"Trust me, I’m a Historian" - Part 3

     In 1970 my parents met and became friends with a British couple, Jane and J.W. "Jamie" Dalgleish of Cardiff, Wales. My mother is now 92 and in going through her "archives" just found this photocopy of a newspaper clipping. It is a letter to the editor of the London Times, undated[1], written by Jamie. 

     I see it in a point for legal historians.

     Jamie Dalgleish was an officer of C.H. Bailey Ltd., a venerable firm engaged in the business of drydocks and related engineering services. In this letter to the editor, he replies to an earlier letter to editor of the London Times by an English vice-admiral, Sir John Lang, recalling a negotiating meeting held in the Admiralty in 1959 (so more one or two decades earlier) with Jamie's company regarding "Malta Drydock." 

     In that prior letter, Lang had recalled the navy's representatives passing a note across the table to the C.H. Bailey Ltd. team, which included Jamie. It was in verse:

And so while the Great Ones 

repair to their dinner

The Secretary stays growing

thinner and thinner.

Racking his brains to record and report

What he thinks they will think that they ought to have thought.[2]

    Jamie was that Secretary, and he reports in his letter to the editor that he passed back a reply:

No such luck for this sec[retary] who

must hear all their patter.

Share all their meals, 

getting fatter and fatter.

And after the Great Ones retire to their bed

Try to record what they wish they had said.[3]

     Jamie concluded his letter with these words:  "Discrepancies between records and between different persons' recollections of meetings have been around for a long time."[4]

    I salute those Brits' quick wits. And to Jamie's conclusion I would add only a triple exclamation point!!! Oral history interviews are important and so are legal and other documents deposited into archives. When they match up, the historian can rest a little more easily than when they don't.

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[1] Based on my parents having received this, and because in this letter Jamie mentions that he "was secretary of C.H. Bailey at the time," I deduce that it must have been published well after 1970, during his retirement and before Jamie's death, which was in the eighties. (Note to self: always write the date on any clipping or copy thereof!) I cannot find it online.

[2] Emphasis added by me.

[3] Emphasis added by me.

[4] Emphasis added by me.

“Trust me, I’m a Historian” - Part 2

This is the second in my series of occasional explorations of the concept of "legal history". . . .

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In my work as Chair of the Legal History Discussion Group of the Dallas Bar Association (the subject of a prior posting), I have consistently used the rubric "the history of law, lawyers, and courts" to describe the ambit of presentations by the Group to the lawyers of Dallas. One of the allures of these presentations for lawyers is the award of "continuing legal education" credit for attendance; and it helps me to obtain CLE accreditation to explain in the application how the presenter's topic embraces at least one of those elements, law, lawyers, or courts. "Law, lawyers, and courts" is a theme that practicing lawyers readily apprehend.

But I always add to the formula, "law, lawyers, and courts," an enlarging phrase, "broadly construed." And if one peruses the list of our Group's more than three score presentations over the past dozen years, a very broad ambit of topics can be seen, ranging from the most recent one, "Law and Literatures for Practicing Lawyers," to law in the music of Johnny Cash, to “Who Were the Traitors? The Legal Perspective of Operation Valkyrie,” to “Borders Wars: Texas’ Fight for Water,” to "Eight Lessons from Nino [Scalia]."

One of the prominent legal historians of our nation today is Ariela Gross, the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California. In an article several years ago, she wrote that "law" in historical analysis is "no longer as clear-cut a category as it once was; in addition to the formal law of statute books and common law appellate opinions, we now understand 'law' to encompass a broad set of institutions, discourses, and processes produced by a larger cast of characters than solely jurists, legislators, and appellate judges."[1]

Accordingly, legal history is not at all limited to history as found in law books--it is not solely "law, lawyers, and courts"--but rather this field of study extends to all "institutions, discourses, and processes" and considers a much fuller set of actors than solely "jurists, legislators, and appellate judges," as Ariela Gross explained.
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[1] Ariela J. Gross, Race, Law, and Comparative History, 29 Law & Hist. Rev. 549-50 (2011).