Stephen Lushington has long deserved full biographical treatment and has now received it from Professor Stephen Waddams. Lushington belonged to the last generation of the civilians, the doctors of civil law, who managed matrimonial, testamentary and maritime litigation until the Victorian reforms swept away their jurisdictions and their profession itself. Lushington himself had a remarkably long career, for though he resigned as Dean of Arches in 1867 (at the age of 85), he was still adjudicating as a Master of Faculties until his death in 1873 (in his 91st year). In his earlier years he had been counsel to Lady Byron and Queen Caroline in their matrimonial trials and tribulations, and as a Whig member of Parliament he had been associated with most of the important reform movements of his age. The cause to which he was most dedicated was the extirpation of slavery, first the trade (1807) and then the status (1833); he was principally responsible for the prohibition of inter-colonial slave trade in 1825. It was, as he said, “the principal object of my life”.

In recounting a many-sided career Professor Waddams has necessarily had to be selective in surveying Lushington’s judicial career. There is a fine piece of original research in examining Lushington’s work in the Consistory Court (1825–1857) through the previously neglected cause papers of that court which throw much new light on matrimonial law and practice of the period (Chap. 5). But it is to the next chapter (Chap. 6) on the Admiralty Court that most readers of this Quarterly will particularly turn. Here Lushington was judge for nearly 30 years, 1838–1867, a period of great change. The Jurisdiction Acts of 1840 and 1861, the Crimean War, and the transition from sail to steam, and from wood to iron, make his tenure one of the highest significance in the history of maritime law and practice. Maitland once called it the “St Martin’s Summer” of the Admiralty, though for Lushington the “summer” started stormily, since the price of his promotion of the 1840 Act was political revenge by Brougham