I was introduced to John Scott, Lord Eldon, a decade ago in Professor Emmet Larkin's Modern British History seminar at the University of Chicago. Since then I have regularly been asked to explain my focus upon him. As my recent work has developed out of a doctoral dissertation, I have tended to reply with the reasons that founded my original study. First, I preferred to concentrate on a person rather than a trend or general phenomenon. Secondly, I was interested in the late eighteenth and/or early nineteenth century. Thirdly, I wanted to study a person whose work linked the worlds of law and politics. Fourthly, I hoped to find a suitable subject whose life had not been both recently and ably studied. Fifthly, my subject must have produced and prompted a reasonable cache of accessible materials. The combination of these factors produced Lord Eldon, although I must admit to an early indecision involving his brother, Lord Stowell, happily resolved by the appearance of Henry Bourguignon's book in 1987.

While inevitably the task of research tends to focus one's mind on the more prosaic of the above criteria, the first has imposed the most significant limitations upon my study of Eldon. Disraeli described biography as ‘life without theory’, and while I think it is both difficult and undesirable to aspire to the complete exclusion of theory, I have attempted to concentrate on Eldon rather than larger legal or political themes.