Workshop: Colonial Legal Biography

14. April 2023

Organisation: Stefan Vogenauer, Victoria Hooton, Victoria Barnes

Place: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main (Germany), Vortragssaal
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Time: 27 - 28 April 2023

How do people and personalities influence the law? There is a growing body of literature which answers this question and it is written in the style of legal biography. It shows that early life, background and experience had an impact on law-making. While there was a long history of examining the lives of judges in England, this interest was far from global. Judicial biographies took off in American legal thought in the 1960s. With a recent resurgence in this work, new interests have now been piqued. Academics have written on figures in the legal history of Australia, Canada, Germany, France and Spain. This literature is now expanding and it recreates the stories of law students, academics, solicitors, barristers as well as judges.

While this work is now global in nature, this workshop seeks to emphasise the importance of the international and global connections. It does so by focussing primarily on colonial lawyers. Colonial judges in the British Empire, for example, were often trained in England but worked outside of it. They dispensed justice and worked with litigants and a community they were not necessarily familiar with. Yet, given their international movement, these officials often took knowledge of one society or another with them. This workshop is not intended to focus on the British Empire only and calls for papers in other imperial contexts. Among many different aspects of colonial and post-colonial life, the workshopexamines the formative experiences as well as legal knowledge that was created in one jurisdiction and taken to another within a colonial context. It considers how these understandings, capabilities and habits travelled internationally through empire.

For organisational details and updates, please contact hooton@lhlt.mpg.de

Source: https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/2231414/event-23-04-27-colonial-legal-biography.html (14.4.2023)