Bøger i Cambridge Studies in English Legal History serien

In the nineteenth century, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held sway over the lives, liberties and property of more than a quarter of the world's inhabitants.

Tying the Knot is for anyone interested in how couples have married from 1836 to the present day. It shows how the legal options have evolved and how social practices have changed, and demonstrates how the legal regulations have hindered many couples from marrying in accordance with their beliefs.

This book covers the period from the Reformation to the end of Lord Eldon's Chancellorship when the modern law of charity had taken a definite shape. Mr Jones shows how the contemporary religious, economic and social pressures moulded the substantive law and illustrates the importance of procedural considerations in defining the limits of legal charity.

Between 1300 and 1550, London's courts were the most important English lay law courts outside Westminster. They served the most active and innovative of the local jurisdictions in which custom combined with the common law to produce different legal remedies from those contemporaneously available in the central courts. More importantly for the long term, not only did London's practices affect other local courts, but they influenced the development of the national common law, and quite possibly the development of the legal profession itself. This 2007 book provides a detailed account, accessible to non-legal historians, of the administration of the law by the medieval and early modern city of London. In analysing the workings of London's laws and law courts and the careers of those who worked in them, it shows how that administration, and those involved in it, helped to shape the modern English law.

This book tells one part of the long history of the institution of marriage. Questions concerning the formation and annulment of marriage came under the exclusive jurisdiction of the church courts during the Middle Ages. Drawing on unpublished records of these courts, Professor Helmholz describes the practical side of matrimonial jurisdiction and relates it to his outline of the formal law of marriage. He investigates the nature of the cases heard, the procedure used, the people involved and changes over the period covered, all of which add to what is known about marriage and legal practice in medieval England. The concluding assessment of canonical jurisdiction over marriage suggests that the application of the law was more successful than is usually thought.

John Scott, Lord Eldon (1751-1838) was a dominant figure in Georgian public life, and ranks among the most important Lord Chancellors in the long history of that office. This biography - the first for one hundred and fifty years - also surveys Eldon's earlier career as an MP and Law Officer. As a lawyer entering Parliament, he encountered both prejudices against 'learned gentlemen' and opportunities for advancement. Once in office he swiftly made his presence felt, drafting the Regency bill of 1788, and conducting the government's legal campaign against Republicanism. Retiring at last in 1827, Eldon spent his final years opposing political reform. Labelled by many as a relic of 'Old Toryism', Eldon's views of government, politics, and the constitution represent an important strand in Georgian political thinking, and his career illuminates the work of the major legal offices of British government.

The first study of the individuals who abused and misused the legal system in medieval England and the initial attempts of the Anglo-American legal system to deal with these forms of legal corruption. It will appeal to readers interested in the medieval period, English history, and the legal professions.

This book, the first extended study of the legal thought of Edward Coke, investigates how law reform impacted his understanding of individual rights, royal authority, and the need for confidence in legal institutions. In doing so, it offers a new explanation for the shaping of early modern constitutional thought.

A demonstration of the contemporary context and significance of Maine's approach to the law.

This book presents a study of the evolution of a professional judiciary in medieval England through the careers of forty-nine royal justices from the last decade of Henry II until 1239. Those years were crucial for the growth of the common law, producing the two legal treatises Glanvill and Bracton.

This book describes and comments on the documents by which land was transferred from one person to another in medieval England. Many different kinds of transaction are examined separately, and each type is illustrated by quotations from original deeds and discussed in connection with the law of the relevant period.

The court of the exchequer, which was the ancient court of tax claims, assumed an equity jurisdiction in the sixteenth century which continued until 1841. This book describes the rise, development and abolition of this part of the court.

The English common lawyers wielded their greatest influence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In these years they were more than the only organized lay profession: in the infancy of statute, they, more than anyone, shaped and changed the law; they were the managerial elite of the country; they were the single most dynamic group in society.

This study is devoted chiefly to Ellesmere's career and writings as Lord Chancellor, 1603-1617.

This study presents a full account of Sheppard's employment under Cromwell's Protectorate as well as an examination of his family background and education, his religious commitment to John Owen's party of Independents and his legal philosophy.

Professor Bellamy traces the English law of treason to Roman and Germanic origins, and discusses the development of royal attitudes towards rebellion, the judicial procedures used to try and condemn suspected traitors, and the interaction of the law of treason and constitutional ideas.

Keechang Kim makes full use of medieval and early modern sources in this reinterpretation of the legal aspects of feudalism, proposing a radical new understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime. This innovative study will interest academics, lawyers, and students of legal history, immigration and minority issues.

In this major study, Professor Bourguignon analyzes Sir William Scott's work as judge of the admiralty court in the light of the little-known, unpublished body of law which had been developed prior to his appointment.

Fee tails were a heritable interest in land which was both inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to descendants of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins of the entail, and the development of a reliable legal mechanism for their destruction, the common recovery.

In The Law of Evidence in Victorian England, which was originally published in 1997, Christopher Allen provides a fascinating account of the political, social and intellectual influences on the development of evidence law during the Victorian period.

McGlynn examines legal education at the Inns of Court in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. By focusing on Prerogativa Regis, she shows how the law was developed, the points of contention within and between generations, and how the general knowledge of the legal profession was utilized and refined.

This 1999 book was the first full-length account of the county court, which in contemporary English life has become the main forum for most civil disputes. It began as the 'poor man's court'; but, as this book shows, it has expanded beyond its working-class origins.

This text was the first study of the bills leading to the Copyright Act 1842, during which Talfourd sought to reform copyright law. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, Seville explores the controversy provoked by the act, which led to Talfourd having to considerably modify his bill.

This work charts the massive sixteenth-century increase in central court litigation and offers an explanation of it largely in terms of social change and the decline of local jurisdictions. At the same time, it argues that the period witnessed a major turning point in the relationship between the legal profession and English society.

R. H. Helmholz, one of the world's foremost legal historians, here draws upon the evidence of the canon law, court records and the English common-law system to demonstrate the surprising extent to which Roman law survived in England after the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation.

This is a history of the law of bills and notes from medieval times to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when bills played a central role in domestic and international finances. It charts the development of legal rules and the relationship between law and economic and social controversies.

This new account of the influence of Magna Carta on the development of English public law is based largely on unpublished manuscripts. The story was discontinuous. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the charter was practically a spent force. Late-medieval law lectures gave no hint of its later importance, and even in the 1550s a commentary on Magna Carta by William Fleetwood was still cast in the late-medieval mould. Constitutional issues rarely surfaced in the courts. But a new impetus was given to chapter 29 in 1581 by the 'Puritan' barrister Robert Snagge, and by the speeches and tracts of his colleagues, and by 1587 it was being exploited by lawyers in a variety of contexts. Edward Coke seized on the new learning at once. He made extensive claims for chapter 29 while at the bar, linking it with habeas corpus, and then as a judge (1606-16) he deployed it with effect in challenging encroachments on the common law. The book ends in 1616 with the lectures of Francis Ashley, summarising the new learning, and (a few weeks later) Coke's dismissal for defending too vigorously the liberty of the subject under the common law.

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated historical examination. This book examines both common law and statutory innovations, paying special attention to underlying assumptions about the operation of society, the function of tort law, and the roles of those involved in legal changes. It recovers the legal and social contexts in which some landmark decisions were given (and which puts those decisions in a very different light) and draws attention to significant and suggestive cases that have fallen into neglect. It also explores the theoretical debates of the period about the nature of tort law, and reveals the fascinating patterns of influence and power at work behind statutory initiatives to reform the law.