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Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Ireland – State (Ryan) v Lennon and its Aftermath The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Thomas Mohr
ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922
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The Matrimonial Family in Byzantine Imperial Law: An Overview from Late Antiquity Until the Tenth Century AD The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-02 Manuel Vial-Dumas
ABSTRACT This article analyses the representation of the matrimonial family in Byzantine legislation. It provides an overview of the basic structures of the system from the time of Constantine the Great until the tenth century. The article considers the elements that can be seen in both the ideal conception provided by imperial law and the customs that imperial legislation recognized even when they
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‘By Fraud and Collusion’: Feudal Revenue and Enforcement of the Statute of Marlborough, 1267–1526 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-08 Ashley Hannay
ABSTRACT Following the Statute of Marlborough 1267, feoffments which were designed to deprive lords of wardship could in some circumstances be deemed ‘collusive’ or ‘fraudulent’. This was further complicated from the mid-fourteenth century onwards by the common practice of creating uses to circumvent the common law rules prohibiting the devise of land by last will. The effect of uses being created
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Scottish Legal History Group Report 2020 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-09
(2021). Scottish Legal History Group Report 2020. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 90-92.
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Migrations of Manuscripts 2020 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-08 Sir John Baker
(2021). Migrations of Manuscripts 2020. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 93-118.
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Law and Society in England 1750–1950 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2021-03-05 Ciaran McCabe
(2021). Law and Society in England 1750–1950. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 119-121.
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Collusive Litigation in the Early Years of the English Common Law: The Use of Mort D’Ancestor for Conveyancing Purposes c. 1198–1230 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 William Eves
ABSTRACT The extent to which real actions such as mort d’ancestor were used collusively for conveyancing purposes in the early years of the English common law is subject to debate. This article first discusses why parties to a transfer of land might engage in collusive litigation, before surveying the existing literature on the question of how collusive suits can be identified, and the suggestions
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Trials by Ordeal in a Kentish Court in the Early Thirteenth Century The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-11-08 Henry Summerson
ABSTRACT The document presented here, one which has gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians, contains the record of three trials by ordeal undergone by suspected thieves, almost certainly in the first decade of the thirteenth century. It has a special interest in that it illustrates procedure not in a royal but in a private court, that of the bishop of Rochester at Southfleet. In various ways
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Ownership in the Seventeenth-century Admiralty Court The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-11-05 George F. Steckley
ABSTRACT A sample of 1090 admiralty instance decrees from across the seventeenth century includes 234 that concerned either the ownership or co-owner management of merchant vessels. Some of these rulings issued by the high court of admiralty and found at the National Archives indicate what was usually required to prove title to a ship or shares in it. Some suggest whether London's civilian judges favoured
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Towards a Characterization of ‘Race Law’ in Medieval Wales The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-11-05 Matthew Frank Stevens, Teresa Phipps
ABSTRACT Welsh persons were subject to legal restrictions within and near Wales, from the point of local English conquest, c.1067–1283, until the 1536 Act of Union of England and Wales. In this article we outline modern scholars’ two main definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ applicable to the middle ages, both ‘race’ as a structural relationship used to essentialize and disadvantage a group and ‘race’
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Maintenance in Medieval England The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-11-03 N. G. Jones
(2020). Maintenance in Medieval England. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 343-346.
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The Disruptive Power of Legal Biography: The Life of Lord Phillimore – Churchman and Judge The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Charlotte Smith
ABSTRACT This article uses a biography of Lord Walter George Frank Phillimore, a prominent high churchman and judge in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to explore the ability of legal biography to disrupt settled or uncritical readings of his comments on the nature of an established church in the case of Marshall v Graham (1907). In so doing it highlights the impact of the nineteenth
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Scholars of Tort Law The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Mark Wilde
Scholars of Tort Law is a collection of essays by tort scholars on tort scholars. The contributors chose (or were possibly allocated in some cases) scholars who have played a significant role in cr...
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On Legal Biography The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Victoria Barnes, Catharine MacMillan, Stefan Vogenauer
An introduction to a collection of legal biographies is usually accompanied by an apologetic justification for the merits of such scholarship. Biography itself is often regarded as a questionable e...
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Sir Edward Fry: Law, Science and Religion The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Catharine MacMillan
ABSTRACT This article explores the life of Sir Edward Fry (1827–1918), England’s first Quaker judge. The argument is advanced that Fry’s legal life is best understood by setting it within the context of nineteenth-century Quakerism. While some of these Quaker influences are apparent in Fry’s public campaigns against wrongdoing, others are less apparent. The construction of his Treatise on Specific
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Feminist Legal Biography: A Model for All Legal Life Stories The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Rosemary Auchmuty, Erika Rackley
ABSTRACT Legal biography remains, with some exceptions, strongly influenced by Victorian biographical models, with a focus on ‘great’ men (since women could not become lawyers before 1920, and there have been few ‘great’ women lawyers) and their public achievements and contributions to law, and with little attention given to their private lives or their attitudes to women’s subordination in law. Feminist
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Interrogating the Self-told Narrative: Lord Lindley’s Autobiography, his Life and his Legal Biography The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Victoria Barnes
ABSTRACT Autobiographies are now popular forms of literature, but for those in the legal profession, this tradition has a much longer history. This article examines the memoir written by Lord Nathaniel Lindley (1828–1921). Lord Lindley is famed for his writings in company law and for his judgments in a considerable number of landmark cases in the court of appeal and in the house of lords. The article
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The Evolution of Manor Courts in Medieval England, c.1250–1350: The Evidence of the Personal Actions The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Chris Briggs, Phillipp R. Schofield
ABSTRACT Manor courts held by landlords for their tenants and other local people existed in their thousands across medieval England. Debate persists concerning the character of these institutions during their heyday in the decades before 1350. This article uses a new database containing hundreds of manorial personal actions – lawsuits which treated areas roughly equivalent to modern tort and contract
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Evaluation of Evidence: Pre-Modern and Modern Approaches The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Andrew L-T Choo
fiscal. The significance of such actions became visible in how they affected the enslaved. To the enslaved, obeah was a means of endurance, a sense of community and provided ties to some form of heritage they clung to. Removal of their ability to openly practise what they held dear was just another form of oppression which again the enslaved managed to survive. Browne shows that despite severe punishments
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Charitable Endowment and Social Change: Cy-Près Orders and Schemes, 1837–1901 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Charles Mitchell
ABSTRACT The article discusses the law governing cy-près applications of charitable endowment during the Victorian period and the institutional framework within which cy-près orders and schemes were made. Powers to make such orders and schemes were vested in the court of chancery and the charity commissioners, a body of administrative officials created in 1853. Some case-studies are undertaken, to
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Professional Liability and Forensic Science in the Context of the Lex Aquilia The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Ido Israelowich
ABSTRACT This article examines the emergence of professional liability and forensic science in the context of the Lex Aquilia. The interpretations of jurists, found in the sections of the Digest discussing the Lex Aquilia, subjected professionals to a higher standard of responsibility and liability, both in the context of locatio-conductio contracts and outside of it. At the same time, the Roman legal
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Inequality, Just Price and Bad Bargains: Contracting Attitudes after the South Sea Crash, 1720 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-09-02 Stephen Bogle
ABSTRACT In 1720, following the crash in South Sea stock, some doubted the legal and ethical enforceability of contracts concluded on the secondary market for the purchase of future South Sea stock. This article examines the argument of David Dalrymple who drew upon civil law, natural law and the notion of a just price to advocate for the annulment of these so called ‘time bargains’. It demonstrates
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Construction and Execution of Trusts in Chancery, c. 1660–1750 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-09-02 David Foster
ABSTRACT Relatively little has been written about the detailed workings of the court of chancery after the restoration. Even less is known about the doctrines of the chancery in the eighteenth century. Yet social historians of this period have relied on legal sources to generate a narrative which suggests that the landed classes were instrumental in determining the content of the rules governing family
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Lambe v Finch (1626): An Early Seventeenth-Century Expectant Heir Chancery Suit in Context The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-09-02 Helen Saunders
ABSTRACT The suit of Lambe v Finch (1626), at first glance, appears to offer evidence that the court of chancery’s jurisdiction to relieve expectant heirs from the consequences of their improvident bargains had at this time not yet developed to the point it was to reach in the latter part of the seventeenth century. However, if a contextual case study approach is taken, the significance of this particular
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The Transportation of Bigamists in Early-Nineteenth-Century England and Wales The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-09-02 Rebecca Probert, Liam D’Arcy-Brown
ABSTRACT Between 1795 and 1853, over 250 men and women were sentenced to transportation for committing the crime of bigamy. This harsh treatment is at odds with the assumption that the sentences handed down to bigamists were generally light. This article provides the first in-depth study of the use of transportation in this context, drawing on the criminal registers, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey
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The Limits of Legal Pluralism in the Roman Empire The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Kimberley Czajkowski
ABSTRACT The Roman empire was legally pluralistic. But what exactly does this entail in concrete terms? With the growth in historical studies of legal pluralism in the Roman empire, some significant differences in approach have emerged. This article tests and clarifies some of the limits in the current ‘legal pluralism’ conceptual landscape, focussing on disputes and dispute resolution. It is argued
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Did Roman Treatment of Freedwomen Influence Rabbinic Halakhah on the Status of Female Converts in Marriage? The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Yael Wilfand
ABSTRACT Rabbinic legal texts often pair converts with freed slaves. This association has been explained by the notion that, like converts, freed slaves joined Judaism upon manumission; therefore, freed men and women were legally viewed like converts. I suggest an inverse and more complex dynamic, through which Roman laws and concepts regarding freed persons influenced particular elements of rabbinic
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Herod the Great and the Iudicium Domesticum: Legal Pluralism to Die For The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Thomas A. J. McGinn
ABSTRACT The central question under consideration in this article is whether the various trials to which Herod, the well-known king of Judaea, subjected family members qualify as instances of the Roman iudicium domesticum. Modern debate among legal historians has been shaped by the views of two scholars in particular, Wolfgang Kunkel, who argues that one of them so qualifies, and Alfredo Mordechai
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Family Law(s) under the Roman Empire The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Yifat Monnickendam, Paul J. du Plessis
This special edition resulted from a workshop, generously funded by the Journal of Legal History. It took place on the 30th November–1st December 2017 at the University of Edinburgh School of Law and was organized by Dr Yifat Monnickendam and Professor Paul J. du Plessis. The motivation for this workshop arose from discussions concerning ‘law and society’ and whether insights from contemporary debates
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Marriage and Family Law in the Ancient Church Order Literature The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Joseph G. Mueller
ABSTRACT Numerous ancient texts present prescriptions on Christianity’s ethic, liturgy, leadership, and other institutions. Scholars call ‘church order literature’ a few of them composed in Greek, because of literary dependencies among them that make them an identifiable corpus. The composition of some of them seems to begin in the first century. In the fourth century, Christians began to gather them
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Greek Influences on Roman Dowry Law The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-05-04 Michael Leese
ABSTRACT Classical and Hellenistic Greek laws and dowry practices were generally more progressive and provided more protections for wives than early Roman marriage law and practice. Roman dowry law then witnessed a series of significant developments over the course of the republic, beginning with the time when the Romans were coming into increased contact with Greek culture. Changes in social attitudes
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The Emergence and Development of Statutory Process for the Compulsory Purchase of Land for Transport Infrastructure in England and Wales, c.1530–1800 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Stephen Gadd
ABSTRACT Before 1539, highway improvement in England and Wales (other than the clearance of illegal obstructions) was achieved only by crown licence following a satisfactory inquisition ad quod damnum. Magna Carta chapter 39 recorded that ‘that no free man is to be … disseised … except by … the law of the land’, but in the wake of other wide-ranging reforms in the 1530s, amid a growing sense of the
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Rebutting the Presumption: Rethinking the Common Law Principle of Marital Coercion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Emily Ireland
ABSTRACT While many historians refer to the legal presumption of marital coercion when discussing patterns of lenient judicial treatment of women in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English criminal trials, few have analyzed the presumption in enough detail to ascertain the impact it genuinely had. This article undertakes close legal analysis of marital coercion. It argues that the presumption was
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Ecclesiastical Law, Clergy and Laity: A History of Legal Discipline and the Anglican Church The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Charlotte Smith
caused problems of the type with which these legislative interventions were intended to deal. For example, very often one or both parties might be killed, there was often fault on both sides, and several vehicles might be involved. Overall, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature in the field and there is some very useful material and some important insights. Although each chapter in
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A History of Tort Law: 1900–1950 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Mark Wilde
writing an ‘epic story’ of the development of freedom under common law. Blackstone would, I am sure, have been delighted to be recognized as not just a Coke, or even a Justinian, but a Homer. This focus on freedom under law recurs in Simon Stern’s preface to Book II and Ruth Paley’s to Book IV. Seen in this light, the Commentaries appear to be rather more than the sum of their parts. Despite the achievements
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‘It is necessary that the issue be heard to cry or squall within the four [walls]’: Qualifying for Tenancy by the Curtesy of England in the Reign of Edward I The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Gwen Seabourne
ABSTRACT This article considers the test used to determine the presence or absence of life in newborn babies, in relation to a widower’s entitlement to remain in land brought to the marriage by his wife, as tenant by the curtesy of England. To qualify for curtesy, a widower needed to have produced a live and legitimate child, but, since even a short period of life was sufficient, there might be disputes
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The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751–1867 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-09-02 Ciara Kennefick
ABSTRACT Contract law and mathematics are, at first sight, singularly unlikely bedfellows. Yet, the influence of each discipline on the other has been significant. The primary claim in this article is that equity’s reception of the mathematics of probability in the second half of the eighteenth century led, at the beginning of the following century, to the development of a striking rule under which
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Thirteenth-Century Origins of Punitive or Exemplary Damages: The Statute of Westminster I (1275) and Roman Law The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-09-02 Jason Taliadoros
ABSTRACT This article highlights the importance of the Statute of Westminster I in the history of the concept of punitive or exemplary damages in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Maitland had long ago noted that its provisions allowing for double and triple reparation had similarities to duplum and triplum remedies in Roman law. But this tentative hypothesis has not been further explored by scholars
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A History of Australian Tort Law 1901–1945: England’s Obedient Servant? The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-09-02 Richard A. Buckley
Were the Australian courts in the first half of the twentieth century guilty of ‘cultural cringe’? This expression, dating back to an essay written in Australia in 1950, denotes an excessive defere...
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Felony Forfeiture at the Manor of Worfield, C.1370–C.1600 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-09-02 Spike Gibbs
ABSTRACT Felony forfeiture has recently received attention by historians working in both politico-legal and economic traditions. However, its history within the context of local lordships remains underexplored. By utilizing an exceptionally rich set of cases recorded in the court rolls of the manor of Worfield for the period c.1370–c.1600, this article explores the exercise of the franchisal rights
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Changes to Common Law Printing in the 1630s: Unlawful, Unreliable, Dishonest? The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-09-02 Ian Williams
ABSTRACT Law printing changed dramatically in the reign of Charles I. This article shows that the legally imposed monopoly on printing books of the common law (the law patent) was breached regularly and seemingly with impunity. Piracy, false attributions of authorship and concerns about quality all appear from the late-1620s onwards. The article explains these changes by stressing a number of factors:
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Judging a Judge: A Reappraisal of Lord Mansfield and Somerset’s Case The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Alexander Jackman
ABSTRACT This article presents an occasion on which moral judgement can, and should, take place. When the chief justice of the court of king’s bench – William Murray, first earl of Mansfield – was presented with the case of Somerset v Stewart in 1772, he was presented with choices that unveiled aspects of his character. By first establishing the ambiguity of the legal context and the multifarious political
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‘The Right to Shoot Himself’: Secession in the British Commonwealth of Nations The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Donal K. Coffey
ABSTRACT The ultimate test of whether an association is voluntary or not is if you can leave it. It is difficult, at this remove, to appreciate how live an issue secession from the British commonwealth of nations was in the 1920s and 1930s. It occupied an inordinate amount of time and negotiation for a doctrine that had been ostensibly conceded in 1920. Yet, much as with the case of the appeal to the
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The Failure of the First Income Tax: A Tale of Commercial Tax Evaders? The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Katherine Cousins
ABSTRACT This article constitutes a re-examination of the financial failure of the first income tax in Britain, introduced in 1799 in order to address the rising cost of the French revolutionary wars. In accounting for this failure, the existing literature has focused largely on failings in the administration of the tax, often blaming, for example, its emphasis on local responsibility for tax collection
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Constitution-making in Asia: Decolonisation and State-building in the Aftermath of the British Empire The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Donal Coffey
book, it is unsurprising that no contributing author is entirely against the uniting of theory and history. Certainly, a range of considerations and practical difficulties bringing theory and history together are well problematized and explored in a number of chapters. The reader finishes this book with a sense of the potential for interdisciplinary research both between theory and history, and with
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Constitutional Rights in the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1893 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Tom Allen
ABSTRACT In 1893, Prime Minister Gladstone introduced the second Irish home rule bill in parliament. The bill broke with tradition in Britain and the empire, as it included provisions from the bill of rights of the United States. Its significance was clear at the time: it was debated for nine days in the committee stage and, with one minor amendment, it remained part of the bill that passed the Commons
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Law in Theory and History: New Essays on a Neglected Dialogue The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-05-04 Cerian Charlotte Griffiths
that was itself the product of imperialism. Lawyers, paradoxically, both supported the existing imperial order and fostered a degree of Nigerian pan-nationalism that eventually worked to dislodge the colonial establishment. This volume as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is carefully, meticulously researched. More significantly, it raises fundamental questions about lawyers and the
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King Charls His Case: The Intended Prosecution of Charles I The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Sean Kelsey
ABSTRACT Charles I was put to death without having pleaded to the charges preferred against him during his trial. This article examines the case that his prosecutor later said he would have opened, had the king entered a plea. John Cook's case was predictably forthright in its denunciation of the accused. On the other hand, it has some highly significant omissions; some of it was legally and factually
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‘In fabrorum potestate’: Plautus and the Mother's Power in Ancient Rome The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Maria Elena Roccia
ABSTRACT Plautus’ Mostellaria contains the first attestation of the attribution of potestas over children to both parents, the mother as well as the father, in ancient Rome. Such an early analogy between pater and mater regarding their social status as parentes, along with a certain correlation between the parents’ duties and their power over their children, seems to suggest that a new social conception
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The Origins of ‘Alien Status’ in the English Common Law The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Paul Brand
ABSTRACT In his 2001 monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship, Dr Keechang Kim suggested that there was no evidence before the late fourteenth century that birth beyond the sea made a person an alien. This article discusses a series of cases heard from the mid-thirteenth century onwards in which tenants pleaded the claimant's birth overseas by way of bar to hereditary
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Jeremy Bentham and Equity: The Court of Chancery, Lord Eldon, and the Dispatch Court Plan The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Chris Riley
ABSTRACT In 1929 Sir William Holdsworth argued that Jeremy Bentham wrote ‘the best criticism’ of Lord Mansfield’s attempts to ‘fuse’ law and equity that has ever been made. As the present article will show, Bentham was in fact in favour of a form of ‘fusion’ that consisted of the abolition of the procedural distinction between law and equity, the incorporation of the subject-matters ordinarily handled
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Bentham on the Interpretation of Laws The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-09-02 Xiaobo Zhai
ABSTRACT A widely accepted view is that, for Bentham, legal interpretation was a mechanical or technical matter. This paper reconstructs Bentham’s complex theory of legal interpretation and challenges the above view. It demonstrates that Bentham’s theory of legal interpretation consists of three major theses. First, when there are different interpretations of a law, the authoritative interpreter ought
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The Origins of Trade Secrecy Law in England, 1600–1851 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-09-02 Sean Bottomley
ABSTRACT This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century until Morison v Moat (1851), described by the Oxford History of the Laws of England as ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions
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The ‘illegal sentences which magistrates were daily passing’: The Backstory to Governor Richard Bourke's 1832 Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act in Convict New South Wales The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-09-02 David Andrew Roberts
ABSTRACT Recent literature has recast the history of the British empire as a vast project of intervention in and reordering of colonial legal administrations. Closer inspection of local moments of legal reform, however, reveals substantial complications and contradictions in that project. This article re-considers Governor Richard Bourke's Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act 1832, the most celebrated
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John Vincent’s Reading at Gray’s Inn, 1668/9, on the Merchants’ Assurances Act 1601 The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-09-02 Jeffrey Thomson
ABSTRACT In Lent Term 1668/9, John Vincent, a bencher of Gray’s Inn, gave a reading on the Merchants’ Assurances Act 1601 (43 Eliz. I, c.12). The notes of the law reporter, Joseph Keble, record this observance of the centuries-old tradition of readings, which was destined to expire within the next two decades. This paper situates Vincent’s reading within the changing tradition of readings in the seventeenth
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Writing Histories of Law and Emotion The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-05-04 Merridee L. Bailey, Kimberley-Joy Knight
ABSTRACT In recent years the study of emotions in the past has received considerable attention. At the same time, many historians of law have shown reluctance to acknowledge and systematically explore emotions in legal sources and legal contexts. This issue of the Journal of Legal History addresses this imbalance and demonstrates how emotions have played important roles in legal reasoning, legal doctrine
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Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-05-04 Amy Milka, David Lemmings
ABSTRACT This article considers the role of emotion in the eighteenth-century courtroom. It discusses the work of judges and magistrates in constituting and upholding a ‘grand narrative’, which legitimized English criminal law. This grand narrative was inherently emotional, activating patriotism and love of justice, but also fear of punishment through the performance of ‘emotional labour’ from the
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Narrative, Law and Emotion: Husband Killers in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-05-04 Katie Barclay
ABSTRACT Scholars of emotion and the law have sought to demonstrate the significant role emotion plays in shaping the operation of courtrooms, the development of legal theory and practice, and the possibilities for justice. This paper contributes to the discussion by exploring what happens when emotion is ignored or underplayed in trial narratives, seeking to demonstrate that whose emotion is considered
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Emotions in the Early Common Law (c. 1166–1215) The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-05-04 John Hudson
ABSTRACT Beyond dealing with wrongdoing and litigation, law has many other functions. It can be designed to make life more predictable, it can facilitate and promote certain actions, it can seek to prevent disputes by laying down rules, and provide routes to solutions other than litigation should disputes arise. All of these can have connections to matters of emotion. Using both lawbooks and records
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‘She Felt Strongly the Injury to Her Affections’: Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Medicalization of Heartbreak in Early Twentieth-Century Australia The Journal of Legal History Pub Date : 2017-05-04 Alecia Simmonds
ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to
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