Legal History as Doctrinal History

Author(s):  
Joshua Getzler

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.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Farihan Aulia ◽  
Sholahuddin Al-Fatih

The legal system or commonly referred to as the legal tradition, has a wealth of scientific treasures that can be examined in more depth through a holistic and comprehensive comparative process. Exactly, the comparison of the legal system must accommodate at least three legal systems that are widely used by countries in the world today. The three legal systems are the Continental European legal system, Anglo American and Islamic Law. The comparative study of the three types of legal systems found that the history of the Continental European legal system is divided into 6 phases, while Anglo American legal history began in the feudalistic era of England until it developed into America and continues to be studied until now. Meanwhile, the history of Islamic law is divided into 5 phases, starting from the Phase of the Prophet Muhammad to the Resurrection Phase (19th century until nowadays). In addition to history, the authors find that the Continental European legal system has the characteristic of anti-formalism thinking, while the Anglo American legal thinking characteristic tends to be formalism and is based on a relatively primitive mindset. While the thinking character of Islamic Law is much influenced by the thought of the fuqoha (fiqh experts) in determining the law to solve a problem, so relatively dynamic and moderate.


Author(s):  
John Baker

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.


1978 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
James F. Bailey

Comparative law has a long history, and it has long been a tradition among legal scholars to compare one legal system with others. Even in the days when Rome ruled the so-called “known world”, there were other legal systems which existed either with the Roman Empire, side-by-side with the Roman jus civilis, or outside the Empire in the German tribes, in the Parthian Empire, among the Celts, and so forth. Law is the element which regulates and harmonizes human activity, behavior, and endeavor within any ordered society, primitive or advanced, and few if any societies could exist for long without some sort of law and legal system. Law is therefore part of the culture, the daily life, behavior, civilization, and yes, even the history of a people and their civilization. Unless a civilization or folk-group is a carbon copy of another, then it is normal to expect differences in the manner in which rights are vindicated, differences resolved, and an orderly solution found for the conflicts in human life.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Mahendra Pal Singh ◽  
Niraj Kumar

Examination of Indian legal history illustrates the presence of multiple legal orders that coexisted in India through the ages. Moreover, certain ‘modern’ conceptions of law were present in similar forms in India before the medieval period, contrary to Western assumptions. Largely ignoring these legal traditions, the British attempted to re-give law and legal systems to the Indians. This was part of the larger project of ideologically justifying the presence of the British Raj in India. The British used India’s extant legal diversity to argue for the lack of a dominant legal tradition, leading to the introduction of British common law as the law of the land.


1936 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 119-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F. T. Plucknett

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.


1954 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. F. C. Milsom

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.


Obiter ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eltjo Schrage

Within both the civil law and the common law (as well as in mixed legal systems), there are means of acquiring and losing rights, or of freeing ourselves from obligations with the passage of time. The reason for this is at least twofold: on the one hand, for a claimant, a dispossessed owner or a creditor, limitation and prescription provide stimuli for bringing the action; on the other, this sanction upon the negligence of the claimant implies in many cases a windfall for the defendant. If a creditor is negligent in protecting his assets, the law at a certain stage no longer protects him or her. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said aptly some 100 years ago: “Sometimes it is said that, if a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example”.


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