11/20/2025
𝐀𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐈𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐋𝐚𝐰 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐠𝐧𝐚 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐝s
“Irish law is the oldest, most original, and most extensive of mediaeval European legal systems. It is a unique legal inheritance, an independent indigenous system of advanced jurisprudence that was fully evolved by the eighth century. It is also far less well known than it deserves.” — Prof. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, UCC (2003)
For all the boasts of British constitutional mythology, the idea that Magna Carta was the first moment a king was bound by law is simply false. Centuries before AD1215, Irish kings were already subject to law—not its authors. Ireland developed a sophisticated, decentralised and judge-led legal order in which rulers answered to laws they did not make. If any nation has grounds to claim an early, advanced system of justice, it is Ireland. By contrast, Common Law evolved as a mechanism not of equity but of elite protection and lawyerly enrichment.
As Prof. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín of NUI Galway explains:
“Early medieval Ireland evolved a system of law (often called ’brehon’ law, from the Old Irish word brithemain—‘judges’) which is remarkable in several respects. No other early medieval society has left such a substantial amount of written law, and none has preserved its laws entirely in the vernacular. Early Irish law is unique also amongst medieval legal codes in the range and nature of the subjects that are covered by it. It has also, until relatively recently, suffered unique neglect. Thanks, however, to the research of scholars in the last half-century or so, the full richness of the Irish legal material from the period c. 600 to c. 800 can now be fully explored, using the tools of philology, history, archaeology and anthropology.”
Ó Cróinín was referring above all to the monumental achievement of D. A. Binchy—barrister, scholar, and Senior Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1978 Binchy published his six-volume Corpus Iuris Hibernici, a vast 2,343-page (1.48-million-word) edition of all surviving Irish legal manuscripts from the seventh to twelfth centuries, complete with glosses and commentaries in Old, Middle, and Early Modern Irish. It remains the indispensable foundation of modern scholarship on early Irish law and a monumental contribution to European medieval studies.
As Prof. Ó Corráin noted, Binchy’s work sparked a renaissance in early Irish legal studies—drawing in scholars from Ireland, Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. It restored to the scholarly world a legal tradition as complex, as humane, and as intellectually ambitious as any produced in medieval Europe.
D. A. Binchy, incidentally, was also the uncle of the novelist Maeve Binchy and of William Binchy, former Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College Dublin—proof that Irish legal scholarship runs in formidable veins.
Image: Law texts copied at the O’Davoren law school in the late 16th century (Section D of the manuscript).
