The Judges of Ireland, 1866-1921

Daire Hogan

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781801512787
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The road to 1877
• Chapter Two: Reforms and their implementation
• Chapter Three: Judicial lives — careers, incomes and honours
• Chapter Four: The judiciary in 1866 (1)
• Chapter Five: The judiciary in 1866 (2)
• Chapter Six: Appointments between 1866 and 1868
• Chapter Seven: Gladstone's first government, 1868-74
• Plate Section
• Chapter Eight: Disraeli's government, 1874-80
• Chapter Nine: Gladstone's second government, 1880-5
• Chapter Ten: The years of Unionist monopoly (1), 1885-92
• Chapter Eleven: The years of Unionist monopoly (2), 1892-1905
• Chapter Twelve: Appointments between 1906 and 1914
• Chapter Thirteen: Appointments between 1915 and 1921
• Chapter Fourteen: The first Irish Lords of Appeal in Ordinary
• Chapter Fifteen: Change and continuity in the early 1920s
• Bibliography
• Index
• Irish Legal History Society Series
• Irish Legal History Society