We learned of a call for paperson colonial legal biographies at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal
History. Here the call:
How do people and personalities
influence the law? There is a growing body of literature which answers this
question, and it is written in the style of legal biography. It shows that
early life, background and experience had an impact on law-making. While there
was a long history of examining the lives of judges in England1,
this interest was far from global. Judicial biographies took off in American
legal thought in the 1960s.2 With a recent resurgence in this
work3, new interests have now been piqued. Academics have written on
figures in the legal history of Australia, Canada, Germany, France and Spain.4 This
literature is now expanding, and it recreates the stories of law students,
academics, solicitors, barristers as well as judges.5
While this work is now global in
nature, this workshop seeks to emphasise the importance of the international
and global connections. It does so by focussing primarily on colonial lawyers.
Colonial judges in the British Empire, for example, were often trained in
England but worked outside of it. They dispensed justice and worked with
litigants and a community they were not necessarily familiar with. Yet, given
their international movement, these officials often took knowledge of one
society or another with them. This workshop is not intended to focus on the
British Empire only and calls for papers in other imperial contexts. Among many
different aspects of colonial and post-colonial life, the workshop examines
the formative experiences as well as legal knowledge that was created in one
jurisdiction and taken to another within a colonial context. It considers how
these understandings, capabilities and habits travelled internationally through
empire.
Workshop
The workshop will be held at the
Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main, Germany on
27-28th April 2020. Those interested in participating should send an abstract
to biography@rg.mpg.de. Please
contact Dr Victoria Barnes (barnes@rg.mpg.de)
or Dr Emily Whewell (whewell@rg.mpg.de)
to discuss whether their project might be suitable and for other informal
queries.
The deadline for abstracts
is 11th October 2019.
1 See the many
volumes of John Campbell Baron Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors and
Keepers of the Great Seal of England, from the Earliest Times Till the Reign of
King George IV.
2 Otis P Dobie,
‘Recent Judicial Biographies: A Composite Review’ (1956) 10 Vanderbilt Law
Review 403; Robert M Spector, ‘Judicial Biography and the United States Supreme
Court: A Bibliographical Appraisal’ (1967) 11 The American Journal of Legal
History 1; Ellyn C Ballou, ‘Prentiss Mellen, Maine’s First Chief Justice: A
Legal Biography’ (1976) 28 Maine Law Review 317.
3 G Edward White,
‘The Renaissance of Judicial Biography’ (1995) 23 Reviews in American History
716; David Sugarman, ‘From Legal Biography to Legal Life Writing: Broadening Conceptions
of Legal History and Socio-Legal Scholarship’ (2015) 42 Journal of Law and
Society 7.
4 James A
Thomson, ‘Judicial Biography: Some Tentative Observations on the Australian
Enterprise’ (1985) 8 University of New South Wales Law Journal 380; Barry
Cahill, The Thousandth Man: A Biography of James McGregor Stewart (University
of Toronto Press 2000); Philip Girard, ‘Judging Lives: Judicial Biography from
Hale to Holmes’ (2003) 7 Australian Journal of Legal History 87; Mark Fenster,
‘The Folklore of Legal Biography 2007 Survey of Books Related to the Law:
Reviews: Lives in the Law’ (2006) 105 Michigan Law Review 1265; Sarah Burnside,
‘Griffith, Isaacs and Australian Judicial Biography’ (2009) 18 Griffith Law
Review 151; Sarah Burnside, ‘Australian Judicial Biography: Past, Present and
Future’ (2011) 57 Australian Journal of Politics & History 221.
5 Rosemary
Auchmuty, ‘Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford’ (2008) 29 The
Journal of Legal History 63; Catharine MacMillan, ‘Judah Benjamin: Marginalized
Outsider or Admitted Insider?’ (2015) 42 Journal of Law and Society 150; Fiona
Cownie, ‘The United Kingdom’s First Woman Law Professor: An Archerian Analysis’
(2015) 42 Journal of Law and Society 127.
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