Challenges and Rewards: Discovering Osborough's Legal History Scholarship

This book was unique in its contribution to the discipline because it was accessible to an inexperienced undergraduate student, while also representing scholarship at the highest level. It is written with Nial Osborough’s signature combination of detailed research, fascinating anecdotes, and good humour. This style of scholarship and communication would dominate another four years of my life as I pursued a PhD under the supervision of Professor Osborough. Before the publication of this book there was no general introductory text on the history of Irish law. As Osborough himself noted in the preface to this book, ‘[t]here is no single volume account of the history of law in Ireland’.21 This is as true in 2021 as it was when he wrote in 1999.