Global legal biography

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on legal biography. In Britain and the United States, a long standing tradition is to focus on the lives of judges. Existing studies focus on a subject’s early life and background, showing that this experience had an impact on legal ideas and law-making. Yet, there is now a recent resurgence in interest in legal biography that focusses on legal figures elsewhere in the world. The scholarship on figures in supranational entities, such as the British Empire and the European Union, breaks away from the national view of law and adopts a transnational and comparative focus. Scholars grapple with concepts and approaches of following lawyers who go beyond borders and transcend regions. By critically examining the legal biographies of actors in the former British Empire and the European Union, this article considers the value of a global perspective involving an inter-regional lens and the methodological barriers that remain.

Keywords:

• life writing
• legal biography
• global legal history
• transnational legal history
• comparative legal history

I. Introduction

There is now a growing body of literature written in the style of legal biography. It shows that a subject’s early life, background, and experience had an impact on their legal ideas and law-making. While there has been a long history of examining the lives of judges in England¹ and an ever-growing literature in American legal historiography since the 1960s,² research focusing on other regions of the world is comparatively less extensive. However, with a recent resurgence in this work in North America,³ new interests have now been galvanised, and academics have started to focus more on the legal histories of lawyers in the former British Empire and Commonwealth countries, as well as in Europe.⁴ This is unsurprising given the wealth of materials left in national archives, colonial archives, and European archives to enable such research.

Legal biographies have also expanded in scope, and many now recreate the stories of law students, academics, solicitors, barristers as well as judges.⁵ Much of this work is breaking away from the national model of law; it is beginning to place a strong emphasis on the individual and their contribution to society and law in transnational frameworks or within regions. While transnational biographies are increasing, there are still comparatively few biographies of those who travelled across multiple regions of the world: a more spatially ‘global’ approach. This leads us to consider why this is so and whether biographies can be written using a wider spatial global frame that goes beyond the nation and region. This article therefore asks:

1. What is a global legal biography, and how might one be written?

2. What can a global perspective add to the scholarship of legal biography?

3. What barriers persist in hindering a global biographical framework?

To explore these questions, we refer to two bodies of historiographic work which appear to offer great opportunities to explore global lawyers but still do not have a large body of literature on such people.

We focus on life stories from lawyers in the European Union and those of the former British Empire and Commonwealth countries. The British Empire consisted of a variety of claimed lands that were spread across the world. There were often not only strong local and regional links among different parts of the British Empire but connections across distant parts of it, where people, goods, and ideas moved among jurisdictions. The British Empire peaked in the nineteenth century, and by the mid-twentieth century, it was in decline. By contrast, the European Union emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. It was, and is, primarily a regional political entity covering much of Western and Eastern Europe but has tangible legal links not only across the European continent but also beyond the borders of the European Union.

By comparing legal and biographical scholarship in these places that were formerly or still are part of the two supranational institutions, we show how a global approach involving inter-regional lenses can be valuable. While both supranational entities were very different in nature in many respects, they both nevertheless offer an opportunity to examine the movement of people and their ideas beyond national and regional frames. With life stories from two very different supranational entities, this article also avoids the ‘nationalist’ community or ‘pan European’ trap in which history is used to create an imagined tradition or community in the way that Eric Hobsbawm has cautioned. Our choice of contrasting social groups, time periods, and space, therefore, is deliberate. It permits us to investigate the individual life stories in the context of Victorian Britain, the British Empire, and the waves of European integration to show the barriers that inhibit a global perspective and also the advantages of such a methodological and theoretical framework. The comparison of the two entities also permits a comparison of themes and approaches that are not pronounced in one legal tradition and can be described as global.

We demonstrate that legal biographies of individuals who participated in the legal system of two supranational institutions have great potential for global perspectives and rich sources for exploration. In doing so, this article adds to the conceptualisation of the term ‘global’. This discussion helps to overcome the abstract nature of the term and the slipperiness of a global perspective. The analysis which follows proposes a multi-regional framework. It distinguishes between national and intra-regional structures, on the one hand, and inter-regional methods, on the other. National and intra-regional lenses examine the development of law within a pre-defined jurisdiction or region. An inter-regional framework focuses on the movement of individuals and their ideas as they moved across different regions of the world.

The structure is as follows: we first explore global legal biography as a methodology and analytical framework. Next, we turn to explore legal biographies and how the nation-state and ‘transnational’ frameworks have shaped scholarly perspectives. We then ask what opportunities exist for scholars to write global legal biographies of lawyers within the British Empire and of the European Union, especially given the nature of the movement of subjects and richness of inter-regional legal influences. Finally, we explore the obstacles that remain and prevent a global perspective towards legal biography.

II. Global exchanges

Global approaches to history have become popular in the past twenty years. ‘Global’ is still a contested and open-ended concept, but broadly speaking, in historical studies, ‘global’ has often been used as a framework to analyse the interconnections of people, ideas, and objects beyond the traditional nation-state lens.⁶ This includes studies that focus on geographic frames that are larger than the nation-state, as well as micro-histories, looking at more specific localised interactions and the blending of these two frames.⁷ There have been calls to use biographies as part of this methodology to understand interconnections, including both macro and micro approaches (but as we shall see, this has not been taken up as much in legal history).⁸ Through the emphasis on interconnection, a global perspective, therefore, tends to reject or downplay the traditional geographic idea of space (especially that of the nation-state) as a unit of analysis.⁹ This focus on interconnectivity and movement characterising ‘global’, as Richard Drayton and David Motadel point out, does not only include mobile subjects but also ideas or objects that spread across the world in societies with immobile populations.¹⁰

Historians have long grappled with understanding people, institutions, and ideas that have moved across borders, but there is a separate literature that discusses global law. This scholarship looks for a shared body of law rather than connections and flows. Since the nineteenth century, for example, comparative legal historians have approached the extra-national concept of law by emphasising ‘legal families’ (Rechtskreise as it is known in the German literature, and familles de droit in the French), and have sought to understand and compare the exchanges between groups. These categorisations of jurisdictions have included those forming part of a civil, common, or ‘other’ mixed legal system.¹¹ Many areas defied categorisation, and scholars of legal pluralism have shown the multiplicity of coexisting legal systems.¹² In addition, whereas national frameworks have been more long-standing in legal history scholarship, scholars have become more keenly aware of the processes of globalisation and their impact on the historical exercise of law. Scholars have sought to understand the deterritorialisation of nations and challenges to national sovereignty. Neil Walker, for example, has considered how national law and national legal systems have increasingly had to comply and interact with regulatory forms that are outside of their national jurisdiction.¹³ Yet, Walker’s definition of global law as a universal set of legal norms remains somewhat abstract.¹⁴

A more recent wave of global legal historians – with stronger historical training – have now been attempting to use interconnected and extra-national frames of analysis. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, for example, have examined legal ideas and processes across the British Empire, reflecting on various local instances of legal action to understanding key, broader empire-wide ideas such as the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in empire and the creation of International Law.¹⁵ Others have adopted more methodological and theoretical insights to understanding global legal practices. Thomas Duve, for example, analyses the globalisation and localisation of law through the movement of ‘normative knowledge’ such as legal and religious belief systems, which moved with people across borders and were adapted in new contexts.¹⁶

Global legal history perspectives are, therefore, understood through the frames of complex legal interaction.¹⁷ Building on the approach that has been developed through historical research, global perspectives focus on legal exchanges, interconnections, translations, amalgamations, and entanglements of people, ideas, and institutions on the micro and macro levels. These linkages were not prescribed by geographical frames. Legal biographies are in this respect highly suitable for understanding the movement of people and their ideas around the world. The term ‘global’, as we have seen above, can be applied to many extra-European biographies and ones which engage on a life that has moved across a border. This is because the loose definition of ‘global’ allows this to encompass many of the novel aspects of lives that cross borders.

Examining legal subjects within a global framework is of particular interest for several reasons. The first being that their influence on law, legal communities, and society more generally was not isolated to one jurisdiction. A global lens allows the recognition of the scale and scope of their activities, which often extended across several regions. Second, it breaks away, rather consciously, from the socio-political identity that the subject may or may not have used in his or her lifetime. These actors may not have identified themselves specifically as ‘global’ connectors – and they may have even embraced the nationalist, imperial, or pan-European identity that this article seeks to avoid – but their actions can certainly be seen as enabling such inter-regional connections.

What remains clear, as the next section will show, is that national and intra-regional frameworks have long been held as the main parameters of analysis even within focusing on supranational institutions, despite the wider geographic movement of legal individuals. In this sense, we are interested in encouraging and exploring ‘global’ legal biographies that examine the lives and influences of lawyers that went beyond not just national but also regional frames and suggest that those doing so already could be said to be engaging in global legal biography, even if this is not explicitly stated. How would one define intra-regional? Regions are, of course, difficult to define, but there appear to be discrete entities as continents, namely Africa, Asia, and Australasia, Europe, North America, and South America, that might be used to create regions of the world. We may also take other ‘regional’ units of analysis, such as in the case of the European Union and connections outside of the European Union member states.

Why could a focus on lawyers who travel, especially beyond regions, be of interest for legal biographies? It is the process of learning through travel that defines a ‘global’ life story, in particular exploring how knowledge from visiting distant places and interacting with different societies alter or otherwise influence the formation of legal knowledge. Legal ideas moved through the circulation of legal texts. Reading texts was one method of learning about legal knowledge from distant places and foreign jurisdictions.¹⁸ Indeed, the internet has made it possible for those around the world to read resources from a jurisdiction that one has never visited. Yet, this method of transplanting ideas is imperfect. It does not allow for cultural translation and the movement of social, political, or cultural ideas. These contextual factors were not present in the written legal text but often informed or otherwise underpinned legal notions, both past, and present. So, the ‘global’ theoretical framework in this article does not concentrate on the dissemination and global readership of legal texts but, rather, it focuses more specifically on the importance of travel in legal lives; on those moved to new societies and immersed in cultures across geographically distant parts of the globe. Why are there comparatively few legal biographies for these globetrotting and well-travelled subjects? To explore this further, we next turn to explore the biographies, which have been studied within bordered frameworks.

III. Biographies within borders

This section examines biographies that use the nation-state or the region as the lens of the analysis. The historiography of legal biography has grown vastly since the nineteenth century. The section first considers those examples from the former British Empire and Anglosphere more broadly, and then it turns to the more recent example of the European Union. This section examines these studies to show common themes across two very different examples. It sheds some light on the question of why national and regional frameworks have continued to be the main parameters of analysis even within supranational institutions that clearly had a wider geographic movement of legal individuals and their ideas.

1. The common law world

Early legal biographies were written in the United Kingdom and were usually authored by the subject themselves, family friends, colleagues, or successors (although there is still a number written in this regard now).¹⁹ These writers wished to learn more about their immediate community and record their history. In other words, biographies were written with a local or national community in mind. As an example, one might look to the many volumes and editions of The Lives of the Lord Chancellors first published in 1846 by John Campbell, himself Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1841, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1846, and Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain in 1859. Biographies such as Campbell’s lacked professional, temporal, or spatial distance from their subjects and tended to be written in a way that was uncritical and hagiographic. They replicated views or described and mapped out important junctures in the subject’s life and were selective in their content and their subject. Biographies in this period often concerned the lives of men, who were the great and the good, and those who had achieved much in their public life, rather than those in the background, such as female characters and the run-of-the-mill lawyers.²⁰ The emphasis on representing the elite is perhaps unsurprising given that in this period, the legal profession was fused with political and other markers of social or hierarchal ordering, leading to hagiographic accounts.²¹

In nineteenth-century Britain, short legal biographies were also plentiful. Who’s Who – a biographical account of figures in public life – was set up in 1849. Debrett’s (Illustrated Heraldic and Biographical) House of Commons and the Judicial Bench was first published in 1867. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was founded in 1885, which also featured lawyers. These helped to illuminate the lives of various lawyers, who, by the nineteenth century, were still part of a small community. Individuals were often relatively well known to one another and bound together by kinship ties.²² This community was naturally geographically concentrated, with the highest courts being in London. Entering the English legal profession required patronage.²³ Judges and those at the bar were localised in London due to the hierarchical court structure. As the English legal profession was self-regulating, it black-balled and otherwise excluded those who did not conform.²⁴ Solicitors, the lower branches of the English legal profession, were much more spread out throughout the provinces setting up companies, conveyancing, facilitating the sale of land, creating trusts, and drafting wills.²⁵

Events and literature during the High Victorian period attempted to forge a sense of regional and national community, which influenced biographies. The Great Exhibition of 1851, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster in the 1840s, the completion of the Royal Albert Hall in 1871, as well as other public projects outside of London, acted as vehicles through which a society could be imagined. Literature, including the novels, such as those by Charles Dickens, fed into this by popularising the image of genteel English life, which was differentiated from that of the violent and revolutionary French.²⁶ Biographies written at this time were not insulated from these trends. In the preface to the fifth edition of Manchester Streets and Manchester Men, published in 1908, Thomas Swindells wrote that ‘[i]t is now becoming generally recognised that the culmination of an interest in local history is of national importance, and as the generations pass away this feeling will grow and develop’.²⁷ Biographers sought to capture the public imagination by recording the lives of local men. They affirmed emerging cultural values in local and national projects, which invented and celebrated an identity in Victorian Britain. With rising literacy rates, biographies and autobiographies had wide appeal to the general public, although readers remained sceptical about these vanity projects and the truthfulness of life stories.²⁸

In the United States, with a state-based legal system, there was not a single legal centre in America as there was one in England. Lawyers were dispersed over a larger area and altogether were less specialised and generally less socially insular.²⁹ That said, common threads remained in Anglo-American legal biographic writing at the time. Biographies of legal figures in the United States differed little,³⁰ but American culture began to look different. Rather than singing ‘God Save the Queen’ and celebrating the persistence of the British monarchy,³¹ Americans began to celebrate their own national badges. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, these were the national flag, national anthem, and other national emblems, which were markers of identity, and became visible in the United States on individual citizens by the 1880s.³² This is also the moment when American legal literature began to be clearly and evidently separated from that of England. Until the late nineteenth century, American lawyers still had many connections to England and English law since they continued to use English case law and British legal texts, but this soon changed.³³ Thereafter, American lawyers wrote their own legal literature and created an independent set of law books with a diverging set of legal norms.³⁴ In both England and the United States, therefore, national and regional identities and histories were important for understanding legal biographies and the purpose of their publication.

Branching from the biographical work in the United States and Britain, legal historians focusing on lawyers in parts of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have also tended to take national or inter-regional foci on imperial lawyers. Biographical and non-biographical works on lawyers (mostly white and metropolitan-educated) have explored their role in particular colonial political regimes. Their role was often presented either as one of upholding liberalism or as propping up despotic governments in specific jurisdictions.³⁵ This coincided with the ‘great men’ approach in history, focusing on key elite players, such as governors and military men, who had legal roles.³⁶ Their role as upholders of liberty or maintainers of despotism is perhaps unsurprising given that lawyers, especially judges, were often at the fault line between the liberal rhetoric of English law and the unjust application of the law, which frequently caused racial discrimination.³⁷ The interest in the role of lawyers and specific localities was strengthened following the independence of many former colonies and possessions. Post-colonial scholars influenced by nationalism and Marxism, for example, have encouraged a body of literature focusing on lawyers as freedom fighters. The historiography of Indian lawyers is particularly rich.³⁸ These works follow a lawyer’s education and experience, such as Gandhi in London and South Africa, but the main focus tends to reflect the narrative of the national independence movement and the later political lives of South Asian lawyers.

A nation-state lens has also been persistently used in biographies of lawyers in Commonwealth countries. As Philip Girard makes clear in his excellent survey of judicial biography in Canada and Australia,³⁹ much of the historiography mirrors that of England and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with its hagiographic focus. Yet, there have been efforts in the last sixty years to write biographies, especially on lawyers in post-colonial nations and Commonwealth countries, with an aim to understand the modernisation of their nation or region beyond the metropolitan lens. This has been helped by resources, such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which was formed in 1957, and a project called the Dictionary of Canadian Biography that was initiated in 1959.

More recent work following the cultural turn in historical studies has sought to examine identities and lawyers (especially non-European legal actors) as cultural intermediaries in various colonial spaces in Africa and Asia.⁴⁰ As Mitra Sharafi notes, this is a welcome turn, allowing greater focus on non-white or locally domiciled lawyers. These works emphasise the fluidity of culture and mixing of different groups and allow focus on actors who are less well known. However, there still tends to be an implicit emphasis on specific jurisdictions and communities or on the transnational link between metropole and colony. Further, many of these works are not biographies. In 2003, Philip Girard noted that judicial characters from other former parts of the Empire, such as in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, are ‘largely unexploited’.⁴¹ This, unfortunately, remains true. However, the literature from Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand and Australia, is, since 2003, at least growing more rapidly.⁴²

2. European Union

In comparison to the former British Empire, the spectre of the European Union has, in many respects, had a different influence on the way scholars have understood law within European legal traditions and Europe. As a collective and political entity with an explicit focus on integration, scholarly work on law in the European Union has tended to see the shared foundations of law. Some have, however, contested such an approach as ahistorical by arguing that each society has a unique linguistic and cultural approach.⁴³ Despite its different legal heritage, the United Kingdom has not escaped the gaze of comparativists. Some, such as Michele Graziadei and James Gordley, have endeavoured to show that exchanges between English and Roman law were more common than previously thought.⁴⁴

Who were (and are) the actors involved in the emergence over time of a European legal system? Who were those that could potentially be portrayed by European Union legal biographers? They were, in allusion to Max Weber, the ‘legal notability’ (rechtshonoratioren) of the European Community and the European Union.⁴⁵ Sociologist Antoine Vauchez was among the first to analyse the role of legal experts in the emergence of a proto-federal legal order, drawing on the French ‘field’ concept originally developed by Pierre Bourdieu.⁴⁶ Vauchez’s work, for example, perfectly demonstrates how American corporate lawyers and investors, Belgian commercial jurists, and the Commission with its different departments interacted smoothly in the project of legal integration. The lens of legal biography thus brought the importance of the economic and political dimensions to the fore. Vauchez’s work on the ‘Politics of International Legal Expertise in European Societies’ (Polilexes) created a collective biography of European legal experts, but it was not limited to the European Community/European Union.⁴⁷

The studies in the European Union published so far demonstrate that ‘a life in European law’ was in many respects a transnational experience. First, taking up a post as a community lawyer in most cases involved moving house and family to either Luxembourg, Brussels, or Strasbourg. For a large number of community lawyers, the new place of residence became a second home. Many of them cultivated a (private and professional) transnational lifestyle and maintained it even beyond retirement. They were part of the European administrative elite which also shared distinct spatial experiences. For many, Brussels became the modern Salamanca, where one had to live and work. The experience of the Walloon city became a characteristic of the group.⁴⁸ Second, for the European lawyers, transnational networks played a crucial role in their attempts to promote European law in the member states and, in particular, in their countries of origin.⁴⁹ Third, the separate legal cultures of the European Community member states amalgamated in the slowly emerging European legal order so that community lawyers were constantly confronted with elements of foreign legal culture and with the various national sources and inspirations of community law. French community lawyers were facing German-inspired federalist injections in the treaty texts and German conceptions of fundamental rights in national supreme court rulings.⁵⁰ United Kingdom community lawyers were facing rules and procedures that clearly reflected continental traditions of interpreting the treaty texts.⁵¹

A biographical approach fitted well into the history of the European Union. The historiography of European integration came into being as a sub-field of contemporary history with the works of Walter Lipgens in the late 1970s.⁵² Focusing on the conception of Europe and Europeanisation in wartime resistance circles, the research stream founded by Lipgens became interested in ideas and actors, in particular, those of the ‘founding fathers’ of a unified Europe. Driven by underlying federalist assumptions, the early European Union historiography thus had a natural interest in biographical approaches. When the initial research focus of the 1970s and 1980s shifted towards an interest in the economic foundations of European integration, in particular with the work of Alan Milward, the new trend in the field clearly marginalised biographical work.⁵³ Only with the transnational turn in European Union historiography in the 2000s and with the opening up of the research field towards European Studies did actors and biographies come back into the field.⁵⁴ Individual and collective biographies not only covered first rank politicians and top officials, or even the ‘founding fathers’.⁵⁵ But they also treated less exposed personalities and societal actors.⁵⁶ The renewed biographical interest in the historiography of European integration and in European Studies was further encouraged by the revival of biographical research in International History.⁵⁷

When the treaties were negotiated, legal experts drafted the texts that were eventually signed by the heads of state or government. Legal experts made sure that the treaty texts would later allow for a deepening of the legal integration, potentially leading to a federalised European legal system. The European institutions – in particular, the European Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament of the European Economic Community – received (partly joined, partly separate) Legal Services, which delivered legal expertise for the top-officials, and which helped to strengthen the institutional profile vis-à-vis other bodies of the community. Among them, the Commission Legal Service played a leading role. Under its Director-General Michel Gaudet, the Commission Legal Service greatly contributed to the deepening of legal integration in the 1950s and 1960s, and it closely interacted with the European law academia in the various member countries.⁵⁸ European Union lawyers were often sketched as members of an elitist, anonymous, and uncontrolled technocracy. The stereotype dates back to French president Charles de Gaulle, who regarded all European Community officials in the 1950s and 1960s as members of a ‘bureaucracie technocratique, apatride et irresponsable’.⁵⁹ Similar stereotypes were cultivated, among others, after the Northern enlargement of the European Community from the early 1970s by the public, media, and political elites, especially in the United Kingdom. The specific concern about parliamentary supremacy and the general scepticism of legal and political actors towards European law became one of the points of debate in the Brexit referendum.

National and transnational legal biographies and networks are crucial explanatory elements for reception studies in European law.⁶⁰ The biographies of judges in the European Court of Justice and academic lawyers can help to provide a fuller understanding of the landmark rulings of the European Court of Justice or the reception of the milestone cases in the member states.⁶¹ The collective research project ‘Towards a New History of European Public Law’ focused on the constitutional practice in European law and largely benefitted from the release of new archival material from 2013 onwards.⁶² A large part of the European Court of Justice archives was transferred to the Historical Archives of the European Union at the European University Institute Florence and subsequently made available to the public. Several legal historians have analysed how the European Court of Justice constantly pushed the boundaries of European law and how the latter was received in member states and by the European law academia. Biographies of European Court of Justice judges, officials, and national politicians played an important role in the deepening of our understanding of the constitutional practice.⁶³

Already in the formation of the early-modern state, law and lawyers were instrumental in producing trust, cohesion, and solidarity. The same applied to the judges, administrative lawyers, advocates, and legal experts who constructed the European legal architecture after the Second World War. They incorporated their national legal cultures and experiences into the new community law, and they allowed community law to feed back into the member states’ legal orders. The lawyers – in their capacity as diplomats, national or European officials, experts, judges, or advocates – were closely involved in what is called the ‘Integration through Law’. They not only created a law for the European member states but were equally representative of the transnational personalities that integration aimed to create. The biographical approach proved highly appropriate to transcend the narrow national focus that the Europeanising mission sought to avoid. Biography captured the social practices in the international organisations and transnational spaces that characterised Europe in the late twentieth century. Of course, the comparison of judicial biographies must always take into consideration the drastic differences between the common law courts and the European Court of Justice. Common law courts typically allow dissenting opinions, and sometimes judges become famous through their dissent. Overall, the different styles of law-making in the courtroom might account for some of the fascination with individual judges in the common law world.

IV. Global legal actors

The previous section outlined the traditional reliance of nation-state and regional frames of analysis for biographies of lawyers in the former British Empire, Commonwealth, and the European Union. In this section, we turn to consider the opportunities for exploring global legal actors and the dynamics of inter-regional legal connections for legal biographies.

1. The British Empire and Commonwealth

The British Empire comprised a vast area of territories and social groups within one supranational unit. The British claim of sovereignty over different territories and peoples was accompanied by the rhetoric of law that served to support imperialism and by judges who exercised law over new populations. Lawyers and translators were also key to the functioning of legal systems, serving to represent individuals at court and communicate as mediators for them where language barriers existed. All British-claimed territories, and even places in Britain’s ‘informal’ empire, had a collection of British lawyers, translators, and judges, and many moved from place to place across the British Empire, as well as the informal empire. These judges (as well as Queen’s/King’s Advocates) were often highly trained experts who were offered positions in different parts of the Empire to suit the needs of the Colonial and Foreign Office, respectively. A judge, therefore, could be posted to somewhere in Africa, then the Caribbean, and thereafter the Pacific. Lawyers, such as barristers and solicitors, whilst not employed by the metropolitan state, also often had migratory lives following financial opportunities where new bars were established. In this sense, we may see that there were certain centres of judicial circuits, such as London, where many lawyers were trained, but also a high degree of mobility across the Empire. There were also obvious sub-centres, where relatively closed circuits appeared to exist, such as the Indian judicial system, or in Australia and New Zealand, where recruitment tended to favour contacts within the jurisdiction or where home-grown lawyers were larger in numbers. This demonstrates that while there were strong movements within regions, there were also plenty of legal actors who moved between regions. Yet, there are seemingly few legal biographies that follow the life of such actors across the British Empire.

The absence of global legal biographies is perhaps more surprising given how historians of empire have explored the nature of the inter-connectedness of the imperial world and the mobility of individuals. For some time, scholars have focused on the networks across and between colonies, the ‘web’ of trade, ideas, and imperial personnel. As part of this global connectedness of empire, biography has been utilised as a way of understanding ordinary lives across imperial spaces and borders.⁶⁴ Indeed, ‘biography-as-method’, drawing upon the lives of imperial figures, has demonstrated the complexity and transnational nature of colonial networks, family trees, and individuals, as well as gendered experiences across imperial borders.⁶⁵ This work has challenged the traditional notion of national or territory-bound histories of empires.⁶⁶ Lawyers involved with a key aspect of governing and the making and unmaking of empires remain comparatively overlooked in this literature.⁶⁷

There is clearly enormous scope for global legal biographies, and some have engaged with such an approach, even if they have not done it explicitly. A standout example is Bridget Brereton’s work on John Gorrie. Gorrie was a prominent lawyer who moved between four regions: the British Isles (Scotland) to the Indian Ocean subcontinent (Mauritius), to Australasia (Fiji), and to the Caribbean (the Leeward Islands and Trinidad).⁶⁸ Linking the life of Gorrie across regions shows the connections between his campaign of racial equality and his understanding of liberty. An issue that was present across the British Empire, Gorrie’s ideas were formed through different experiences, and his campaign was not simply one of reformed race relations in one locality, but of a universal change in the idea of race relations across the world and had global ramifications. Another example, although not a biography, is John McLaren’s work on the lives of imperial judges as they ran into difficulties in their careers.⁶⁹ Moving between colonies was common, not just when judges ran into difficulties but as a regular part of colonial judicial careers. What both McLaren’s and Brereton’s work point to are the ways in which the circulatory nature of the colonial legal careers can offer an opportunity to study how legal ideas moved globally. Although some regions had seemingly more closed or intra-regional hiring systems such as Australasia, imperial judges often moved not only within a region but to different continents. Some also had a connection to the metropole, such as being educated there or maintaining family and professional links, such as can been seen in Catharine MacMillan’s work on Judah Benjamin.⁷⁰ Many careers of imperial lawyers were, therefore, a story of inter-regional movement.

Indeed, in the post-colonial period and in the mid to late twentieth century, there are several legal academics who travelled around the regions of the world. William Twining (1934-), the renowned academic lawyer, worked in Belfast, Warwick, Sudan, and Tanzania. He is a prime example of a legal actor who gained new insights and perspectives from travel. David Sugarman’s work on Twining’s life sought to demonstrate the interplay between his experience of living in different countries and the development of his ideas. Sugarman describes Twining as ‘anti-authority’.⁷¹ He explains that his experience of Africa was influential. It was where he was born and spent his early years. Twining’s move to the University of Khartoum in Sudan and the new University College in Dar es Salaam. The ‘pull of Africa’, Sugarman says, ‘was underpinned by an anti-colonialism that had gripped him since adolescence’.⁷² Twining’s move took place in the 1950s and 1960s when the Ford Foundation supported American expatriates to teach law in Africa.⁷³ Twining had strong links to the American jurist, Karl Llewellyn, and legal education in the United States, specifically Chicago and Yale. Sugarman noted that these influences were different from those in the United Kingdom,⁷⁴ and the socio-legal work challenged Twining’s legal education in Oxford, which was doctrinal in nature.⁷⁵ It was these multinational experiences, and subsequently in Belfast and Warwick, which helped him to develop the ‘law in context’ movement.⁷⁶ Comparisons can be made with the international career of the influential legal historian Brian Simpson.⁷⁷

Another example of a global legal actor is Claire Palley (1931-), the first female law professor in the United Kingdom. Her biographer, Fiona Cownie, notes the varied nature of her career and her mobility. Palley began as a legal academic in South Africa but moved due to the political regime to Southern Rhodesia. In 1970, she became the first female law professor in the United Kingdom, in Belfast. Cownie saw ‘a strong streak of determination and resilience, supported by an independence of mind which reflected an inner strength’ as the explanation for her pioneering status.⁷⁸ Also at Queens University, Belfast, at this point in time, was Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020), who was born in Queensland, Australia. Fitzpatrick, much like Twining and Simpson, was a strong mover in making legal studies more interdisciplinary; he had strong links to anthropology and the University of Papua New Guinea.⁷⁹ After spending time in Papua New Guinea, Fitzpatrick moved to Kent and developed pioneering critical legal scholarship in the United Kingdom.⁸⁰ His biographer, David Sugarman, carefully unpicks how Fitzpatrick’s settings and his socialisation influenced his decisions and legal thought.⁸¹

There is clearly much potential for exploring global legal actors, but why focus on them at all in the Commonwealth countries or those in the former British Empire? As the English-speaking world, through the auspices of the British Empire, spread around the globe, agents of empire were key to its maintenance and geographic reach. As McLaren and Brereton show, lawyers had the capacity to uphold justice and the rule of law or to deny it. From North America to the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, lawyers supported and challenged colonial governance on a global scale. Those administering justice or involved in cases and suits involved a range of people: consuls, military officials, governors, translators, local headmen, solicitors and lawyers, and legally trained judges. The latter were almost exclusively directly employed by colonial governments or metropolitan bodies such as the Colonial Office or Foreign Office. Lawyers were key imperial actors, maintaining the Empire and deciding key cases. Tracing inter-regional movement demonstrates how ideas moved across distant parts of the world and how key ideas, such as sovereignty, justice, and rights, were formed and united through different cultural, social, economic, and political contexts.

2. The European Union

European legal biography potentially opens up to global perspectives when it comes to the life and work of academic scholars and experts involved in the build-up of the European Union’s political and legal system. In the immediate post-war period, a vivid and truly global exchange between academics and practitioners based in Europe and the United States can be observed. This has contributed to a much better understanding of the political and legal assumptions that were underlying the process of European integration at the time. On the one hand, United States scholars theorised about neo-functionalist delegation of national sovereignty to the newly emerging supranational entity and about how bureaucratic harmonisations would finally result in a federalist-style European political union. On the other hand, treaty negotiators and high officials at the frontline in Brussels and Luxembourg were pragmatically developing what they qualified as the ‘community method’.⁸²

Apart from the transatlantic intellectual exchanges during the 1950s, a global dimension is inherent in most of the biographies under scrutiny. This concerned not only the United States academics, often originally refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe such as Ernst B Haas, but also the practitioners of European integration, see, eg, Jean Monnet’s formative wartime years in the United States or Walter Hallstein’s experience with American federalism as Prisoner of War at Camp Como.⁸³ A proper academia of European law only came into being from the early 1960s, with substantial support from the supranational European institutions.⁸⁴ Initially, the academic field was dominated by the assumption that the European Court of Justice had simply applied the law of the founding treaties, far from taking an activist or political stance towards European integration. This changed dramatically in the early 1980s when Czech-born American scholar Eric Stein introduced the narrative of the European Court of Justice proactively ‘constitutionalising’ the European legal order.⁸⁵ The path-breaking theme of ‘constitutionalisation’ quickly came to dominate the academic field and the curricula of European law on both sides of the Atlantic and, crucially, it shaped the self-perception and code of practice of community lawyers, most notably in the European Court of Justice and the Legal Services. Stein not only established Michigan Law School as a globally influential centre of excellence for European law, but he also maintained an extensive network with European scholars and community officials.⁸⁶ Not only did other global scholars of European Union law educated at Michigan Law, like Joseph Weiler, broaden and refine the paradigm,⁸⁷ but it was also introduced into other academic fields interested in the process of European integration, eg, by a younger generation of American based political scientists in the 1990s whose work was subsequently received by European scholars.⁸⁸ Even if European legal biographies often seem to present women and men ‘who never travelled’ at least globally,⁸⁹ future research promises to explore those actors and their ‘global mindset’ and how they constructed the role of unified Europe in the East-West and North-South relations of the Cold War world.

Thus, the field of a global biography of European law is now most suitable for historicisation, and future scholars of history and law will further explore the interactions between academics and practitioners of European law. The examples pointed to here emphasise the connections between North America and Europe, but there is now other work that also points not only to the transatlantic sphere but also including European-Africa legal relations.⁹⁰ Future research will also more thoroughly explore the history of relations between the supranational European Community and regional projects for economic (and political) integration in other parts of the world, such as the Mercado Común del Sur in South America and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in South East Asia. The movement of people and ideas between those entities and International Organisations is a widely disregarded field with great potential for future research, including biographical perspectives.

V. Methodological barriers

Despite the opportunities for global legal biographies, there remain some methodological and practical issues for scholars to consider. Legal historians may be reluctant to explore an individual’s life in a context that is perhaps totally alien to them. This is unsurprising given the importance in historical studies of considering the context in which judges worked and the field’s emphasis on understanding culturally embedded environments. For example, how can one researcher have a rich enough understanding of the life of an individual if he grew up in England, worked in the Middle East and East Asia? Or a judge who worked in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and parts of Africa? How can a legal historian of the European Union relate to legal biographies of those from regional entities elsewhere, such as the Arab League or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and beyond? It therefore requires an interdisciplinary approach across legal studies, historical studies, and area studies, with a multi-regional perspective and, sometimes, multiple language skills.

The scale of expertise needed to carry out these global studies may well be beyond the traditional skills of a single researcher. There is some hope, however, as in area studies, in particular South and East Asia studies, scholars are increasingly looking outwards to understand the global connections of nations and regions.⁹¹ The rise of global studies is challenging these older area study boundaries and the reluctance in engaging in this approach. The work of scholars focusing on the interconnections between regions in terms of trade, culture, politics, and demographics has shown the importance of taking global frames to understand regional, national, and local contexts. There is now also the slow emergence over time of a ‘new European Union legal history’, demonstrating that historians with their distinct interest in and their well-equipped toolbox for biographical studies, who were the latecomers to the interdisciplinary field of European law, can now bring newer, and more global perspectives.⁹²

The second issue is the practical methodological challenges for writing global biographies. Not all legal figures left personal papers that can greatly aid those wanting to write a biography, and there are regions where there are rich sources and some which are surprisingly less rich. For example, despite the importance of British India to the British Empire, and as one of the largest parts of the Empire with the most sought-after judicial positions, there are comparatively few judges of British India who left autobiographies and accounts of their careers. This is an unfortunate difficulty for those wishing to trace the lives of such judges, as private papers make up an important part of biography. For the British Empire, however, other important sources to initiate research are the Colonial Office Lists and Who’s Who publications, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which allow researchers to trace judges, especially those in less high-profile positions. Daniel Duman’s book on the colonial bar uses these resources to tell us much about the background, geographical origins, family wealth, and pay of lawyers.⁹³ In addition, many relevant papers are included within national archives, and these are often the products of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist constructions of the archive. The task of the historian would be to navigate these collections of information, some of which have been greatly shaped and assembled by an understanding of national jurisdictions and colonial administration based on national frameworks.

Over the past 10–15 years, the historiography of European integration and European Studies saw a forceful trend towards network analyses and prosopography with a distinct focus on the elite and expert culture of European officials. Studies on the socialisation of the European administrative elite were able to draw far-reaching conclusions about the administrative culture and the policy-making process of the institutions under investigation.⁹⁴ In contrast, other works concentrated on the role of economic and party elites, as well as of policy experts and their informal policy-making in the multi-level system of the European Union.⁹⁵ Aside from the challenge of multilingual research, a clear limitation for those conducting legal biographies of actors in the European Union was archival access. Only recently were archival materials of the European Court of Justice and of the Legal Services made available to the public, with large deposits still being closed.⁹⁶ Private papers of judges in the European Court of Justice and other community lawyers have only very recently been explored more systematically. Attempts for an oral history of European law were instrumental in discovering private papers and transferring them to public archives.⁹⁷ More generally, a major challenge for future European Union legal biography is the scattered nature of the archives. Researchers must follow a dual archival research strategy, which moves back and forth between national archives on the one hand and centralised archival deposits on the other hand. Thus, a European Union legal biography will only come to fruition and finally flourish when the empirical basis will have been broadened over the coming years.

Third, there needs to be a recognition that the study of highly mobile lawyers tends to be a history of white, metropolitan educated men, and a focus on such subjects has been less popular in certain fields. There have been efforts by many scholars, especially in area studies and historians of the British Empire, to uncover the personal lives and careers of non-white subjects, including lawyers. This historiography has, quite rightly, sought to redress the balance by focusing on the impact and role of indigenous and local people in the creation of local, national, and regional histories. As Mitra Sharafi points out, this is a much-needed ongoing process.⁹⁸ Yet, this is not to say that there were no non-white global lawyers, but that by focusing on globe-trotters, the vast majority of these subjects – certainly before the twentieth century – were predominantly white and male. With careful examination and selection, it is possible to uncover the histories of women and non-white lawyers in this process, and focusing on such subjects, regardless of their social and cultural attributes, can contribute to the understanding of the movement of legal ideas.

Finally, following the life of an individual across multiple borders and across many regions often requires following their paper trail around the world. This requires the researcher to use larger financial resources and more time by visiting archives in different places (or to find personal papers). In addition, as Philip Girard notes, some scholars in economically developing countries may not have the finances or mobility to travel around the world to conduct this type of research.⁹⁹ However, as archives engage in digitisation processes, documents are no longer only available to those who have the funds to travel, and they are accessible to researchers around the globe. The digitalisation procedures are in themselves costly, and it is often undertaken by commercial providers. Several resources are stored behind paywalls.¹⁰⁰ This again places barriers for those based in institutions without subscription packages. Indeed, for the smaller archives or those national archives in jurisdictions with a shorter history of an archival tradition, cataloguing projects are yet to be carried out, and the contents of the archive remain unknown. Some archival resources in the European Union are digitised up to a point. However, they are normally only available for consultation at Brussels, Luxembourg, or Florence, depending on the origin of the papers. More specialised deposits, such as those covering the legal history of the European Union, largely remain in a paper form. This creates a significant logistical obstacle, in particular, for scholars based in Asia or the United States.

VI. Conclusion

This article has examined the value of adopting a global perspective in the writing of legal biography. Generally speaking, whilst global historical perspectives have proliferated in recent years, legal biographies have still generally been intertwined with nation-building and political discussions that were manifest of a cultural process that sought to generate shared community identity. We show this process of national identity building that occurred in the writing of the legal biography in Victorian Britain, the post-colonial era, and more latterly with an emphasis on regionalism in the European Union.

A framework that emphasises global, especially inter-regional movement and connections, therefore, adds value as it reduces this temptation to see individual lives as a product of national and regional political regimes. Relating the narrative of a life is often an exercise in uncovering the person’s place and contribution to their community. A global perspective seeks to explore how individuals not only travelled the world but traversed and contributed to discourses, identities, and practices that went beyond borders. It adds value by uncovering linkages among regions and how experiences were shaped by moving among socially and economically diverse regions.

Lawyers who worked in the British Empire or in the European Union often had global connections. As we have highlighted in the British Empire, the Foreign Office and Colonial Office appointed many judges to positions in different jurisdictions across the British Empire during their careers, sometimes on different continents, from Africa to North America, Asia, and the Pacific. Many lawyers in the European Union also had global and inter-regional experiences. This included strong connections to North America, as well as to other regions such as Africa. This demonstrates that there is ample opportunity for exploring global lives using this framework.

Writing a legal biography with a global perspective is a challenging task. Barriers, such as the global dispersion of archival material, the skills deficit caused by regional or national expertise, and an absence of reliable historical sources make undertaking a global legal biography difficult. However, the benefits of taking such an approach remain that we can understand not only how individual lives contributed to supranational institutions, such as the European Union or the British Empire, but it also enriches our global history of law, more generally.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See the many volumes of John 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. Volume 7 (3rd edn, Lea and Blanchard 1848).

2 Otis P Dobie, ‘Recent Judicial Biographies: A Composite Review’ (1957) 10 Vanderbilt Law Review 403–13; Robert M Spector, ‘Judicial Biography and the United States Supreme Court: A Bibliographical Appraisal’ (1967) 11 (1) The American Journal of Legal History 1–24; Ellyn C Ballou, ‘Prentiss Mellen, Maine’s First Chief Justice: A Legal Biography’ (1976) 28 Maine Law Review 317–418; Laura Kalman, Abe Fortas: A Biography (Yale University Press 1990); Mark V Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (OUP 1994).

3 G Edward White, ‘The Renaissance of Judicial Biography’ in Roger K Newman (ed), (1995) 23 (4) Reviews in American History 716–22; David Sugarman, ‘From Legal Biography to Legal Life Writing: Broadening Conceptions of Legal History and Socio-Legal Scholarship’ (2015) 42 (1) Journal of Law and Society 7–33.

4 James A Thomson, ‘Judicial Biography: Some Tentative Observations on the Australian Enterprise’ (1985) 8 University of New South Wales Law Journal 380–400; 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 87–106; 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 1265–82; Sarah Burnside, ‘Griffith, Isaacs and Australian Judicial Biography’ (2009) 18 (1) Griffith Law Review 151–84; Sarah Burnside, ‘Australian Judicial Biography: Past, Present and Future’ (2011) 57 (2) Australian Journal of Politics & History 221–44.

5 Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford’ (2008) 29 (1) The Journal of Legal History 63–97; Catharine MacMillan, ‘Judah Benjamin: Marginalized Outsider or Admitted Insider?’ (2015) 42 (1) Journal of Law and Society 150–72; Fiona Cownie, ‘The United Kingdom’s First Woman Law Professor: An Archerian Analysis’ (2015) 42 (1) Journal of Law and Society 127–49.

6 See Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, Conceptualizing Global History (Westview 1993); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press 1996); Pamela Kyle Crossley, What is Global History? (Polity 2008); Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (Routledge 2006); Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (Palgrave 2013).

7 On the theory of the connection of micro history and global history, see for example, the idea of connected singularities, in Christian De Vito and Anne Gerritsen (eds), Micro Spatial Histories of Global Labour (Palgrave 2018). As a recent overview, see: John-Paul Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World Like a Microhistorian’ (2019) 242 (14) Past and Present 1–22.

8 See Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Harper 2007); Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’ (2014) 21 (4) Journal of World History 573–591; Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Entanglements of a Man who Never Travelled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds (Columbia University Press 2018).

9 On the integration of the local or national into global frames, see for example: Thomas Duve, ‘Von der Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte zu einer Rechtsgeschichte Europas in globalhistorischer Perspektive’ (2012) 20 Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 18–71; Thomas Duve, ‘German Legal History: National Traditions and Transnational Perspectives’ (2014) 22 Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 16–48. Also, see for example, Christian de Vito and Anne Gerritsen (eds), Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour (Palgrave Macmillan 2007).

10 Richard Drayton and David Motadel, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’ (2018) 13 Journal of Global History 10–11.

11 H Patrick Glenn, ‘Comparative Legal Families and Comparative Legal Traditions’ in Mathias Reimann and Reinhard Zimmermann (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (OUP 2006) 423–41. Yet there was little agreement on the precise criteria or exact groupings. See: Ugo Mattei, ‘Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World’s Legal Systems’ (1997) 45 (1) The American Journal of Comparative Law 5–44; Esin Örücü, ‘Family Trees for Legal Systems: Towards a Contemporary Approach’ in Mark Van Hoecke (ed), Epistemology and Methodology of Comparative Law (Bloomsbury Publishing 2004) 359–76. This taxonomic approach has been criticised in recent years as being overly stiff and static; it suggests that links between jurisdictions from different legal groups did not exist and cannot be made in the future. See: Mathias Reimann, ‘The Progress and Failure of Comparative Law in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century’ (2002) 50 (4) The American Journal of Comparative Law 671–700; Jaakko Husa, ‘Classification of Legal Families Today. Is It Time for a Memorial Hymn?’ (2004) 56 (1) Revue Internationale de Droit Comparé 11–38; Mariana Pargendler, ‘The Rise and Decline of Legal Families’ (2012) 60 (4) The American Journal of Comparative Law 1043–74.

12 Sally E Merry, ‘Legal Pluralism’ (1988) 22 Law & Society Review 869.

13 Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law (CUP 2015) 16.

14 Richard Collins, ‘The Slipperiness of “Global Law”’ (2017) 37 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 714.

15 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Harvard University Press 2016).

16 See Thomas Duve, ‘What is Global Legal History?’ (2020) 8 Comparative Legal History 73.

17 Ibid.

18 Access to texts could influence the reader's understanding of the current relevant law. See Victoria Barnes and Emily Whewell, ‘English Contract Law Moves East: Legal Transplants and the Doctrine of Misrepresentation in British Consular Courts’ (2019) 7 The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law 26.

19 See Hilary Heilbron, ROSE QC (Hart 2019).

20 Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley, ‘Feminist Legal Biography: A Model for All Legal Life Stories’ (2020) 41 (2) The Journal of Legal History 186–211. As Auchmuty and Rackley note, a feminist perspective does not have to focus on a female character and such an approach is for all life stories.

21 Morton J Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Harvard University Press 1977); Kate Malleson, The New Judiciary: The Effects of Expansion & Activism (Ashgate 1998).

22 Raymond Cocks, Foundations of the Modern Bar (Sweet & Maxwell 1983).

23 However, this did not guarantee promotion. See Lord Mansfield’s attempt to push the judicial career of Buller in James Oldham, Murray, William, first earl of Mansfield (1705-1793), judge and politician. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008) www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-19655, accessed on 15 January 2021.

24 See Stefan Vogenauer on Abraham Hayward in ‘Translating Savigny: Legal Transplant as Career Advancement’ (Selden Society Lectures, forthcoming).

25 Rande W Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (Clarendon Press 1994). For more on the North American counterpart, see Jamie Benidickson, ‘Aemilius Irving: Solicitor to the Great Western Railway, 1855-1872’ in Carol Wilton (ed), Inside the Law: Canadian Law Firms in Historical Perspective (University of Toronto Press 1996).

26 This point pertains most notably to Dicken’s work A Tale of Two Cities which is set in London and Paris during the Industrial Revolution. Other Dickens texts, such as Bleak House, are more familiar to a legal historian. See Thomas A Fyfe, Charles Dickens and the Law (Chapman & Hall 1910); William Searle Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (Yale University Press 1929); Anat Rosenberg, Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Routledge 2017) ch 3.

27 Thomas Swindells, Manchester Streets and Manchester Men (5th edn, Morten 1908). Other variants existed, such as The Leeds Biographer, the Bradford Portraits and various columns in London Illustrated News.

28 Sean Grass, Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (CUP 2019) 7–10.

29 This changed after the Civil War. See Alfred S Konefsky, ‘The Legal Profession: From the Revolution to the Civil War’ in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (eds), The Cambridge History of Law in America (CUP 2011) 90.

30 For some American examples, see James Wilson and Bird Wilson, The Works of the Honourable James Wilson (Bronson and Chauncey 1804); George Van Santvoord, Sketches of the Lives and Judicial Services of the Chief-Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (C Scribner 1854).

31 David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Traditon”, c. 1820-1977’ in Eric J Hobsbawm and Terence O Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (CUP 1983) 101–64.

32 Eric J Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’ in Eric J Hobsbawm and Terence O Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (CUP 1983) 11.

33 Victoria Barnes, ‘Legal Transplants, Law Books, and Anglo-American Corporate Fiduciary Duties’ (2020) 16 (2) Hastings Business Law Journal 145.

34 Friedman estimated conservatively that 1,000 treatises were published in the last half of the nineteenth century. He noted that they were then overwhelmingly American treatises, rather than American editions of British treatises. Lawrence M Friedman, A History of American Law (3rd edn, Simon and Schuster 2005) 477.

35 See for example, on a judge who regularly opposed various Indian colonial policies: Douglas McDonald, ‘Becoming Indian: William Broome and Colonial Continuity in Post-independence India’ (2015) 42 Indian Historical Review 303–31.

36 On the historiography of colonial lawyers, see: Mitra Sharafi, ‘A New History of Colonial Lawyering: Likhovski and Legal Identities in the British Empire’ (2007) 32 (4) Law & Social Inquiry 1059–94.

37 See for example: Martin J Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870-1935 (CUP 2008); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (CUP 2009).

38 See for example: GNS Raghavan (ed), M. Asaf Ali’s Memoirs: the Emergence of Modern India (Ajanta 1994); Keshav Dayal, Famous Lawyers of Freedom Struggle and Trials of Freedom Fighters (Universal Law Publishing 2010).

39 On the historiography of judicial biography, especially relating to commonwealth countries, see Girard, ‘Judging Lives’ (n 4).

40 See for example: Assaf Likhofvski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (University of North Carolina Press 2006); Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (CUP 2014).

41 Girard, ‘Judging Lives’ (n 4). A notable exception, as raised by Girard, is of course Bridget Brereton’s Law Justice and Empire: The Colonial Career of John Gorrie 1829-1892 (UWI Press 1997). Also see, for example: Mark Quintanilla, An Irishman's Life on the Caribbean Island of St Vincent, 1787-90: The Letter Book of Attorney General Michael Keane (Four Courts Press 2019).

42 Girard, ‘Judging Lives’ (n 4). See also for example: Susan Bartie, Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars (Bloomsbury Publishing 2019).

43 Pierre Legrand, ‘European Legal Systems Are Not Converging’ (1996) 45 (1) International & Comparative Law Quarterly 52–81.

44 Michele Graziadei argued that it was only ‘[i]n the last quarter of the nineteenth century’ that ‘the common law world began to reconsider its attitude towards the Romanistic legal tradition’. James Gordley has noted that the decisions in England in the early nineteenth century were based upon the work of natural lawyers, such as Grotius, Domat, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac and Pothier. Natural lawyers, he argued, borrowed their ideas from the late scholastics and Roman law and Greek philosophy, more specifically. See Michele Graziadei, ‘Changing Images of the Law in XIX Century English Legal Thought (The Continental Impulse)’ in Mathias Reimann (ed), The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World 1820-1920 (Duncker & Humblot 1993) 141; James Gordley, Foundations of Private Law: Property, Tort, Contract, Unjust Enrichment (Oxford 2006). Helmholz’s work on the Magna Carta also shows its links to the ius commune. See Richard H Helmholz, ‘Magna Carta and the Ius Commune’ (1999) 66 The University of Chicago Law Review 297.

45 Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, Geistige Arbeit als Beruf: Vier Vorträge vor dem Freistudentischen Bund (Duncker & Humblot 1919); Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, III. Abteilung) (Mohr Siebeck 1922).

46 Antoine Vauchez, Brokering Europe. Euro-Lawyers and the Making of a Transnational Polity (CUP 2015).

47 Julie Bailleux, ‘L’Europe et ses légistes: Le service juridique des exécutifs européens et la promotion d’un droit communautaire autonome (1957-1964)’ (2013) 41 (3) Politique Européenne 88–117; Julie Bailleux, Penser l’Europe par le droit: L’invention du droit communautaire en France (Dalloz 2014).

48 See the ongoing project ‘An Oral History of the European Court of Justice’ at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. Interview transcripts will be available at the Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence.

49 Alexandre Bernier, ‘Constructing and Legitimating: Transnational Jurist Networks and the Making of a Constitutional Practice of European Law, 1950-70’ (2012) 21 (3) Contemporary European History 399–415.

50 Bill Davies, Resisting the European Court of Justice: West Germany’s Confrontation with European Law, 1949-1979 (CUP 2013); Bill Davies and Morten Rasmussen, ‘From International Law to a European Rechtsgemeinschaft: Towards a New History of European Law, 1950-1979’ in Johnny Laursen (ed), The Institutions and Dynamics of the European Community, 1973-83 (Nomos 2014) 97–130.

51 Eg common lawyers based in the United Kingdom understood the informal and uncodified practice of vetoing legislative proposals in the European Community Council as European (customary) law, whereas all continental lawyers insisted on the non-legal character of the practice.

52 Walter Lipgens and Wilfried Loth (eds), Documents on the History of European Integration (De Gruyter 1985) 4 vols; Wilfried Loth, ‘Walter Lipgens (1925-1984)’ in Heinz Duchhardt and others (eds), Europa-Historiker: Ein Biographisches Handbuch (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006) vol 1, 317–36.

53 Alan S Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (2nd edn, Routledge 2000); Fernando Guirao, Frances MB Lynch and Sigfrido M Ramírez Pérez (eds), Alan S. Milward and a Century of European Change (Routledge 2011).

54 Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Morten Rasmussen, The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity 1950-72 (Routledge 2009).

55 Gérard Bossuat, Les fondateurs de l’Europe (Belin SUP 1994); Sylvain Schirmann (ed), Robert Schuman et les pères de l’Europe: Cultures politiques et années de formation (Peter Lang 2008); Johan van Merriënboer, Mansholt: A Biography (Peter Lang 2011); Richard T Griffiths, ‘The Founding Fathers’ in Erik Jones, Anand Menon and Stephen Weatherill (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the European Union (OUP 2012) 181–92; Jan Van der Harst and Gerrit Voerman, Impossible Job? The Presidents of the European Commission 1958-2014 (John Harper 2015); Klaus Schwabe, Jean Monnet. Frankreich, die Deutschen und die Einigung Europas (Nomos 2016); N Piers Ludlow, Roy Jenkins and the European Commission Presidency, 1976-1980. At the Heart of Europe (Palgrave 2016); Matthias Schönwald, Walter Hallstein: Ein Wegbereiter Europas (Kohlhammer 2018).

56 Jürgen Mittag and Wolfgang Wessels (eds), ‘Der Kölsche Europäer’: Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim und die Europäische Einigung (Aschendorff 2005); Antonio Varsori and Lorenzo Mechi (eds), Lionello Levi Sandri e la Politica Sociale Europea (FrancoAngeli 2008); Anjo G Harryvan and Jan van der Harst, Max Kohnstamm. A European's Life and Work (Nomos 2011); Ann-Christina Lauring Knudsen and Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Living Political Biography: Narrating 20th Century European Lives (Aarhus University Press 2012).

57 François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (Norton 1994).

58 Anne Boerger and Morten Rasmussen, ‘The Making of European Law: Exploring the Life and Work of Michel Gaudet’ (2016) 57 (1) The American Journal of Legal History 1–32. See also Julie Bailleux, ‘Michel Gaudet, a Law Entrepreneur: The Role of the Legal Service of the European Executives in the Invention of EC Law and the Birth of the Common Market Law Review’ [2013] 50 Common Market Law Review 359.

59 Charles de Gaulle, Pour l’Effort 1962-1965 (Plon 1970).

60 Bill Davies, Resisting the European Court of Justice: West Germany’s Confrontation with European Law, 1949-1979 (CUP 2013).

61 Bill Davies, ‘Resistance to European Law and Constitutional Identity in Germany: Herbert Kraus and Solange in its Intellectual Context’ (2015) 21 (4) European Law Journal 434–59; William Phelan, Great Judgments of the European Court of Justice: Rethinking the Landmark Decisions of the Foundational Period (CUP 2019).

62 Bill Davies and Morten Rasmussen, ‘Towards a New History of European Law’ (2012) 21 (3) Contemporary European History 305–18.

63 Alexandre Bernier, La France et Le Droit Communautaire 1958-1981: Histoire d’une Réception et d’une Co-Production (PhD, Copenhagen University 2017); Vera Fritz, Juges et avocats généraux de la Cour de Justice de l’Union européenne (1952-1972): une approche biographique de l’histoire d’une révolution juridique (Vittorio Klostermann 2018); Philip Bajon and Stefan Vogenauer (eds), Key Biographies in the Legal History of the European Union 1950-1993 (forthcoming 2022); Morten Rasmussen and Bill Davies, The History of European Law 1950 to 1993: The Battles over the Constitutional Practise (forthcoming 2022).

64 See, amongst others: Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (ANU Press 2008); Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present (Springer 2010); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920 (CUP 2012); Achim von Oppen and Silke Strickrodt, ‘Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire’ (2016) 44 (5) The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 717–29.

65 David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (CUP 2006); Caroline Drieënhuizen, ‘Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933’ (2016) 44 (3) The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 397–422; Ulrike Lindner, ‘Transcending Gender Roles, Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill’s Fight for Her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa’ (2016) 44 (5) The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 777–97; Stephen Constantine, ‘Woman’s Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor’s Wife’ (2018) 46 (3) The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 473–501. Also see for example: Sue Thomas, ‘William Dawes in Antigua’ (2011) 12 (1) Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 187–204; David Lambert, ‘Reflections on the Concept of Imperial Biographies’ (2014) 40 (1) Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22–41. On mobilities and transnational history, also see: Sarah Panter, Johannes Paulmann and Margit Szöllösi-Janze, ‘Mobility and Biography: Methodological Challenges and Perspectives’ (2015) 16 Jahrbuch für Europaische Geschichte / European History Yearbook 1–14.

66 This is explicit in Thoralf Klein, ‘Biography and the Making of Transnational Imperialism: Karl Gützlaff on the China Coast, 1831–1851’ (2019) 47 (3) The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 415–45.

67 Victoria Barnes and Emily Whewell, ‘Judicial Biography in the British Empire’ (2021) 22 (2) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 1.

68 Brereton (n 41).

69 John McLaren, Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800-1900 (Toronto University Press, 2011).

70 MacMillan, ‘Judah Benjamin: Marginalized Outsider or Admitted Insider?’ (n 5). See, for example, Mitra Sharafi’s forthcoming work on Indian lawyers educated in London. See also: Sharafi, ‘A New History of Colonial Lawyering’ (n 36) 1059–94.

71 David Sugarman, ‘Twining’s Tower and the Challenges of Making Law a Humanistic Discipline’ (2021) 2 (3) Amicus Curiae 334–51.

72 Twining in his own words stated that ‘I had a colonial childhood, an anti-colonial adolescence, a neo-colonial start to my career and a post-colonial middle age’. William Twining, Jurist in Context (Cambridge University Press 2019) 8. See also William Twining and David Sugarman, ‘Jurist in Context: William Twining in Conversation with David Sugarman’ (2020) 47 Journal of Law and Society 195; David Sugarman, ‘William Twining: The Man Who Radicalised the Middle Ground’ (2020) 16 International Journal of Law in Context 475.

73 John Harrington and Ambreena Manji, ‘“Africa Needs Many Lawyers Trained for the Need of Their Peoples”: Struggles over Legal Education in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana’ (2019) 59 American Journal of Legal History 149.

74 David Sugarman, ‘“Great Beyond His Knowing”: Morton Horwitz’s Influence on Legal Education and Scholarship in England, Canada and Australia’ in Daniel W Hamilton and Alfred L Brophy (eds), Transformations in American Legal History – Law, Ideology and Methods: Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz (Harvard University 2010) 504–42; David Sugarman, ‘A Special Relationship? American Influences on English Legal Education, c. 1870-1965’ (2011) 18 International Journal of the Legal Profession 7–57.

75 Sugarman, ‘Twining’s Tower’ (n 71).

76 See also David Sugarman, ‘Beyond Ignorance and Complacency: Robert Stevens’ Journey through Lawyers and the Courts’ (2009) 16 International Journal of the Legal Profession 7.

77 David Sugarman, ‘Brian Simpson’s Approach to Legal Scholarship and the Significance of Reflections on “The Concept of Law”’ (2012) 3 Transnational Legal Theory 112.

78 Fiona Cownie, ‘The United Kingdom’s First Woman Law Professor: An Archerian Analysis’ (2015) 42 Journal of Law and Society 127, 149.

79 David Sugarman, ‘Becoming Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020)’ International Journal of Law in Context (forthcoming).

80 Peter Fitzpatrick and Alan Hunt (eds), Critical Legal Studies (Basil Blackwell 1987).

81 Sugarman, ‘Becoming Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020)’ (n 79).

82 Jonathan PJ White, ‘Theory Guiding Practice: The Neofunctionalists and the Hallstein EEC Commission’ (2003) 9 (2) Journal of European Integration History 111–31.

83 François Duchêne, Jean Monnet. The First Statesman of Interdependence (Norton 1994); Matthias Schönwald, ‘Hinter Stacheldraht – Vor Studenten: Die Amerikanischen Jahre Walter Hallsteins 1944-1949’ in Ralph Dietl and Franz Knipping (eds), Begegnungen zweier Kontinente: Die Vereinigten Staaten und Europa seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 1999) 31–54.

84 Rebekka Byberg, ‘Academic Allies: Transnational European Law Academia and the Development of the Constitutional Practice’ in Morten Rasmussen and Bill Davies (eds), The History of European Law 1950 to 1993: The Battles over the Constitutional Practice (Forthcoming 2022).

85 Eric Stein, ‘Lawyers, Judges, and the Making of a Transnational Constitution’ (1981) 75 (1) The American Journal of International Law 1–27; Anne Boerger, ‘At the Cradle of Legal Scholarship on the European Union: The Life and Early Work of Eric Stein’ (2014) 62 (4) The American Journal of Comparative Law 859–92.

86 The list of contributors of the festschrift produced upon Eric Stein’s retirement in 1984 reads like the ‘who is who’ of European law, see: ‘Festschrift in Honor of Eric Stein’ (1984) 82 (5) and (6) Michigan Law Review.

87 Joseph HH Weiler, ‘The Transformation of Europe’ (1991) 100 (8) The Yale Law Journal 2403–83; Daniel Halberstam, ‘Joseph Weiler, Eric Stein, and the Transformation of Constitutional Law’ in Miguel Poiares Maduro and Marlene Wind (eds), The Transformation of Europe (CUP 2017) 219–33.

88 Karen J Alter, Establishing the Supremacy of European Law (OUP 2006).

89 Alluding to Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Travelled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds (Columbia University Press 2018). See in the case of German legal scholar, Helmut Coing and Michael F Feldkamp (eds), Für Wissenschaften und Künste: Lebensbericht eines europäischen Rechtsgelehrten (Duncker & Humblot 2014).

90 Rafael L Sakr, ‘The Making of EU-Africa Trade Regionalism: The Law and Governance of the Yaoundé and Lomé Conventions (1963-1974)’ (2020) Edinburgh School of Law Research 1–77.

91 On China for example, see: Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago University Press 1995).

92 Bajon and Vogenauer (eds), Key Biographies in the Legal History of the European Union (n 63); the volume will take global perspectives and female biographies into account.

93 Daniel Duman, The English and Colonial Bars in the Nineteenth Century (Croom Helm 1983).

94 Eg focused on the officials of the High Authority and the Commission. Bernd Bühlbäcker, Europa im Aufbruch. Personal und Personalpolitik deutscher Parteien und Verbände in der Montanunion, 1949-1958 (Klartext 2007); Katja Seidel, The Process of Politics in Europe the Rise of European Elites and Supranational Institutions (Tauris Academic Studies 2010).

95 Michael Gehler, Wolfram Kaiser and Brigitte Leucht, Netzwerke im europäischen Mehrebenensystem: Von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart / Networks in European Multi-Level Governance: From 1945 to the Present (Böhlau 2009).

96 To date, the files transferred to the Historical Archives of the European Union at the EUI Florence are crucially lacking the déliberé of the European Court of Justice proceedings, which substantially complicates the historical reconstruction of court cases.

97 Oral history projects potentially interesting scholars of European Union legal biography are now carried out, among others, at the University of Luxembourg’s C2DH unit, and at the European University Institute Florence.

98 Sharafi, ‘A New History of Colonial Lawyering’ (n 36) 1082.

99 Girard, ‘Judging Biography’ (n 4).

100 Ibid.