From Legal Biography to Legal Life Writing: Broadening Conceptions of Legal History and Socio‐legal Scholarship
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | David Sugarman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00696.x |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 42, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2015
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 7±33
From Legal Biography to Legal Life Writing:
Broadening Conceptions of Legal History and Socio-legal
Scholarship
David Sugarman*
This article describes and analyses how legal life writing has grown to
embrace a wider range of subjects, sources, and methods ± from
eminent white male judges to women, minorities, displaced persons,
and outsiders ± and explains and justifies it as an intellectual project.
It considers some of life writing's challenges, shortcomings, and
dilemmas, suggesting ways forward. The aim is to advance an
important, inter-disciplinary perspective in the making: namely, a
more pluralistic, democratic conception of legal life writing, which
offers new ways of advancing legal history and socio-legal
scholarship, encouraging inter-disciplinary dialogue. It is argued that
legal life writing demonstrates the value of historical thinking in
comprehending law, politics, and culture; it can also supplement the
study of law, helping legal historians and socio-legal scholars to
develop new skills and embrace a wider range of participants and
audiences, thereby enhancing their ability to engage with public issues
and public history.
No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since
. . . none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more
widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition . . . I have often
thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful
narrative would not be useful . . .
1
7
*Law School, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, England
d.sugarman@lancaster.ac.uk
My thanks go to LeÂonie Sugarman for her helpful feedback. I am also indebted to the
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, for its long-standing support
of my research.
1 S. Johnson, Rambler No. 60, 13 October 1750.
ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School
I.
At its best, life writing, such as biography and autobiography, illuminates the
shifting interplay between agency, circumstance, and the material conditions
prompting behaviour. It not only appeals to a universal human interest in
gossip, but answers a need within us to understand each other better. It also
raises intriguing and profound issues concerning every aspect of reading, and
writing, a life. Great life writing is unsettling, challenging the way we look at
the world, and inspiring us to develop new ways of knowing. It humanizes. It
goes to the heart of our individual and shared existence. The dramas that
comprise biography and autobiography are histories that speak to the state of
our souls and the state of our world. As Virginia Woolf put it, biography can
provide not only an account of a person's outer life, but also an insight into
their `inner life of emotion and thought'.
2
Most compelling of all, it tells us
how it is to be inside our skins. Hence, pursuing in print the life of others
may provide inspirati on and encouragement,
3
especially at times of
adversity.
These are very broad claims. And they are claims that could equally be
made of other forms of writing and of great art.
4
Nonetheless, they are some
of the good reasons why legal historians and socio-legal scholars should take
legal life writing seriously.
Certainly, biography and autobiography are booming.
5
Artists, philoso-
phers, politicians, historians, and even economists, from Beveridge
6
and
Keynes
7
to Thatcher
8
and Wittgenstein,
9
have all attracted a steady stream of
high-quality biographies. At first blush, the contrast with British legal
8
2 V. Woolf, `The New Biography' (1927) reprinted in Collected Essays Volume Four
(1967) 229, at 230. This concession to the power of biography appears in an essay
primarily concerned to demonstrate biography to be a failed attempt to accomplish a
task that only fiction can carry out successfully. For a valuable critique of Woolf's
hostility to biography, see R. Monk, `This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on
Biography, Reality, and Character' (2007) 31 Philosophy and Literature 1.
3 S. Bartie, `Histories of Legal Scholars' (2014) 34 Legal Studies 305.
4 S. Sharma, The Power of Art (2009) at 6±13.
5 `Top Selling Biographies and Autobiographies since 2001' Guardian 7 February
2013, at //www.theguar dian.com/news /datablog/201 3/feb/07/biog raphies-
autobiography-nielsen-2001>. The prevalence of biography is paralleled by the
current popularity of another poor relation of academic history, genealogy. In an age
where individual identity seems increasingly homogenized, and individual agency
feels limited, family history, like biography, constitutes `real history', telling us new
things about the past and our identities, and suggesting new ways we might write
about it: see, A. Light, `In Defence of Family History' Guardian, 11 October 2014.
See, further, the discussion of life writing in section V, below.
6 J. Harris, William Beveridge (1977).
7 R. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes (2013).
8 C. Moore, Margaret Thatcher (2013).
9 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1991).
ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School
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