The Judges of Ireland, 1866-1921

Daire Hogan

The late 1860s and the 1870s are important years in the history of the Irish judiciary, and for the structure and culture of the courts. On New Year’s Day 1878 the judicial framework was significantly modernised by the establishment of a single new High Court and Court of Appeal, in succession to a number of historic courts. In turn the political settlements, north and south, of the early 1920s resulted in new court systems.

This book is both an account of all those new court systems, and their origins, and a biographical study, individual and collective, of the senior judges of Ireland (approximately 80 men in total) in the last third of the 19th century and the initial decades of the 20th century. It is an overall narrative of appointments, retirements and judicial issues in that era. Since there was then no fixed judicial retirement age, and the number of judicial positions was steadily being reduced, the opportunities for judicial promotion depended upon the happenstance of voluntary retirement or death of sitting judges. Irish judicial patronage was exercised by the prime ministers of the day, and the fortunes of aspiring judges were ultimately determined by the party politics of the United Kingdom as a whole. This exploration of how the courts and judges worked, and the nature of their connection to wider civic and political society, renders them and their relation to that wider society more accessible outside the field of legal history itself.

Daire Hogan is a solicitor and former president of the Irish Legal History Society, which has awarded him its gold medal. He has edited and contributed to a number of publications of the Society, and other works of legal history. He is a contributor to the Dictionary of Irish Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.