Lay legal history

Abstract

It seems like an act of intellectual exhibitionism, verging on indecent exposure, to attempt to lay bare ‘the underpinning of my substantive research’ and provide ‘methodological pointers and personal insights into the problems, frustrations, delights and serendipities that are inherent in the making of legal history’. Yet despite some lingering reservations about the prudence of accepting their kind invitation, I am grateful to the conference organisers who offered me an opportunity for public rumination on what I do and how and why I do it. As my title seeks to suggest, whether I qualify to be classified as an authentic legal historian seems quite doubtful, even if Wikipedia does characterise me as a historian ‘specialising in legal history’. I cannot deny occasional attendance at British Legal History Conferences over the past three decades, and a recent formal affiliation with my university's Law School. Yet I neither hold a law degree nor have ever taught a law course. With the possible exception of a visiting fellowship attached to the Woodrow Wilson School's Law and Public Affairs programme (Princeton University's closest approximation to or substitute for a law school), my academic qualifications and experience are both entirely in the field of history. So I tend to regard and, if necessary, describe myself as a mere (in the early modern sense of sole or simple) jobbing historian, with particular interests in the social history of legal institutions and practitioners, largely but not exclusively early modern English. Now Professor Baker has told us that the social history of the legal profession does not relate directly to legal history, as he conceives of that subject. His colleague Professor Ibbetson similarly holds that while it would be odd to exclude ‘institutional legal history – the history of courts, of literature, of the legal profession’ from ‘our conception of legal history’, equally ‘by no stretch of the imagination could we say that any of these constituted parts of the history of law’ – or at least of ‘internal’ legal history, ‘the legal history of Sir John Baker's Introduction’ to that subject. Of course, Baker's textbook deals with courts, law books and lawyers, but it does so from a wholly legal perspective. Some support for my identity as historian unqualified rather than legal may be gleaned from my publications, which include a synoptic survey of English history from the Stuart restoration to the battle of Waterloo, together with articles and chapters on population mobility in early modern England and America, the history of the professions, Australian cultural and educational history, and the history of the province and state of South Australia.