Full Description
This collection of papers from the Twentieth British Legal History Conference explores the relationship between substantive law and the way in which it actually worked. Instead of looking at what the courts said they were doing, it is concerned more with the reality of what was happening. To that end, the authors use a wide range of sources, from court records to merchants' diaries and lawyers' letters. The way in which the sources are used reflects the possibilities of legal historical research which are opening up in the twenty-first century, as large databases and digitised images - and even online auction sites - make it a practical possibility to do work at a level which was almost unthinkable only a short time ago.
Contents
1. 'The hypostasis of prophecy': legal realism and legal history Charles Donahue, Jr; 2. Chancery, the Justices and the making of new writs in thirteenth-century England Paul Brand; 3. Copulative complexities: the exception of adultery in medieval dower actions Gwen Seabourne; 4. Arbitration and the legal profession in late medieval England Anthony Musson; 5. Privileges and their application in the main English central courts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Susanne Jenks; 6. Trusts litigation in chancery after the Statute of Uses: the first fifty years Neil Jones; 7. The assessment of contractual damages at common law in the late sixteenth century David Ibbetson; 8. The case of Joan Peterson: witchcraft, family conflict, legal invention, and constitutional theory Clive Holmes; 9. Criminal informations of the Attorneys-General in the King's Bench from Egerton to North Henry Mares; 10. Lawyers, merchants, and the law of contract in the long eighteenth century Warren Swain; 11. Creditors and the Feme Covert James Oldham; 12. Legal process as reported in correspondence John Baker; 13. Legal development in Victorian felony trials Phil Handler; 14. Cutting the Gordian Knot? Arbitration and company insolvency in the 1870s Michael Lobban; 15. 'Forty years on': the British Legal History Conference, 1972-2011 Patrick Polden.
