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During the last half-century, Christopher W. Brooks (1948–2014) established himself as the foremost historian of law in early modern English society. Through his scholarship, his teaching, and the generations of students he advised and supervised, and as a friend and colleague, Brooks exercised, from the early 1990s onwards, an increasingly significant influence on writing about early modern English history. He was the leading exponent of a history of earlymodern England that transcended the boundaries of social, political and legal history, and which placed law and lawyers centre stage. In doing so, he challenged major premises of the dominant vision of law-in-history in writing about English history. This chapter brings a critical, if friendly, eye to Brooks's work, focusing on how Brooks beat his own path through the methodological thickets to create a distinctive vision of law in history, and on the strengths and weaknesses of that vision.

Biography is booming. William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Steve Jobs and Billy Conolly, for example, have all been the subject of recent biographies that have sold and earned millions. General biographies, such as The Hare with Amber Eyes have sold over 400,000 copies, as have Celebrity biographies and autobiographies. While political biographies may not reach these dizzy heights, they remain popular, as is evidenced by John Campbell on Margaret Thatcher, Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Katherine Frank's Indira: The life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, Roy Jenkins on Churchill, Ben Pimlot on Harold Wilson and the Queen, and by the diaries of Harold Macmillan, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn and Chris Mullin (amongst others). Artists of diverse sorts, philosophers, historians and even economists have all attracted a steady stream of admirable biographies, from Bagehot and Beveridge to Warhol and Wittgenstein. At first blush, the contrast with legal biography (other than in the United States) could not be more striking. Under this optic, a few pearls glitter in the mud, such as Nichola Lacey on HLA Hart and R. Gwynedd Parry on David Hughes Parry (UK); Charles Herbert Curry on Sir Francis Forbes, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and Leonie Star on Julius Stone (Australia); and Philip Girard on Bora Laskin and David Ricardo Williams on Chief Justice Sir Lyman Poore Duff (Canada). However, many have been written by unabashed admirers, based on inadequate or undisclosed sources, and published by small obscure presses where they rapidly, and perhaps deservedly, fell out of print. According to this view, the history of legal biography is largely one of failure. It is principally a manifestation of the conservative tradition of legal history and legal scholarship. In this paper, I problematize the notion that the history of legal biography is largely a story of failure and conservatism. Some of the key methodological and theoretical perspectives underlying legal and other forms of biography are described and analysed. I point to long-standing and recent work that embodies visions of biography that suggest ways of expanding the repertoire of legal biography and socio-legal scholarship, and which provide important insights into "what does legal biography add?" My comments derive, in part, from the oral history of English legal education and scholarship that I commenced in 1986, and whose interviewees include LCB (Jim) Gower, HLA Hart, Tony Honore, Peter Stein and William Twining.

HauptbeschreibungDas Eigentum spielt in der modernen Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte eine zentrale Rolle. Die Transformationsprozesse in Mittel- und Osteuropa führen das besonders deutlich vor Augen, doch auch in Westeuropa geraten gängige Vorstellungen über das Eigentum angesichts von Deregulierung und Umverteilung, von neuen Informationstechnologien und neuen Knappheiten unter Druck. Das Eigentumsrecht, zu dem auch Konventionen, Doktrinen und kulturelle Praktiken gehören, prägt Wahrnehmungen, Erfahrungen, Handlungen, gesellschaftliche Strukturen und Vorstellungen. Es kodiert die politisc.