D Dyzenhaus, M Hunt and G Huscroft (eds), A Simple Common Lawyer: Essays in Honour of Michael Taggart (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), IX + 334, £45
| Author | Peter Cane |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.22145/flr.37.1.6 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
D DYZENHAUS, M HUNT and G HUSCROFT (eds),
A SIMPLE COMMON LAWYER: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF
MICHAEL TAGGART
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), IX + 334, £45.
Peter Cane*
Bracketing his scholarship on administrative law and legal history, Michael Taggart is
probably best known as the champion and chronicler of that genre of legal (and, more
generally, scholarly) literature known as the 'festschrift'.1 Despite the fact that this
volume marks Mike's very early retirement, because of ill-health, as Alexander Turner
Professor of Law at the University of Auckland, the publication of a festschrift for the
scholar who has done most to bring the genre out of the shadows is an event the
reflexivity of which I am sure the honorand himself — being a man of wit and
irrepressible joie de vivre — has found pleasing and amusing. The very title of the
volume — a deprecatory self-description, we are told — echoes Mike's interest in
exploring the common law species of a genus which was, until recent years at least,
much more popular in civil law than in common law countries.2
According to Lilly M Roberts (cited by Taggart),3 a festschrift is a published
collection of legal essays by different authors, specifically written to honour an
individual, institution or event. A Simple Common Lawyer meets the definition. But it is
more than that. The Dutch edition of Wikipedia (which, fortunately, offers an
'automatic' — but slightly clunky — English translation) defines a liber amicorum as a
'collection of mostly personal lyrics and artwork by friends and/or colleagues offered
on the occasion of an anniversary or retirement'. The volume under review offers
artwork: the engaging painting on the cover showing Mike hard at work in the library
is the handiwork of Richard, one of Mike's four children. We see the honorand only in
profile, from some distance, and I personally regret that the cover is not supplemented
by the sort of face-on photograph of the subject found in many festschriften. (In a
different mood, the honorand is cast as action man over the caption 'Adventures in
Common Law' in a painting, also by Richard, presented on the occasion of Mike's
retirement function in November 2008).
_____________________________________________________________________________________
* ANU College of Law.
1 See especially Michael Taggart, 'Gardens or Graveyards of Scholarship? Festschriften in the
Literature of the Common Law' (2002) 22 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 227; Michael
Taggart (ed), An Index to Common Law Festschriften (2006);
<http://magic.lbr.auckland.ac.nz/festschrift/>.
2 Although whether this is the sense of 'common law' in play in the title is unclear.
3 Taggart, above n 1, 228.
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