AustLit

J. M. Bennett has been praised by The Hon Justice Michael Kirby as 'Australia's foremost legal historian'. He has written the life of Sir Alfred Stephen, third Chief Justice of NSW, 1844-1873, the thirteenth volume in his series Lives of the Australian Chief Justices and it is surely his masterpiece. Bennett uses 'Legge's Reports' and the recently published Dowling's Select Cases 1828-1844, as well as newspapers and a mass of archival letters and papers and thanks his son Michael for help with the thirteen illustrations. He lists 92 'Dramatis Personae', 'principal actors' which is most helpful. One feels that Bennett knows them all well enough to tell us their virtues, achievements and flaws, but they are briefly introduced. He is well acquainted with the 'drudgery of diligence', a phrase from his valuable and unique regional legal history In Witness Whereof: Lawyers, the Law and Society in New England and the Liverpool Plains in the Nineteenth Century. (Introduction)