John Baker (legal historian)

Sir John Baker

Sir John Hamilton Baker, QC, FBA, FRHistS, FBS (born 10 April 1944 )is an English legal historian. He has been the Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge since 1988.

Biography

Baker was born in Sheffield, the son of Kenneth Lee Vincent Baker, and Marjorie Baker (née Bagshaw). He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford, and University College London (LLB/PhD). He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1966 and was elected an Honorary Bencher in 1988.

His first marriage in 1968 was to Veronica Margaret Lloyd, with whom he had two daughters. They were divorced in 1997, and in 2002 he married Fiona Rosalind Holdsworth (née Cantlay), who died in 2005.

His first academic position was as an Assistant Lecturer in Law at University College London, in 1965. In 1967 he was promoted to Lecturer, and in 1971 moved to the University of Cambridge. There he was Librarian of the Squire Law Library until 1973, and remains a Fellow of St Catharine's College, where he resides above the Sherlock Library.

In 1973 he became a Lecturer in Law at Cambridge. He was appointed Reader in English Legal History, at the University of Cambridge in 1983. In 1988 he was appointed Professor of English Legal History. From 1998 he has been Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge.

He was President of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, until 2007 when he was succeeded by Professor Sir Christopher Alan Bayly. He is also Literary Director of the Selden Society (jointly 1981-199-, sole since 1991).

Appointments have included Visiting Professor, New York University School of Law since 1988, Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford in 1995, Honorary Fellow, Society for Advanced Legal Studies 1998, Corresponding Fellow, American Society for Legal History 1992, and Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2001. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1984.

Baker was appointed a Fellow of University College London in 1991, made an honorary LLD of the University of Chicago in 1991, and received the Yorke Prize (University of Cambridge) 1975, and the Ames Prize (Harvard Law School) in 1985. He was knighted in 2003. In 2004, he was awarded the Irish Legal History Society's Gold Medal.

Publications

• Introduction to English Legal History (1st ed. 1971, 2nd ed. 1979, 3rd ed. 1990, and 4th ed. 2002).
• The Reports of Sir John Spelman [editor] (1977).
• Manual of Law French (1979).
• The Order of Serjeants at Law (1984).
• English Legal MSS in the USA (Part I) (1985).
• The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (1987).
• Sources of English Legal History (coeditor, with S.  F.  C. Milsom) (1986).
• The Notebook of Sir John Port [editor] (1987).
• Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court (1990).
• English Legal MSS in the USA (Part II) (1990).
• Cases from the Lost Notebooks of Sir James Dyer [editor] (1994).
• Catalogue of English Legal MSS in Cambridge University Library (1996).
• Spelman’s Reading on Quo Warranto [editor] (1997).
• Monuments of Endlesse Labours: English Canonists and Their Work, 1300-1900 (1998).
• Caryll's Reports [editor] (1999).
• The Common Law Tradition: Lawyers, Books, and the Law Tradition (2000).
• The Law's Two Bodies: Some Evidential Problems in English Legal History (2001).
• Readings and moots at the Inns of Court in the fifteenth century (2000).
• Oxford History of the Laws of England, Volume VI: 1483-1558 (2003).
• Reports from the Time of Henry VIII [editor] (2003–04).
• An Inner Temple miscellany : papers reprinted from the Inner Temple yearbook (2004).

See also

• English legal history

Interviews with Sir John Baker on ReConstitution, the website of The Constitution Society.