BOOK REVIEW: Colum Kenny.TRISTRAM KENNEDY AND THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LEGAL TRAINING, 1835-1885.Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Gordon Bigelow (bio) Tristram Kennedy and the Revival of Irish Legal Training, 1835–1885, by Colum Kenny; pp. xviii + 270. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999, £30.00, $45.00. Modernity is a colonial artifact. This is perhaps the central insight of postcolonial criticism for scholarship in nineteenth-century Europe, and it is borne out by the obscure histories brought to light in Colum Kenny’s book on legal education in Victorian Ireland. The standardization of the professions has been a common theme of nineteenth-century cultural history, but it is only recently that we have begun to see liberal institutions like these as products of colonial culture, imported only latterly back into metropolitan use. One useful example of this phenomenon of reverse migration is the brief establishment of a law school in Dublin between 1839 and 1842, a school which, though short-lived, would set standards for the training of lawyers that would be gradually adopted throughout England and Ireland over the course of the next fifty years. Colum Kenny’s book presents this story and the life of its protagonist, Tristram Kennedy, attorney, land agent, off-and-on MP, and founder of the Dublin Law Institute in 1839. British legal training up to this point was carried out by apprenticeship, a system that privileged birth and family connection over ability. Beyond this period of unregulated study, students were only required to “keep” a certain number of terms at one of the inns of court in London. Though seemingly intended to familiarize students with court practice, the requirement was monitored only by the students’ attendance at a fixed number of dinners at the inns for each term. Daniel O’Connell once remarked that under this rule legal training was made a matter of “so many legs of mutton” (x). Dublin had its own Law Society at the King’s Inns, formed in 1541, just a generation after the practice of the Brehons, the legal counselors of Gaelic Ireland, was outlawed by London. But Irish students were forced by the Statute of Jeofailles, passed the following year, to keep terms at one of the London inns before returning to be called to the Irish bar. University graduates could keep a reduced number of terms, but this gave advantage only to the Anglo-Irish elite at Trinity College. Meanwhile, Kenny writes, “training in the common law had been utterly neglected by the universities and the inns of court” (148). In 1838, a Parliamentary commission headed by Irish member Thomas Wyse delivered a report on Irish education. This classic liberal document provided the argument for broadened access to the professions in Ireland, England’s nearest colony until its nominal incorporation into Great Britain with the 1800 Act of Union: “[An] appropriate system of education for the middle class is the [End Page 347] only means by which they may be enabled to acquire and maintain that proper position in society to which they are entitled, and by the maintenance of which the community can be fully protected from the chances of internal disorder” (81). Kennedy founded the Dublin Law Institute the next year, in 1839, setting up formal courses of lectures and providing for the first time an opportunity to train in the law without the patronage of an established practitioner. “Protestant, dissenter, roman catholics [sic], whig, tory, conservative and radical” (87), he argued, should be united in the goal of standardized legal training, given that such a common rule, and the merit-based system it aimed at, would reduce “the chances of internal disorder.” Kennedy’s Institute fell when a Tory government returned to power and canceled its meager support, but its liberal vision would set the program for gradual reforms through the rest of the century. The Statute of Jeofailles, requiring Irish students to attend the English inns, was repealed in 1885, by which time courses and examinations in law were becoming the norm in Irish and English universities. The paradox of these reforms, however, is the great paradox of liberal ideology itself. Conceived as a means to unite all parties, to find the common core of...