BOOK REVIEW: Lyndsay CAMPBELL on English law, the legal profession, and colonialism: histories, parallels, and influences edited by Cerian Griffiths and Łukasz Jan Korporowicz (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1, June, pp. 150-153)

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Originating in and building on a 2021 conference, this collection contributes to the growing literature on the histories of empire, focusing on the movement of English law and the history of the legal profession in the colonial context. It features chapters from scholars around the world at a whole range of career stages. The conclusion, by Cerian Griffiths and Łukasz Jan Korporowicz, indicates that the project is an attempt to tug British Empire history into the theoretical orbit of European-style Global Legal History, to shed light on a field that ‘has traditionally been the poor relation to its civil law cousin’ (258) and to present research on the ‘early modern and modern eras which often receive less interest than medieval historical studies’ (259). I had to chew on these statements for a bit, and also the omission, in the same paragraph, of the forty-six-year-old Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History from the editors’ list of academic associations that have contributed to the development of the history of the common law world over the past 40 years (Canada is mostly absent from the book, which perhaps explains this omission). In any case, although at least in theory Global Legal History seems to purport to do everything, a single collection cannot. More importantly, I take it that the editors’ point is to underline the focus on the mobility of law and people, to look beyond the nation and the local in our questions and approaches.

English Law, the Legal Profession, and Colonialism opens with a helpful introduction by Michael Lobban, who describes the book's major thematic preoccupations, including how legal ideas travelled within the British Empire (between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ and also among colonies), the tension between authoritarianism and liberalism, and how that tension wove through conceptions of the nature and purpose of the rule of law, given that the law and legal principles that travelled around the empire landed in places that were unlike England, to varying degrees and in various ways. The chapters that follow, although somewhat uneven in readability, direct our attention not only to public law and notable juridical personalities but also to the network of personal and commercial relationships – structured through legal rights and principles – that were so crucial to the decisions individual people made in shaping legality in the British Empire.

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DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500210