English Legal History and its Sources


Book Description

This volume honours the work and writings of Professor Sir John Baker over the past fifty years, presenting a collection of essays by leading scholars on topics relating to the sources of English legal history, the study of which Sir John has so much advanced. The essays range from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, considering courts (central and local), the professions (both common law and civilian), legal doctrine, learning, practice, and language, and the cataloguing of legal manuscripts. The sources addressed include court records, reports of litigation (in print and in manuscript), abridgements, fee books and accounts, conveyances and legal images. The volume advances understanding of the history of the common law and its sources, and by bringing together essays on a range of topics, approaches and periods, underlines the richness of material available for the study of the history of English law and indicates avenues for future research.




Essays in English Legal History


Book Description

This volume is a collection of essays written by Samuel E. Thorne, former legal historian and professor at the Harvard Law School. Professor Thorne was considered an authority on English legal history and common law up to the 12th century. Bringing together essays on topics such as Henry I's coronation charter, English feudalism, the early history of the Inns of Court, sovereignty and the conflict of laws and Tudor social transformation, as well as the life and writings of key figures such as Henry de Bracton and Sir Edward Coke, this collection is the essential companion to Professor Thorne's work in the field.




Essays in Law and History


Book Description

xv, 302 pp. Originally published: Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946. Compiled and edited by A.L. Goodhart and H.G. Hanbury, editors of the last four volumes of Holdsworth's History of English Law, this volume presents a selection of seventeen essays by the great legal scholar. Highlights from his long and prolific career, they address such topics as martial law, the English constitution, case law, equity, trusts, libel, law reporting, contracts and land law. "These essays tend to enlarge the mind and to stir the imagination. They are the work of one of the most distinguished of the great line of English legal historians." --Bernard L. Shientag, Columbia Law Review 47 (1947) 1255 WILLIAM S. HOLDSWORTH [1871-1944] was a professor of constitutional law at Cambridge from 1903-1908 and the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1922-1944. He is well-known for his monumental History of English Law (1st ed. 1908) and other works, such as Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1929) and Some Makers of English Law (1938). ARTHUR LEHMAN GOODHARD [1891-1978] was an American-born British academic jurist and lawyer. He was editor of the Cambridge Law Journal from 1921 to 1925, editor the Law Quarterly Review in 1926, a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University from 1931-1951 and the first American to be the master of an Oxford College. HAROLD GREVILLE HANBURY [1898-1993] was a Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1921-1949 and All Souls College, Oxford, from 1949-1964. His works include Modern Equity: Being the Principles of Equity (1935), The Principles of Agency (1952) and The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (1958).




Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law


Book Description

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law builds upon the legal historian F.W. Maitland's famous observation that history involves comparison, and that those who ignore every system but their own 'hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history'. The extensive introduction addresses the intellectual challenges posed by comparative approaches to legal history. This is followed by twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the 24th British Legal History Conference. These essays explore patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice across an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range. Carefully selected to provide a network of inter-connections, they contribute to our better understanding of legal history by combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.




Taming the Past


Book Description

A critical catalogue of how lawyers use history - as authority, as evocation of lost golden ages, as a nightmare to escape and as progress towards enlightenment.




Law Books in Action


Book Description

'Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise' explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action', the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action', an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be, not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other forms of legal writing, but a multifaceted genre of legal literature in its own right, practical and fanciful, dogmatic and ornamental in turn. This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.




Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England


Book Description

Explores the impact of legal ideas and legal consciousness on early modern English society and culture.




An Introduction to English Legal History


Book Description

Fully revised and updated, this classic text provides the authoritative introduction to the history of the English common law. The book traces the development of the principal features of English legal institutions and doctrines from Anglo-Saxon times to the present and, combined with Baker and Milsom's Sources of Legal History, offers invaluable insights into the development of the common law of persons, obligations, and property. It is an essential reference point for all lawyers, historians and students seeking to understand the evolution of English law over a millennium. The book provides an introduction to the main characteristics, institutions, and doctrines of English law over the longer term - particularly the evolution of the common law before the extensive statutory changes and regulatory regimes of the last two centuries. It explores how legal change was brought about in the common law and how judges and lawyers managed to square evolution with respect for inherited wisdom.




Feminist Legal History


Book Description

Attuned to the social contexts within which laws are created, feminist lawyers, historians, and activists have long recognized the discontinuities and contradictions that lie at the heart of efforts to transform the law in ways that fully serve women's interests. At its core, the nascent field of feminist legal history is driven by a commitment to uncover women's legal agency and how women, both historically and currently, use law to obtain individual and societal empowerment. Feminist Legal History represents feminist legal historians' efforts to define their field, by showcasing historical research and analysis that demonstrates how women were denied legal rights, how women used the law proactively to gain rights, and how, empowered by law, women worked to alter the law to try to change gendered realities. Encompassing two centuries of American history, thirteen original essays expose the many ways in which legal decisions have hinged upon ideas about women or gender as well as the ways women themselves have intervened in the law, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's notion of a legal class of gender to the deeply embedded inequities involved in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a 2007 Supreme Court pay discrimination case. Contributors: Carrie N. Baker, Felice Batlan, Tracey Jean Boisseau, Eileen Boris, Richard H. Chused, Lynda Dodd, Jill Hasday, Gwen Hoerr Jordan, Maya Manian, Melissa Murray, Mae C. Quinn, Margo Schlanger, Reva Siegel, Tracy A. Thomas, and Leti Volpp