This short piece makes reference to an event that was held in May 2019 at the London School of Economics. The occasion was entitled ‘Oral History Research: Illuminating the Past’. There were three speakers and the session was chaired by Professor Michael Lobban. One of the speakers that evening was Lesley Dingle and, following this introduction, her talk is featured in this issue of Legal Information Management.

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.

This article discusses an oral history doctoral research project about the little known, yet critical role of the court clerk in Crown Courts. It is surprising that even though Crown Court clerks have been pivotal in trials of the most serious criminal offences, they have been neglected in legal scholarship. This research project has contributed towards filling an absence in the academic literature about the nature and function of their vital work between 1972 and 2015, and was carried out by Dvora Liberman, in partnership with the London School of Economics Legal Biography Project and National Life Stories, British Library.