Legal Oral Histories in Cambridge ESA: Some Examples of Researching Personal, Institutional, and Social Developments

25 Pages Posted: 19 Nov 2019

Date Written: November 8, 2019

Abstract

The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and currently has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs, and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries, and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science.

The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith & Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site.

Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and “group biographies” of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.

Keywords: Digital archives, Oral histories, Legal History, Life Writings

Suggested Citation

Dingle, Lesley, Legal Oral Histories in Cambridge ESA: Some Examples of Researching Personal, Institutional, and Social Developments (November 8, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3483499 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3483499

Lesley Dingle (Contact Author)

University of Cambridge ( email )

10 West Rd
Cambridge, CB3 9DZ
United Kingdom

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