I first and fleetingly came across Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's remarkable record of his nervous illness, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memorabilia of a Nerve Patient), as a law student. I assumed, in my youthful state, and later as a neophyte academic, that such a unique and candidly graphic work by a senior judge would have been dissected, deliberated upon, argued over and disputed, if not excoriated or anathematised by lawyers, ad infinitum. It transpired, however, that the Judge's magnum opus had received no such attention and indeed the medical and psychoanalytic diagnosis of his madness had seemingly put a stop to any attention being paid to his legal discourse and the radical experience of gender dysphoria and transitional theory of sexuality, of creativity and law that he gives vivid vent to in his immaculate text. The recent and comprehensive study of The Jurists by James Gordley, for instance, a work I greatly admire, is much within the norm in making no mention of him in its 312 tightly packed pages, and yet by any count he was one of the most interesting, complex and painfully inventive of lawyers. He has been studied, of course, and endlessly, by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and literary theorists, but neither within the pantheon of the biographical dictionaries of law, nor, as said, among ‘the’ jurists, is there reference, comment, accolade or critique. Yet, it is hard to claim that the definite article excludes a jurist whose work has had such remarkable longevity and remains in print to this day.

Much later, in the self-confessed moment of ‘trans revolution’, of testo junkies, hormone hacking, xenofeminism, trans identities of all sorts, surgical, chemical and pharmacopornographic, X-passports on the near horizon, Schreber always somewhere at the back of my mind, the silence of all manner of jurists and jurisprudes, nomikoi and jurisconsults, came slowly to seem ever more deafening and surprising. I experienced, just to reference Foucault, an inkling of an archaeology of a juridical silence and so I decided to investigate further and then to reclaim the Judge's lively and discriminating text as also being of interest and importance for law and lawyers.