There is a remarkable dearth of judicial memoirs and biographies in modern Irish legal literature although, ironically, one of the great biographers of the British judiciary was an Irishman, Robert Heuston, who wrote the Lives of the Lord Chancellors . As it happens, Professor Heuston s predecessor in the Regius Chair of Law at Trinity College, Vincent Delany, produced an excellent biography of Chief Baron Palles who retired from the Irish bench in 1916 and died in 1920. But we still await full-length biographies of the leading Irish judges who did so much to shape Irish law and social policy since the foundation of the State, people like Hugh Kennedy, Cearbhaill O Dalaigh, Kingsmill Moore and Brian Walsh. George Gavan Duffy has fared somewhat better, having been the subject of a biography by Golding published in 1982, although he deserves fuller treatment. The judges themselves have been equally reticent, apart from the rather disappointing memoir, Lawful Occasions , published in 1991 by Judge MacKenzie following his retirement from the High Court.
Judges are, of course, naturally reluctant to write about cases over which they presided.
One of the few brave enough to do so, in these islands at least, was Lord Devlin whose decision to publish Easing the Passing , a book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams, attracted no small amount of criticism from some of his former judicial colleagues. In A Double Life , Thomas F O Higgins sets out to describe his life in law and politics, hence the title. Few people in modern Ireland can have been so well connected on entering either law or politics. He was a nephew of Kevin O Higgins who was assassinated while Minister for Justice in 1928 and whose widow later married the well-known Dublin solicitor Arthur Cox. He was also connected with T.D. Sullivan and Tim and Maurice Healy, all members of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster.