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Q:- Gaelic Ireland didn’t have a unified system of education, there wasn’t a university: so how did the legal system actually work? How did people become lawyers, where did they go to study law?
Legal students would have gone to special law schools. In the later period we know a lot about the law schools: there seems to have been quite a lot of drudgery involved. The students were required to work long hours, sometimes in cold conditions, transcribing legal manuscripts, and sometimes in the margins we get complaints - "I am cold" or "Somebody has messed up my pen" . The legal scholars spent a lot of time going around to other law schools, collecting and transcribing manuscripts and discussing various legal problems with one another. Sometimes, it seems that certain law schools had low opinions of other legal families and again we get this sort of bitchy comment, sometimes recorded in the margins of manuscripts.
Q:- You mention legal ‘families’. I mean was there a renowned legal family that litigants would seek out in order to have experts to fight their cases?
Certainly from the 13th or 14th century onwards until the end of the 16th century, the McEgans were the most widely distributed legal family. They had branches over most of central and western Ireland and they were the private judges to most of the lordly families in that area, so McEgan is the great name in the later period of Brehon law.
Q:- Is there any evidence to suggest that the Gaelic legal families made the transition to the English common law system?
In general it seems that the native legal families did not make the crossover to English common law. There are a few examples - one or two of the O’Davorans who were a legal family in Clare, are recorded as having become lawyers under the English system, likewise with the McEgans. But in general there seems to have been rather little crossover.
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