History of the Common Law


Book Description

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.










The Foundations of Anglo-American Corporate Fiduciary Law


Book Description

This book explores the foundations and evolution of modern corporate fiduciary law in the United States and the United Kingdom. Today US and UK fiduciary law provide very different approaches to the regulation of directorial behaviour. However, as the book shows, the law in both jurisdictions borrowed from the same sources in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiduciary and commercial law. The book identifies the shared legal foundations and authorities and explores the drivers of corporate fiduciary law's contemporary divergence. In so doing it challenges the prevailing accounts of corporate legal change and stability in the US and the UK.




Perversions of Justice


Book Description

Examines the faulty "reasoning" employed to legislate colonial control over North America's indigenous peoples and their lands.




The Historians of Anglo-American Law


Book Description

Deals with the Professional Tradition of the historical development of English law as it influences the historians of Anglo-American law.




Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England


Book Description

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King AEthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.




Corporate Rescue Law--an Anglo-American Perspective


Book Description

. . . a highly readable and informative text and an excellent addition to insolvency scholarship. . . In their entirety, the chapters of Corporate Rescue Law An Anglo-American Perspective represent one of the most incisive and relevant treatments of comparative insolvency regimes to date. . . This book is an absolute boon: it provides the reader with a mass of legal and practical insights into the workings of two ostensibly divergent systems and challenges received wisdom in a fluent and persuasive manner. Not only are legal differences examined through the lens of practice, but also commercial, philosophical and social responses to failure are considered and highlighted as possible drivers of those real distinctions that do exist. Professor McCormack has produced an exceptional work that should be required reading for academics, practitioners and policy makers alike, and is to be warmly congratulated. Sandra Frisby, Banking and Finance Law Review The issues are well chosen. They are easily the most important aspects of any corporate rescue law. The careful analysis of the technical provisions, the incorporation of the extensive scholarship on the two corporate rescue regimes and the reference to practice in the real world all help to make these chapters an indispensable tool for any scholar wishing to gain a better understanding of the similarities and differences of English and American corporate rescue laws. . . This monograph could not have come at a better time. . . The comparative account in this book will help law reformers, judges and scholars to have a better grasp of the issues and appreciate better how the two systems have dealt with them. . . Comparative law has a critical role to play in promoting mutual understanding and respect. It is hoped that this monograph will help in that respect. Wee Meng Seng, Singapore Journal of Legal Studies This book offers an unprecedented and detailed comparative critique of Anglo-American corporate bankruptcy law. It challenges the standard characterisation that US law in the sphere of corporate bankruptcy is pro-debtor and UK law is pro-creditor , and suggests that the traditional thesis is, at best, a potentially misleading over-simplification. Gerard McCormack offers the conclusion that there is functional convergence in practice, while acknowledging that corporate rescue, as distinct from business rescue, still plays a larger role in the US. The focus is on corporate restructurings with in-depth scrutiny of Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code and the UK Enterprise Act, and offers other comparative oversights. Integrating theoretical and practical insights, this book will be of great interest to academics and practitioners, and also to policymakers in the DTI, Insolvency Service and regulatory bodies.







By Birth or Consent


Book Description

In mid-sixteenth-century England, people were born into authority and responsibility based on their social status. Thus elite children could designate property or serve in Parliament, while children of the poorer sort might be forced to sign labor contracts or be hanged for arson or picking pockets. By the late eighteenth century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent rather than on birth status. In By Birth or Consent, Holly Brewer explores how the changing legal status of children illuminates the struggle over consent and status in England and America. As it emerged through religious, political, and legal debates, the concept of meaningful consent challenged the older order of birthright and became central to the development of democratic political theory. The struggle over meaningful consent had tremendous political and social consequences, affecting the whole order of society. It granted new powers to fathers and guardians at the same time that it challenged those of masters and kings. Brewer's analysis reshapes the debate about the origins of modern political ideology and makes connections between Reformation religious debates, Enlightenment philosophy, and democratic political theory.