Book review: Lawyers, the Law and History. By Felix M. Larkin and N.M. Dawson (eds) [Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2013. 320 pp. Hardback €55.00. ISBN 978-1-84682-244-5.]

On 30 June 1922 Irish legal history went up in smoke. It was wrenched apart and incinerated in a great explosion of munitions. The destruction of the Irish Public Records Office at Dublin’s Four Courts marked the end of the first act in a tragedy of fratricidal folly known as the Irish civil war (1922-1923). One contemporary eyewitness described the remains of the Public Records Office in the moments after the explosion as a ruin "littered with chunks of masonry and smouldering records". The remains of the collection of legal documents that dated as far back as the thirteenth century were reduced to fragments of paper "gyrating in the upper air like seagulls" (Ernie O’Malley, The Singing Flame, Dublin, 1978, pp. 114-5).