A Trio of Legal History Books, reviewed in (2016) 176 Law and Justice 69-74. (original) (raw)

The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary composition (poetry and drama) and of new legal epistemologies of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. This Handbook brings historians, literary scholars, and legal historians together to build on and challenge these and sim...

The Renaissance of English Legal History

Cambridge Law Journal, 2021

Cambridge Law Journal. In many ways it was a response to, and development from, F. W. Maitland's Rede Lecture with the same title, published some 80 years previously. Baker's paper marks a punctuation in his study of English law under the early Tudors, a subject which he has made his own, culminating in his magisterial sixth volume of The Oxford History of the Laws of England. In addition, it marked a major break with the earlier orthodoxy that English law in this period was fundamentally distinct from the law which was developing on the European continent. The present paper explores both of these themes.

Anglo-Saxon Law: Its Development and Impact on the English Legal System (1991)

US Air Force Academy Journal of Legal Studies, 1991

The conquest of England by the Normans in the year 1066 has been described by the renowned English historian, Frederic William Maitland, as being a catastrophe which determined the entire future of English law. This traditional view of legal history has regarded the primary source of modem English law as being of Anglo-Norman origin and has often overlooked the valuable contributions made to it by the antecedent Anglo-Saxon customary law. The purpose of this article is to rectify this deficiency and to examine, in some detail, the operation of the Anglo-Saxon legal system.

History & Philosophy of Law: Basic References in English

The literature on history and philosophy of law is as interesting as it is vast; this list of references aims to provide some good points of entry into it, and some useful orientations within it, both historical and contemporary. (The aims are quality, variety and significant, not comprehensive coverage.

A Law for the People? English Courts and the Law, 1750-1850

In his provocative 1975 essay ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ Douglas Hay declared: ‘The private manipulation of the law by the wealthy and the powerful was in truth a ruling-class conspiracy, in the most exact meaning of the word. The king, judges, magistrates and gentry used private, extra-legal dealings among themselves to bend the statute and common law to their purposes.’ A doctoral candidate who studied under the direction of E.P. Thompson, architect of the Marxist-oriented ‘Warwick School’ of English social history, Hay’s inflammatory rhetoric narrowed the perspective of the English legal system down to a sweeping generalisation. He echoed his adviser’s belief that eighteenth-century English law ‘favoured those with power and disadvantaged those without.’ This essay presents the work of subsequent historians who disproved his assumption—most notably John Langbein—and which culminated in Peter King’s assessment that during this transitional period ‘the law held different meanings for different people and its pluralistic nature meant that each individual or social group might have a range of often contradictory experiences of legal institutions’.

Studies in English legal history. An introduction

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica

In this article, the general goals of the following volume of the journal were defined. It was described how Polish-English commercial and political relations evolved. Besides, a short history of the Polish lawyers’ interest in English law was presented. Finally, the author referred to the outcomes of the research of Polish scholars who were studying English legal history in the last half a century.

Recent Themes in English Criminal Justice History

2011

he three books under consideration here illustrate some of the important themes developing in the history of English criminal justice. The first book presents a careful study of the legal profession at a key moment when both the institutions of legal administration and the law itself were undergoing significant revision and reform. The second studies how recent advances in gender and literary theory might suggest a re-examination of the nature and patterns of criminality in early modern England. The third explores the interaction between the state and those living on the margins of society and traces the spread of social and institutional networks in a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Although the three books deal with distinct topics in various locales and in different time periods, each makes important contributions to the study of crime and law in the past, while also speaking to questions about the administration of justice in the present.

The History of the Common Law of England

The American Journal of Legal History, 1974

Edw. I. none being extant of Record in the Time of Hen. 3. but that of 49 Hen. 3. and none in the Time of Edw. I. till the 23 Edw. I. But after that year, they are for the most part extant of Record, viz. In Dorso Claius' Rotulorum, in the Backside of the Close Rolls. Secondly, As to the Rolls of Parliament, viz. The Entry of the several Petitions, Answers and Transactions in Parliament. Those are generally and successively extant of Record in the Tower, from 4 Edw. 3. downward till the End of the Reign of Edw. 4. Excepting only those Parliaments that intervened between the 1st and the 4th, and between the 6th and the 11th, of Edw. 3. But of those Rolls in the Times of Hen. 3. and Edw. I. and Edw. 2. many are lost and few extant; also, of the Time of Henry 3. I have not seen any Parliament Roll; and all that I ever saw of the Time of Edw. I. was one Roll of Parliament in the Receipt of the Exchequer of 18 Edw. I. and those Proceedings and Remembrances which are in the Liber placitor' Parliamenti in the Tower, beginning, as I remember, with the 20th year of Edw. I. and ending with the Parliament of Carlisle, 35 Edw. I and not continued between those years with any constant Series; but including some Remembrances of some Parliaments in the Time of Edw. I. and others in the Time of Edw. 2. In the Time of Edw. 2. besides the Rotulus Ordinationum, of the Lords Ordoners, about 7 Edw. 2. we have little more than the Parliament Rolls of 7 & 8 Edw. 2. and what others are interspersed in the Parliament Book of Edw. I. above mentioned, and, as I remember, some short Remembrances of Things done in Parliament in the 19 Edw. 3. Thirdly, As to the Bundles of Petitions in Parliament. They were for the most part Petitions of private Persons, and are commonly endorsed with Remissions to the several Courts where they were properly determinable. There are many of those Bundles of Petitions, some in the Times of Edw. I. and Edw. 2 and more in the Times of Edw. 3. and the Kings that succeeded him. Fourthly, The Statutes, or Acts of Parliament themselves. These seem, as if in the Time of Edw. I. they were drawn up into the Form of a Law in the first Instance, and so assented to by both Houses, and the King, as may appear by the very Observation of the Contexture and Fabrick of the Statutes of those Times. But from near the Beginning of the Reign of Edw. 3. till very near the End of Hen. 6.