ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the judicial career of John Gorrie, an unusual jurist who served on the bench of several colonies in widely different areas of the empire. It highlights both the experiences of Gorrie as a peripatetic colonial judge, and the value of judicial biography as a tool for drilling down to reveal the ways in which British justice and conceptions of the rule of law were reproduced, reinterpreted and resisted in colonial circumstances, as well as the implications for the much vaunted claims for the rule of law, including judicial independence, in multiracial possessions. Biographical studies of judges and lawyers who served in the colonies have much to contribute to the historiography of empire. Gorrie was a Scottish advocate with strikingly liberal views. He represented the judicial aspect of liberal imperialism, which was a significant - though by no means dominant - force in the Victorian empire.
