Osborough in the 1980s. Yet contemporary politics cannot be entirely dismissed. Osborough admitted in his earliest survey “[t]he legal history of Ireland for the modern period is substantially, if not exclusively, the history of English law in Ireland” (p. 34). This reality is illustrated by the images of the nineteenth century chain of the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, dominated by Tudor roses and portcullises, which appear on the dust jacket of this book. Although W.J. Johnston's romantic description of Ireland providing the scene for “the first adventure of the common law” ((1920) 36 Law Quarterly Review 9) is often quoted, it is unlikely to reflect popular perceptions of the twelfth century invasion that established political and legal connections linking both sides of the Irish Sea. Yet it is also probable that the contention that Ireland's legal past is a “disaster best ignored” (p. 34) would win little support in any part of this island in the twenty-first century.