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,...

Nineteenth-century governments faced considerable challenges from the rapid, novel and profound changes in social and economic conditions resulting from the industrial revolution. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated and complex government, from the 1830s the specialist and largely lay statutory tribunal was conceived and adopted as the principal method of both implementing the new regulatory legislation and resolving disputes. The tribunal's legal nature and procedures, and its place in the machinery of justice, were debated and refined throughout the Victorian period. In...

The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.

Historians have long recognized that members of the lower branch of the legal profession, the ancestors of the modern solicitors, played an important part in early modern English society, but difficulties in establishing their identities and recovering their career patterns have hitherto left them virtually unstudied. 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...

This study presents a full account of Sheppard's employment under Oliver 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. An appraisal of all Sheppard's legal works, including those written during the Civil War and the Restoration period, illustrates the overlapping concerns with law reform, religion and politics in his generation. Sheppard had impressively consistent goals for the reform of English law and his prescient proposals anticipate the reforms ultimately...

In this original reinterpretation of the legal status of foreigners in medieval England, Keechang Kim proposes a radically new understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime and the important distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Making full use of medieval and early modern sources, the book examines how feudal legal arguments were transformed by the political theology of the Middle Ages to become the basis of the modern legal outlook. This innovative study will interest academics, lawyers, and students of legal history, immigration and minority issues.

In The Law of Evidence in Victorian England, Christopher Allen provides a fascinating account of the political, social and intellectual influences on the development of evidence law during the Victorian period. His book convincingly challenges the traditional view of the significance of Bentham's critique of the state of contemporary evidence law, and describes instead the extent to which ongoing common law developments had already anticipated many of the improvements for which Bentham has usually been credited as the instigator.

Focusing on one text, Prerogativa Regis, this book examines legal education at the Inns of Court in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century through surviving lecture notes. It demonstrates the ways in which the law developed from generation to generation; the points of contention within and between generations, and the ways in which the general knowledge of the legal profession was utilized and refined. It also considers whether the lawyers' treatment of this charged topic was affected by political pressures from outside the Inns.

John Scott, Lord Eldon (1751-1838) was an important English lawyer and 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 in approximately 150 years, traces Eldon's public career, from MP to Lord Chancellor. That career was significant for its duration and complexity. Eldon held public office for almost 49 years, and his 25 year tenure as Lord Chancellor is unique. This enabled him to exercise influence in almost every government between 1788-1827.

"Fee tails" were a building block for family landholding from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The classic entail was an interest in land which was inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to the lineal heirs of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins, development and use of the entail, and the origins of a reliable legal mechanism for the destruction of individual entails, the common recovery.