Water resources were central to England's precocious economic development in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then again in the industrial, transport, and urban revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of these periods saw a great deal of legal conflict over water rights, often between domestic, agricultural, and manufacturing interests competing for access to flowing water. From 1750 the common-law courts developed a large but unstable body of legal doctrine, specifying strong property rights in flowing water attached to riparian possession, and also...

The leading case of The Mayor, Alderman and Burgesses of the Borough of Bradford v Pickles was the first to establish that it is not unlawful for a property owner to exercise his or her property rights maliciously and to the detriment of others or the public interest. Though controversial at the time, today it is often invisible and taken for granted. This book explores why the common law, in contrast to civil law systems, developed in this way.

The adversary system of trial, the defining feature of the Anglo-American legal procedure, developed late in English legal history. For centuries defendants were forbidden to have legal counsel, and lawyers seldom appeared for the prosecution either. Trial was meant to be an occasion for the defendant to answer the charges in person.
The transformation from lawyer-free to lawyer-dominated criminal trial happened within the space of about a century, from the 1690's to the 1780's. This book explains how the lawyers captured the trial. In addition to conventional legal sources, Professor...

Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition provides the first detailed historical account of one of England's great jurists. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Neil Duxbury examines Pollock's career, jurisprudence, philosophy of the common law, treatise writing, and editorial initiatives, and shows that Pollock's contribution to the development of English law and juristic inquiry is both complex and crucial.

This text reconstructs the martial law suppression of the Jamaica uprising of 1865, and the subsequent debate and litigation these events spawned in England.

A Jurisprudence of Power reconstructs the martial law suppression of the Jamaica uprising of 1865, and the subsequent debate and litigation these events spawned in England. The book addresses questions of legality, and the integrity of political ideals arising from the most important conflict over martial law and the rule of law in the history of England in the nineteenth century.

This text explores ideals of femininity during the 19th and early 20th centuries by charting responses to broken engagements. Interweaving a history of the legal remedies available for a broken promise of marriage with literary accounts from Dickens to Wodehouse, it offers an insight into modern attitudes to female identity.

The modern adversarial criminal trial emerged from the punitive and procedural upheaval in the criminal law of the first half of the nineteenth century. This is the first scholarly work to analyse the practice of advocacy and to identify its significance for the administration of justice. The topics discussed include the increasing sophistication of prosecution and defence advocacy, the beginnings of modern professional ethics and the conscious rationalisation of adversary procedure as the best means to discover the truth.