Professor Bill Cornish was a legal scholar of vision, who was well ahead of his time in two widely disparate areas, and in both he became a recognised leader and authority: legal history and intellectual property law. In the former he applied what was then the novel approach of stressing the contemporary social conditions to which the extant law had to apply - something that modern commentators could well ponder, but which he was honest enough to acknowledge was also criticised by some of his peers at the time. As for intellectual property law, his place as the ‘father of intellectual property teaching and scholarship in the UK’ was acclaimed by his admission as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, and his place as the inaugural occupant of the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, at Cambridge (1995–2004). Both these activities had their origins in Bill's long stay (1970–1990) as professor of law at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by their emphasis on societal tertiary education, and his friendship with the renowned Anglo-German scholar Otto Kahn-Freund, respectively. In reality, though, Bill's upbringing in the unique milieu of immediate post-War South Australia, which he describes as a backwater of tranquility, and his urge to see Europe were the roots of his expansive vision of the law. Lesley Dingle interviewed Bill for the Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) in 2015, nine years after his retirement, and these observations of this remarkable scholar are based on those conversations, and her readings of his works.

Michael Prichard was born before the Second World War and lived through the bombing and destruction of much of London. When he entered university in 1945, King's College London had reoccupied its old quarters in the badly-damaged Somerset House, and along with LSE and UCL had pooled teaching resources to overcome staff shortages and accommodation damage. This inadvertently gave Michael a rich pool of mentors upon which to found his career, and who served him well in later years. He entered Queens’ College Cambridge in 1948 and experienced the unique post-war phenomena of the “returning warriors”, which continued, along with the “weekenders”, when he became a fellow at Gonville & Caius in 1950. Here he has remained, and is still a Fellow, seventy years later. His legacy is a fund of memories of a life-long journey through changing landscapes of legal research, teaching, and college and faculty administration. Lesley Dingle first interviewed Michael for the Eminent Scholars Archive in 2012, where his biography and general academic reminiscences are set forth. She now revisits aspects of these, following a conversation she had with David Yale for ESA in November 2019. David was Michael's career-long colleague, and his interview shone new light on their decades of joint endeavour unravelling the development of maritime law in the British Isles. Shortly after David's reminder of the magnitude of their project, an encounter with Professor David Ibbetson, and most recently a meeting with Michael, now in his 93rd year, spurred the author on to summarise particular aspects of Michael's varied research projects. In the process, she will emphasise the overall sense of adventure, and enjoyment - in short “fun”, with which he explored the history and jurisdictional intricacies of the Admiralty Court (jointly with David Yale), presented his enlightened insights into the evolution of aspects of tort law, and explained his research of the few esoteric conundrums in which a retiree was able to indulge.

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 and 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.

James Richard Crawford was born in Adelaide in November 1948, where he went to school and eventually graduated from Adelaide University with an LLB and a BA in 1971. His political views were coloured by his country's involvement in the Vietnam War, and these were reflected in his vision of international law, which he researched under Ian Brownlie for his LLD at Oxford (1972–73). The result was his seminal text The Creation of States in International Law. After returning to Australia, James Crawford spent the next 18 years pursuing a career in academia and government legal service, culminating in his occupying the Challis chair at Sydney in 1986. Further recognition of his standing in international law came when Cambridge appointed him to the Whewell Chair in 1992, and the Directorship of the Lauterpacht Centre 1997–2003 and 2006–2009. After 23 years in Cambridge, Professor Crawford was elected to the bench of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2015, where, in May 2018, Lesley Dingle recorded nearly 4 hours of conversation with him in his chambers at the Peace Palace. The audio and transcript records of these interviews have been presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive, along with a narrative biography. During his parallel careers, academic and juristic, James Crawford wrote extensively on international law. His works reveal a distinctive vision of the law's legacy and future prospects. In the present article, Lesley Dingle expands on some of the perspectives that underpin this Crawfordian vision of international law, inter alia: historical contingency, human enhancement, the legal polymath, personal priorities, and constraints on ICJ judges.

Professor Sir John Baker was born in Sheffield in April 1944 towards the end of the Second World War. His path into legal history was via the Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford, and University College London (UCL) in the early 1960s. It was his good fortune that lecturing arrangements still in place at UCL as a wartime legacy caused him to fall under the inspirational guidance of Professor Toby Milsom at LSE for his legal history tuition. By the time John Baker moved to Cambridge in 1971 he had been called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and his interest in the development of the common law in the late mediaeval/early Tudor period was firmly grounded. The next forty years were spent at Cambridge, where he established an enviable reputation as an innovative and meticulous scholar, whose publications output has become legendary. He retired from the Downing Chair of the Laws of England in 2011, and was knighted for his services to legal history in 2003. This article by Lesley Dingle attempts to highlight some aspects of Professor Baker's illustrious career, and should be read in conjunction with his entry in the Cambridge Eminent Scholars Archive, both of which are based on interviews that she conducted with Sir John in the Law Faculty in February-March 2017.

In this paper Lesley Dingle provides a detailed account of the historical development of the public international law collections at the Squire Law Library in Cambridge. She explains the close involvement of the academic lawyers and the librarians, past and present, in developing an important collection which reflects the significance of the subject at Cambridge's Faculty of Law. Finally, she brings things up-to-date by detailing the extent of the electronic provision which benefits the modern scholar in this discipline.

Professor Tony Smith was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947. He completed his LLB and LLM at Canterbury University, interspersed with a short-lived sortie into legal work with the Treasury. It was during these formative years that he acquired the deep interest in criminal law and its social and constitutional ramifications that has underpinned his whole career, and which gained him numerous academic advances, culminating in his chair of Criminal and Public Law at Cambridge University in 1996. He is currently Professor of Law at Victoria University, Wellington. This article is written by Lesley Dingle and is based on her interviews with Professor Smith which have been incorporated into the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge.

This article, written by Lesley Dingle, is based upon an in-depth interview with Dame Rosalyn Higgins in March 2014. It highlights particular elements that characterise her contribution to legal scholarship and international adjudication, and should be read in the context of the biography presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive: http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent_scholars/dame_rosalyn_higgins.php. Dame Rosalyn Higgins was born in Kensington in 1937. She grew up in London during the Blitz and her matter-of-fact account of these times epitomised her later career: application to the task in hand, and a lack of a sense of expectation. After the War, she passed successively through grammar school, Girton College, Yale and the Royal Institute of International affairs, steadily immersing herself over fifteen years in the work of the United Nations during its formative period. It was on the UN's role as the global peace-keeper and international law-maker that she became the acknowledged authority. There followed a long period of formal academia (1978–95: Kent and LSE), during which she rose to high office. This experience further honed her scholarly and administrative instincts, and she was honoured in 1995 with a DBE. Later that year Dame Rosalyn was appointed to the Bench of the International Court of Justice – the first woman to rise to this position, and in 2006 was elected its President. She retired in 2009.

Lesley Dingle describes the ESA, a digital archive based on interviews with prominent personalities associated with the Law Faculty of Cambridge University. It constitutes a unique repository of audio, textual and photographic materials, providing insights into the careers of scholars, jurists and practitioners. Motivations for the establishment of the archive in 2006 were: recording reminiscences of scholars back to WWII and its immediate aftermath; documenting developments in administration and teaching in the Faculty and colleges; archiving voices of scholars taking about their early lives, careers and published works; compiling a cross-indexed reference of personalities mentioned in interviews; and generating an awareness amongst students and younger staff of the rich heritage of the Faculty. The methodology and strategy of conducting interviews and compiling entries is briefly described. Finally, in the broader context of legal biography, it is argued that such oral histories are an essential component because they capture aspects of personality that written accounts cannot and thereby reveal traits that conventional biographies may miss. This claim is illustrated by selected examples from the archive, that currently contains twenty interviewees.

The calm and courteous mannerisms that Professor Len Sealy's interviews radiate belie a pragmatic determination that has been the hallmark of his long and productive career. For nearly six decades he has been a legal pioneer, working assiduously to elevate the law of commerce, and in particular company law and insolvency, to scholarly respectability in academia and practical understanding in boardrooms. Yet typically, for one who spent his entire professional life collaborating with wealth creators of the commercial world, he eschewed direct personal involvement in such activities. His loyalty to the scholastic tradition, mirrored in his unstinting service to his college and the Faculty, has generated a legacy of fond regard and intellectual respect. These reflections by Professor Sealy are based on interviews with Lesley Dingle at the Squire Law Library during February and April 2013. They should be read in conjunction with Professor Sealy's entry in the Eminent Scholars Archive1.

Lesley Dingle, founder of the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge, gives a further contribution in this occasional series concerning the lives of notable legal academics. On this occasion, the focus of her attention is Stroud Francis Charles (Toby) Milsom QC BA who retired from his chair of Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge in 2000 after a distinguished career as a legal historian at the universities of Oxford, London School of Economics and St John's College Cambridge. His academic life and contentious theories on the development of the Common Law at the end of the feudal system in England were discussed in a series of interviews at his home in 2009. At the core are aspects of his criticism of the conclusions of the nineteenth century historian Frederick William Maitland, upon which the teaching of the early legal history of England was largely based during much of the 20th century. Also included are insights into his research methods in deciphering the parchment Plea Rolls in the Public Records Office, and anecdotes relating to his tenure as Dean at New College Oxford (1956–64) as well as associations with the Selden Society: he was its Literary Director, and later President during its centenary in 1987. Professor Milsom also briefly talked of his memories of childhood during WWII and his inspirational studies as a student at the University of Pennsylvania (1947–48).

Lesley Dingle, founder of the Eminent Scholars Archive, provides a further contribution based on interviews with Emeritus Professor John Anthony “Tony” Jolowicz, one of the great legal scholars at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College since 1952.

This is a further contribution to the Squire Law Library Eminent Scholars Archive by Lesley Dingle. It is based on interviews with Stephen Schwebel about his distinguished career as an international jurist in the United States and at the International Court of Justice.

This paper by Lesley Dingle, Squire Law Library, University of Cambridge was presented at the BIALL Seminar held on 3 March 2009. It covers the major sources, both paper and electronic, of international law.

This is a further contribution to the Squire Law Library Eminent Scholars Archive based on interviews with Emeritus Professor Sir Bob Hepple.1 Part 2 covers his career in the UK, both academic and as a legal activist in the fields of human and social rights and labour law. Professor Hepple gave his interviews at the Squire Law Library between August 2007 and June 2008.

This is the second contribution by Lesley Dingle and Daniel Bates to an expanding audio and photographic archive, which focuses on the careers of prominent academics who have a long affiliation with the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University.