A Concise History of the Common Law. By T. F. T. Plucknett, M.A. (Lond.), LL.B. (Cantab.); Professor of Legal History in the University of London. 3 edition. London: Butterworth & Co. (publishers), Ltd. 1940. xxx, 672 and 45 pp. (20s.)

1941 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 434-434
Author(s):  
P. H. W.
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The University

Baker and Milsom Sources of English Legal History

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

This book contains selected cases, statutes, and a few other texts, relating to the history of English private law between 1194 and 1750. (Cases after 1750 are mostly available in the English Reports.) It may be used as a companion to the textbooks written by the compilers, but the purpose is different from that of a textbook. The original materials are here allowed to speak for themselves, without commentary. Most of them are reports of cases, which show how the common law evolved through argument. The losing arguments help to explain those which prevailed, and it is often instructive to know what was not argued. Most of the reports were written in law French, but they are here given in English translation, corrected or augmented from manuscripts, together with notes from the enrolled Latin records. Much of this material is not available in English translation elsewhere. The second impression (2019) contains corrections and additions.

Blackstone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John V. Orth
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
First Century ◽  
Legal Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University ◽  
Law Professors

This chapter focuses on Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), the author of the most important book in the history of the common law. The four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) and the series of lectures Blackstone delivered at Oxford from 1753, changed the way lawyers thought about the law. Blackstone’s Commentaries were read by more people, non-lawyers as well as lawyers, than any other English law book. Their influence is difficult to overstate, and extends into the twenty-first century. Almost as momentous was Blackstone’s influence on legal education. While gradual, the transfer of legal education from the law office and the courts to the university, which Blackstone pioneered, had an enormous impact on legal development, as law professors contributed to the formation of generations of lawyers and themselves came to play a significant role in legal development.

Adjudication and interpretation in the common law: a century of change

Legal Studies ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Birks
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

This paper is concerned with one hundred and ten years of legal history. It is a success story. Yet it has, not an unhappy ending, for the end is in the future, but an unhappy present. Markers put down in 1883 and 1983 define the century. The change in question is the modernization of the literature of common law and hence of all the machinery of its interpretative development. Having been kept in shape first by the forms of action and then by a hardening of the doctrine of precedent, in the late nineteenth century the growing mass of case law urgently required to be more rationally ordered and explained. It began to find in the universities the means of achieving that improvement. Analysis, definition and classification, the familiar tools of the university, were brought to bear for the first time on the raw materials of the common law.

Some Proposed Legislation of Henry VIII

1936 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 119-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F. T. Plucknett
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Human Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Law Reports

One of the most fascinating features in the study of the history of the common law as revealed in six centuries of law reports is the possibility of tracing the growth of legal thought over long periods of time; hints, suggestions, unsuccessful attempts to establish a rule or a doctrine often appear in such sources long before the innovation has received the final approbation of the courts, and so we are privileged to watch the progress of legal speculation, to overhear the debates upon new departures, and to estimate the forces which produced or obstructed some projected innovation. It is this possibility which gives such life and vividness to legal history. In many fields of thought we are mainly confined to those considered statements of results which have been deliberately left to us by philosophers, theologians, or politaical theorists, but the historian of the common law has more intimate and more human material at his disposal.

Legal History as Doctrinal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Getzler
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Common ◽  
History Of Doctrine

This chapter investigates the idea of doctrine as a focus of historical scholarship, asking how the doctrinal mentality arose, and how historical approaches to doctrine emerged strongly in both common-law and civilian or Romanistic legal cultures. It first defines the meaning of ‘doctrine’, and sets out a guiding thesis. It argues that an important dimension of doctrine is communication; and jurists become fascinated by the history of doctrine when social and political conditions necessitate an expansion or transfer of the legal system, with concomitant transfers of doctrinal thought. The chapter then traces the development of doctrinal history from Gaius to the common law tradition.

Not Doing is no Trespass

1954 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. F. C. Milsom
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Standard Work ◽  
Secondary Purpose ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

This article will tell some elementary stories about the history of contract and tort. Its purpose is primarily pedagogic: although the stories are largely old, they are not very clearly explained in the books, and in particular they are done something less than justice in the standard work, Mr. Fifoot's invaluable History and Sources of the Common Law. Since the present aim is to explain what the stories are, rather than to prove that they are true, their telling will be as little encumbered as possible with old cases and their technicalities. A secondary purpose is to set the stories together, and show how far they turn out to be the same story. It is doubtful whether even Ames, who first stated the most important of them, fully realised how far the point was the same in each; and since in one guise or another it is the point of much legal history it deserves more emphasis than it has had. Finally, since Professor Plucknett freed us from the sterile delusion that case was somehow “like” trespass, there has grown up a new background of ideas in which the old stories must be set afresh.

Conversations with Emeritus Professor Stroud Francis Charles (Toby) Milsom: A Journey from Heretic to Giant in English Legal History

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Dingle
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
London School ◽  
Public Records ◽  
The Public ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
London School Of Economics ◽  
The University

AbstractLesley Dingle, founder of the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge, gives a further contribution in this occasional series concerning the lives of notable legal academics. On this occasion, the focus of her attention is Stroud Francis Charles (Toby) Milsom QC BA who retired from his chair of Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge in 2000 after a distinguished career as a legal historian at the universities of Oxford, London School of Economics and St John's College Cambridge. His academic life and contentious theories on the development of the Common Law at the end of the feudal system in England were discussed in a series of interviews at his home in 2009. At the core are aspects of his criticism of the conclusions of the nineteenth century historian Frederick William Maitland, upon which the teaching of the early legal history of England was largely based during much of the 20th century. Also included are insights into his research methods in deciphering the parchment Plea Rolls in the Public Records Office, and anecdotes relating to his tenure as Dean at New College Oxford (1956–64) as well as associations with the Selden Society: he was its Literary Director, and later President during its centenary in 1987. Professor Milsom also briefly talked of his memories of childhood during WWII and his inspirational studies as a student at the University of Pennsylvania (1947–48).

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