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.

Status: Problems of Definition and Use

1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey MacCormack
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Development ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Ancient Law ◽  
Tribal Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law, first published in 1861, postulated legal development in terms of an evolution from status to contract. Since that time both lawyers and anthropologists have made frequent use of the notion of status in their characterisation of law or society. Although status is a concept well known in social theory whose exponents, independently of Maine, have worked out its content and application, much that has been written about status in a legal or anthropological context owes its inspiration to him. Maine's status to contract thesis has proved of interest both to lawyers studying the history of the common law or modern developments in the law of contract and to anthropologists studying social and legal phenomena in simple or tribal societies.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Thomas J. McSweeney
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Early History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Central Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

A central question in the early history of the common law is how much influence Roman and canon law exerted over the common law in its first century. The debates over Roman- and canon-law influence have largely stalled, however. This chapter introduces a new way forward in those debates. Most scholars who have looked for Roman- and canon-law influence on the common law have looked for similarities in particular rules and have argued that common lawyers adopted those rules from Roman or canon law. Priests of the Law argues that we are more likely to find borrowings in the context of more fundamental questions. The early thirteenth century was a time before the common law was the common law. There was debate over its nature and who should control it. In their attempts to answer these questions, the authors of Bracton turned to Roman and canon law.

scholarly journals Law, Language and the Printing Press in the Reign of Charles I: Explaining the Printing of the Common Law in English

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Ian Williams
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Professional Control ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Long Term Trend

The printing press had the potential to break the common lawyers' monopoly of legal knowledge. Early-modern England witnessed debates about the desirability of wider dissemination of legal learning. Previous scholarship has identified the long-term trend to increased printing of the law in English, focusing on ideological debates between lawyers and other key actors. Only selected texts and types of material were made available to the wider public before the 1620s. From the later 1620s a wider range of material which had hitherto existed only in manuscript was printed in English. Knowledge of the common law became more commonly available. This article identifies this crucial moment and explains the change. Rather than the ideological questions which are discussed in the existing literature, more mundane causes are identified for the legal profession's reduced control over the transmission of legal knowledge: a shift to the use of English by lawyers themselves, and a loss of professional control over manuscripts. The paper therefore demonstrates an important methodological point: understanding and assessing the history of legal printing requires engagement with older methods of transmitting the law.

Priests of the Law

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. McSweeney
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
New Interpretation

Priests of the Law tells the story of the first people in the history of the common law to think of themselves as legal professionals: the group of justices who wrote the celebrated treatise known as Bracton. It offers a new interpretation of Bracton and its authors. Bracton was not so much an attempt to explain or reform the early common law as it was an attempt to establish the status and authority of the king’s justices. The justices who wrote it were some of the first people to work full-time in England’s royal courts, at a time when they had no obvious model for the legal professional. They found one in an unexpected place: the Roman-law tradition that was sweeping across Europe in the thirteenth century. They modeled themselves on the jurists of Roman law who were teaching in Italy and France. In Bracton and other texts they produced, the justices of the royal courts worked hard to establish that the nascent common-law tradition was just one constituent part of the Roman-law tradition. Through their writing, this small group of people, working in the courts of an island realm, imagined themselves to be part of a broader European legal culture. They made the case that they were not merely servants of the king. They were priests of the law.

The First Edinburgh Chair in Law: Grotius and the Scottish Enlightenment

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University ◽  
Law Professors

This chapter examines the development of teaching from the chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the intellectual content of the classes and the politics of professorial appointments. For the first half-century, law teaching from the chair was intermittent. However, this does not mean that the holder was incapable or unlearned. When the holder of the chair did teach, the class was based on Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis libri tres. The chapter first provides an overview of legal education in Scottish universities before profiling the law professors who were appointed to the new chair between 1707 and 1831, including Charles Areskine, William Kirkpatrick, George Abercromby, Robert Bruce, James Balfour, Allan Maconochie, and Robert Hamilton. Robert Bruce was the last holder of the chair to teach Grotius' natural law.

Quasi-Contract

2019 ◽  
pp. 386-402
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Common Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter traces the history of what used to be called quasi-contract but is now part of the law of restitution. It was principally concerned with the receipt of money which belonged in justice to someone else. The earliest relevant action was account, at first limited to agents and then extended to all receivers of money; this was an impracticable action and went into disuse. Actions on the case came to the rescue, particularly the action for money had and received (a species of indebitatus assumpsit). The latter action was used not only in traditional cases of accountability but also where money was received by mistake or compulsion, where income from property was taken by an interloper, or where a party to a failed contract sought rescission. Much of the history is hidden from view by fictions, but Lord Mansfield declared a general principle based on the equity of the common law.

Law reform in the twenty-first century

Legal Studies ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Toulson
Keyword(s):  
Law School ◽  
First Century ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University ◽  
Law Commission

In this paper, which is the text of a lecture given at the official launch of the Law School at the University of Bradford on 11 May 2006, the history of law reform in England is traced, the role of the Law Commission is analysed and future prospects are considered.

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