“[W]hile it is unquestionably a work of impressive scholarship, it is also a timely meditation on the role of legal education and the discipline of law in Australia… Free Hands and Minds makes compelling claims about the important place of Australian law schools in our society… a provocative and really masterful work but just as importantly, a terrific read.” –
Professor Jan McDonald, University of Tasmania, Australia
“A superb contribution to legal life writing and the transnational history of legal education and scholarship. Bartie's accomplishment is to recover the lives, contributions and times of three very different marginal figures who played a leading role in the broadening of academic law in Australia. One of the many virtues of this wonderfully novel book is the way that it illuminates the relationship between their scholarly activity, politics and the growth of the discipline of law; the importance of international networks of legal scholars embracing America, Australia and Britain; the variety among "progressive" legal scholars; and the significance of gender. In the process, Bartie offers vital insights, while highlighting some of the intellectual, institutional and moral confines of the discipline of Law.” –
David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus, Lancaster University Law School