ABSTRACT Tithe was a personal charge levied on the Christian community to support the church. From the twelfth century AD canon lawyers distinguished tithe raised from the more valuable product of the land, praedial tithe, from that due from other, less valuable sources, personal tithe. This generated a third, mixed category. The origin of the distinction was an attempt to prevent tithe being diverted

ABSTRACT When widows claimed dower they were normally claiming part of the lands which their husband had possessed during their marriage. But the medieval common law also allowed widows to claim lands which the husband had never held if they had been in the possession of a close relative of the husband at the time of the marriage provided the relative had been present at the marriage and given consent

ABSTRACT By the early seventeenth century, about 180 cities, towns and townships in England and Wales were administered as self-governing boroughs. In 1615, in Bagg's Case, Coke CJ announced that the King's Bench possessed a jurisdiction to judicially review misgovernment in the boroughs. Coke CJ's claim to remedy ‘any manner of misgovernment’ was denounced by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and the King's

ABSTRACT This article revisits the nineteenth-century debate about medical quackery in Britain, to examine its implications for the history of modern advertising. It makes two related claims. First, the prevalent view of advertising as a field prone to exaggeration, often taken as obvious, has a legal history. The circumstances of the quackery debate led to a legal elaboration and formalization of

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

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

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

(2021). Scottish Legal History Group Report 2020. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 90-92.

(2021). Migrations of Manuscripts 2020. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 93-118.

(2021). Law and Society in England 1750–1950. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 119-121.

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

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

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’

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

This is a study of the pathology of a legal system, ‘the first book covering those who abused and misused the legal system in medieval England and the initial attempts of the Anglo-American legal s...

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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