On Legal Biography

Abstract

Much of legal biography is also attended by the criticism that it is written in a manner in which the personal life of the individual is detached from his (and it usually is his) legal or judicial accomplishments. Legal biography, more so than other forms of biography, has been dominated by what Woolf referred to as the Victorian biographer’s preoccupation with ‘the idea of goodness … [n]oble, upright, chaste, severe; it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented’. English legal biographies in the twentieth century came, also, to become concerned with the enthusiastic, sometimes melodramatic, accounts of the great barrister’s activities. A related problem is that legal biography is often depicted as the individual histories of great men and how they changed the course of history. Such biographies, as Laura Kalman has observed, are not in vogue; they are an‘unusually old-fashioned subject of an unusually old-fashioned field, political history’. Finally legal biography straddles that uneasy divide amongst legal historians, between an internal legal history concerned with a self-contained lawyer’s world of rule development and an external legal history concerned to set, and explain, law and legal development within a broader historical context.