scholarly journals COMMON LAW JURISPRUDENCE AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE RADICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GRANVILLE SHARP, AND CAPEL LOFFT

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE BERNARD OWERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ancient Constitution

AbstractA number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

The Invention of National Legal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Rückert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Critical Method

The chapter undertakes the first European overview up to the present and a comparison of the main European variations with its significant differences and communalities. European legal history is a product of special historiographies. The decisive contexts were the legal humanism and the monarchical state-nationalism of the seventeenth century. Legal history now was understood as task of legitimation, integration, and differentiation. The scientific basis was a new critical method. In the late eighteenth century the task became a modern national drive and was concentrated on state and folk. At the same time the genre was widened in nearly all branches of law. The three pioneers and model cases, namely Hermann Conring (1643) with K.F. Eichhorn (1808), Claude Fleury (about 1670), and Matthew Hale (about 1670), are analysed intensively.

The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

Common Law Confrontations

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 763-786
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Common

This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

Legal Change, Customary Right, and Social Conflict in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The Origins of the Great Gleaning Case of 1788

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter King
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal Precedent ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Law Reports

In 1788 the Court of Common Pleas, after lengthy deliberations, came to a judgment in Steel v. Houghton et Uxor, concluding that “no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest field.” Gleaning was of considerable importance to many laboring families in the eighteenth century; therefore, both the provincial and the London-based newspapers reported the 1788 judgment at length, as well as covering the 1786 case of Worlledge v. Manning on which it was partly based. The 1788 case not only stimulated a widespread public debate over the gleaners' rights, but also established an important legal precedent. From 1788 onward, every major legal handbook from Burn's New Law Dictionary of 1792 to the early twentieth-century editions of Wharton's Law Lexicon used it as the standard caselaw reference. It is quoted in a wide variety of law books written for farmers such as Williams's Farmers' Lawyer and Dixon's Law of the Farm, as well as inspiring long footnotes in the post-1788 editions of Blackstone's Commentaries. By 1904, it was being referred to in the law reports as “the great case of gleaning.”

Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern Indiacirca1600–1800 CE

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
INDRANI CHATTERJEE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Networks ◽  
Commercial Presence ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.

Masters of Disguise: French Cooks Between Art and Nature, 1651––1793

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
jennifer j. davis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Food Preparation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Treatises

This essay traces the changing place of artifice as an ideal in food preparation through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks and medical treatises published in France. Initially one of the guiding aesthetic principles of elite culinary production, artifice propagated a series of technical processes that redefined skill among cooks. However, by the late eighteenth century, an ideology of the natural gained ground in aesthetic philosophy, which rendered those same highly prized skills of disguise as increasingly suspect. Of course, it proved difficult to identify what qualified as ““natural cuisine. ”” During the eighteenth century, two oppositional definitions of natural cuisine developed, with very different implications for the organization of culinary labor. On the one hand, natural cuisine could indicate simple preparations, dispensing with the need for a master cook. On the other hand, natural cuisine could require a rigorous study of nature's laws. By positing a universal foundation for taste in natural law, natural cuisine envisioned the cook's liberation from diners' whims and so theorized a relationship in which the cook dictated standards of taste to consumers, rather than vice versa. We might trace today's celebrity chefs' authority over ““good taste”” back to the latter definition promoting a more natural cuisine.

Divine Poetry? Early Modern European Orientalists on the Beauty of the Koran

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Loop
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Islamic Belief

AbstractThis article discusses Western attitudes to the style of the Koran from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The subject is of particular interest because the question of the Koran's aesthetic value is ultimately linked with the Islamic belief that the inimitable beauty of Muhammad's revelation is the very proof of its divine origin (i'jāz al-Qur'ān). Given the apologetic function of this doctrine in Islamic theology, many early modern European orientalists, from Theodor Bibliander to Ludovico Marracci, criticised the style. Some of the arguments presented were remarkably persistent and can be followed up to the present day. This article also shows, however, that since the end of the seventeenth century scholars such as Andreas Acoluthus, George Sale and Claude-Etienne Savary had developed a more favourable attitude to the Koranic style, while, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Prophet Muhammad was seen as an inspired genius and the Koran as an example of 'divine poetry'.

Transforming the Law of Nations: The Case of the Eighteenth Century Italian Peninsula

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-146
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

Abstract This article aims to demonstrate and investigate how natural law and law of nations theories were used and adapted within the context of the Italian peninsula of the late eighteenth century. It proposes to retrace the ways in which the texts of the so called Ecole romande du droit naturel and particularly the Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des Nations et des Souverains by Emer de Vattel (1758) were used in and adapted to the Italian environment, which was extremely different from the one in which these texts were written and published, in order to contribute to the legal transformation process of the Italian states during the eighteenth century.

The ichneumon fly and the equilibration of British natural economies in the eighteenth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 639-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHEILA WILLE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Wealth ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Inherent Stability

AbstractThe parasitic ichneumon fly, discovered by European natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, remained largely unstudied until it captured the attention of Enlightenment-era natural historians. Although this sudden surge of interest has been explained as an effort to understand the natural ‘evil’ of parasitism, the heyday of ichneumon studies was actually inspired by the political and agricultural context of late eighteenth-century Britain. British naturalists were captivated by this insect for reasons both philosophical and practical. In the providentially self-equilibrating qualities of ‘natural’ ichneumon economies, they saw solutions to political problems of famine, dearth, national wealth, governance and excess population, in addition to finding reassurance that Enlightened confidence in nature's inherent stability and fruitfulness was not unfounded.

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