Friday, January 15, 2021

A Blurb for Bartie's "Free Hands and MInds"

Some time ago, we posted a notice of Susan Bartie’s Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars.  At the time, we had no endorsement to post with it.  We have one now:

Free Hands and Minds is centered in absolutely first rate, short-form—longer than an article and shorter than a book—intellectual biographies of three Australian legal scholars, each active at the time when Australian law teaching was professionalizing years after World War II.  Peter Brett who took a Harvard JSD under Henry Hart centered his work  on Criminal Law; Alice Erh-Soon Tay, first on comparisons with and between the Marxist legal systems of China and Russia and later on Human rights; and Geoffrey Sawer the law governing Australian federalism seen from the perspective of political and social circumstances at the time of the relevant decisions.  For each, the scholarship is taken seriously, the life is taken seriously and the academic surround is taken seriously, pretty much all at the same time.  No one could ask more from work in this form.

                    --John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo School of Law

--Dan Ernst