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Is legal biography really legal scholarship?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

R Gwynedd Parry
R Gwynedd Parry*
Affiliation:
School of Law, Swansea University
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Abstract

This paper examines the recent resurgence of interest in the legal biography among legal scholars. It argues that the legal biography has traditionally been treated with suspicion within the English law school due to ideological and methodological concerns about the intellectual validity and robustness of the form, and because of reservations about its true disciplinary province. Through a literary survey of legal biography, it claims a tension between intellectual and empirical approaches that parody the tension between the internal and external traditions in legal history. More recent biographies, however, have succeeded in bridging these divides and in demonstrating the potential value of legal biography in deepening our understanding of the human context of legal phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 208 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 2010

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References

1 Lytton Strachey in his preface to Eminent Victorians (New York: GP Putnam's and Sons, 1918).

2 That jurist being Sir David Hughes Parry QC (1893–1973). See Parry, RG ‘A master of practical law – Sir David Hughes Parry (1893–1973)’ in Watkin, TG (ed) Y Cyfraniad Cymreig: Welsh Contributions to Legal Development (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2005) pp 102–159 Google Scholar; Parry, RG ‘Federalism and university governance: Welsh experiences in New Zealand’ (2006) 23(1) Welsh History Review 123 Google Scholar; Parry, RG ‘Sir David Hughes Parry as lawyer and economist’ (2007) 13 Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 193 Google Scholar. My book on his life and career is due to be published by University of Wales Press in 2010.

3 For an impression of legal academics' awkwardness if not unease at being described as ‘legal biographers’, see the recording of a panel discussion on judicial biography held at the London School of Economics on 17 October 2007, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/projects/legalbiog/lbp.htm.

4 Ibid.

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113 See Brogan, above n 107, p 111.

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