Review: Searching For WPM Kennedy – The Biography Of An Enigma By Martin L Friedland

It is a strange irony that one of the leading Irish constitutional scholars of the twentieth century wrote very little on the subject of Irish constitutional law. William Paul McClure Kennedy (1879-1963), better known as WPM Kennedy, was born in Lurgan and graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1900 where he won numerous prizes in the field of English literature. He emigrated to Canada in 1913 where, in time, he would become the leading authority on Canadian constitutional law of the early and mid-twentieth century. His magnum opus, The Constitution of Canada, is still frequently cited almost a hundred years after the publication of its first edition in 1922. Kennedy also made significant scholarly forays examining the Constitutions of South Africa and Australia. Yet, he never devoted sustained analysis to the constitutional law of his native country. This anomaly becomes all the more apparent when it is considered that Kennedy boasted till the end of his days that he had made a significant contribution to the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State.