Douglas printer and publisher associated with the Isle of Man Times and with nineteenth-century Manx public and legal life.

Brown was operating as a printer in King Street by 1850, when a Manks Historical and Geographical Dictionary of the places mentioned in the Bible was printed and published by him. By the mid-1860s his name appears repeatedly on official and public printing from the Times Office.

In 1865 Brown printed the orders, bye-laws, rules and regulations of the Douglas Town Commissioners after their confirmation by Tynwald. In 1866 James Brown and Son printed the official correspondence concerning the fiscal changes of that year from the Times Office.

Brown also became involved in litigation which reached the English courts. A later Manx constitutional note records a case involving James Brown in 1864 in which a writ was issued from the Queen’s Bench to the Isle of Man. The court held that legislation restricting such writs from being sent to a “colony or foreign dominion of the Crown” did not prevent issue to Mann: the Island was a dominion of the Crown, but not a foreign one.

A later biography of Richard Sherwood also identifies the important case of James Brown versus the House of Keys, in which Sherwood acted after returning to Mann from Queensland.