Walsh, John Edward (1816–69), judge and writer, was born 12 November 1816 in Tolka, Co. Dublin, the only son of the Rev. Robert Walsh (qv) and his wife, Anne, daughter of John Bayley. He was educated at Bective School, Dublin, and entered TCD in 1832. A distinguished student, he became a scholar (1835), was auditor of the College Historical Society, and graduated BA (1837) with a gold medal in ethics and logic. After attendance at the Middle Temple, he was called to the Irish bar (1839) and began working on the Leinster circuit. Lacking any contacts, he struggled for some years and turned for a time to literary work. With his colleague Richard Nun (1785?–1867), assistant barrister in Co. Tyrone, he wrote The powers and duties of justices of the peace in Ireland (2 vols, 1844), which was for many years the standard textbook on the subject. Three years later Walsh published anonymously an altogether different work on which his literary fame rests, Ireland sixty years ago (1847), a racy and amusing account of duellists, gamblers, highwaymen, and characters from the Liberties in pre-union Ireland, with much of the material being provided by Walsh's father, himself a noted writer. It went through numerous reprints, necessitating a change of title to Ireland ninety years ago (1877) and Ireland one hundred and twenty years ago (1911), and was last published in 1979 as Rakes and ruffians: the underworld of Georgian Dublin. The introduction announces that the aim is not to titillate but to show what advances in sobriety, anglicisation, and industriousness Ireland has made since the union; however, the lip-smacking relish with which Walsh relates the old exploits belies his stated aim.
It was his last publication, as success at the bar encouraged him to concentrate on his legal career. After some years as a reporter in the court of chancery he was made QC in 1857 and two years later crown prosecutor at Green St., Dublin. In June 1866 he was appointed attorney general in Lord Derby's third administration, and was elected the following month as conservative MP for the University of Dublin (July–October 1866), but had to resign his seat on succeeding Thomas Berry Cusack Smith (qv) as master of the rolls. In this capacity he presided over the celebrated case of MacCormac v. Queen's University concerning the validity of the supplemental charter granted to the university by Earl Russell's government in June 1866. He first dismissed the case on a technicality in April 1867, and on the suit being reinstituted, issued on 1 February 1868 a perpetual injunction against the charter. He was at the height of his success and had begun collecting material for a biography of Lord Clare (qv) when, on returning from a continental tour, he took ill in Paris, and died there on 20 October 1869. He was survived by his wife Blair Belinda (m. 1 October 1841), daughter of Capt. Gordon MacNeill, and by five sons and a daughter. His eldest son, Canon Robert Walsh (1843–1917), became rector of Donnybrook and archdeacon of Dublin (1909–17) and, as author of Fingal and its churches (1888), continued the family's literary tradition.