The book is about the informal sources of English Law that lie undiscovered because they are not included in Statutes, law reports, or in current legal teaching. Through his work with primary documents the author shows that this informal source of law is too important to go unnoticed by legal historians and commentators.

Speaking to today's flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of 'common law', the stuff of courtrooms, and 'natural law', a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today's natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.

In the common law world, Albert Venn Dicey (1835-1922) is known as the high priest of orthodox constitutional theory, as an ideological and nationalistic positivist. In his analytical coldness, his celebration of sovereign power, and his incessant drive to organize and codify legal rules separate from moral values or political realities, Dicey is an uncanny figure. This book challenges this received view of Dicey. Through a re-examination of his life and his 1885 book Law of the Constitution, the high priest Dicey is defrocked and a more human Dicey steps forward to offer alternative ways of reading his canonical text, who struggled to appreciate law as a form of reasoned discourse that integrates values of legality and authority through methods of ordinary legal interpretation. The result is a unique common law constitutional discourse through which assertions of sovereign power are conditioned by moral aspirations associated with the rule of law.

As the first woman to be appointed President of the UK Supreme Court, Brenda Hale was one of the UK's most high profile and influential judges, and she is among the most powerful women leaders of our time. For almost half a century, she pioneered as an educator, reformer, and decision-maker, leaving a distinct mark on the law and the lives of many. In commemoration of her recent retirement from the Supreme Court, this collection celebrates her long and illustrious career. Organised by thematic chapters and featuring original research from leading academics, judges and lawyers, this book offers a comprehensive account of Lady Hale's achievements and enduring impact. The contributors, many of whom were her peers and colleagues, demonstrate how Hale forged her own path within male-dominated institutions, carved a space for herself and others, and, ultimately, endeavoured to promote justice for everyone.

In this unique book Lord Woolf recounts his remarkable career and provides a personal and honest perspective on the most important developments in the common law over the last half century. The book opens with a comprehensive description of his family background, which was very influential on his later life, starting with the arrival of his grandparents as Jewish immigrants to England in 1870. His recollections of his early years and family, education and life as a student lead into his early career as a barrister and as a Treasury Devil, moving on to his judicial career and the many roles taken therein. The numerous standout moments examined include his work on access to the judiciary, prison reform, and suggested reforms to the European Court of Human Rights. Fascinating insights into the defining cases of his career, T AG v Jonathan Cape, Gouriet v Union of Post Office Workers, Tameside, Hazel v Hammersmith, M v Home Office, remind the reader of how impactful his influence has been. He considers the setting of the mandatory component of the life sentences of Thompson and Venables and the Diane Blood case. Alongside the case law, and the Woolf Reforms, the Constitutional Law Reform Act 2005 is also explored. Considering the ebb and flow of changes over his remarkable judicial life, Lord Woolf identifies those he welcomes, but also expresses regret on what has been lost. A book to remind lawyers, be they students, practitioners or scholars, of the power and importance of law. All author profits from the book will be donated to the Woolf Institute.

Under the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong the previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years. This concept has been embedded in the Basic Law of Hong Kong. The future of the Common Law judicial system in Hong Kong depends on the perceptions of it by Hong Kong's Chinese population; judicial developments prior to July 1, 1997, when Hong Kong passes from British to Chinese control; and the Basic Law itself. All of these critical issues are addressed in this book. It applies survey and statistical analysis to the study of the attitudes toward, and the values inherent to, the Common Law judicial system in the unique cultural and economic milieu of Hong Kong in transition.

Research on comparative administrative law, in contrast to comparative constitutional law, remains largely underdeveloped. This book plugs that gap. It considers how a wide range of common law systems have received and adapted English common law to the needs of their own socio-political context. Readers will be given complex insights into a wide range of common law systems of administrative law, which they may not otherwise have access to given how difficult it would be to research all of the systems covered in the volume single-handedly. The book covers Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Israel, South Africa, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, India, Bangladesh, Australia and New Zealand. Comparative public lawyers will have a much greater range of common law models of administrative law - either to pursue conversations about their own common law system or to sophisticate their comparison of their system (civil law or otherwise) with common law systems.

Despite plague, fire, political upheaval and religious strife, in the 17th century English people of all kinds used mediation and arbitration routinely to help resolve their differences. Kings and poor widows were parties. Kings and yeomen arbitrated. Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, Samuel Pepys, Robert Hooke and James I himself all took what they called arbitrament for granted as the best way of resolving all kinds of disputes they could not manage themselves. The redoubtable Lady Anne Clifford was exceptional; she successfully withstood the insistent demands of James I to arbitrate in her land dispute with her husband and family. Women appear as often as men in many of the primary sources and have a chapter to themselves. There are five parts: Part One describes the background; Part Two the subject matter: land, family and business; Part Three the people: parties and arbitrators; Part Four the law, and Part Five draws conclusions. The 17th century saw great changes in English life, but few and only towards its end in the ways in which parties managed their disputes by arbitrament, usually asking an even number of third parties, first to arrange a settlement as mediators and, if that failed, to adjudicate as arbitrators. Parties relied on bonds to ensure each other's performance of the submission and award. But, as the century drew to its close, lawyers advised their clients to take advantage of the courts' offer to accept a claim and, with the parties' consent, to refer it to arbitration, with arbitrators appointed by the court. That process came to be called a rule of court and the Government established it by the Arbitration Act 1698.

In a series of fifteen vivid essays, this book discusses the contributions of great common-law jurists and singular documents--namely the Magna Carta and the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts--that have shaped common law, from its origins in twelfth-century England to its arrival in the American colonies.
Featured jurists include such widely recognized figures as Glanvill, Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Coke, and John Selden, as well as less known but influential writers like Richard Hooker, Michael Dalton, William Hudson, and Sir Matthew Hale. Across the essays, the jurists' personalities are given voice, the context of time and events made clear, and the continuing impact of the texts emphasized. Taken as a whole, the book offers a simple reverence for the achievements of these men and law books and a deep respect for the role historical events have played in the development of the common law.

This book discusses the dominant corrective justice and distributive justice approaches to private law and identifies their strengths and weaknesses. It goes on to propose a general approach to private law, including contract, tort and private property, and explains how it can provide solutions to some longstanding problems. Two general ideas inform this approach: the ‘standpoint limitation’ and ‘remedial consistency’. The standpoint limitation explains the distinctive character of private law, that is to say why it is focussed mainly, though not exclusively, on particular individual interests rather than the common welfare. Remedial consistency explains the way in which remedies depend on and give effect to primary rights. The book also discusses the nature of common law legal reasoning and its relationship to the suggested understanding of private law.

The mediation of the balance between vigilance and restraint is a fundamental feature of judicial review of administrative action in the Anglo-Commonwealth. This balance is realised through the modulation of the depth of scrutiny when reviewing the decisions of ministers, public bodies and officials. While variability is ubiquitous, it takes different shapes and forms. Dean R. Knight explores the main shapes and forms employed in judicial review in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand over the last fifty years. Four schemata are drawn from the case law and taken back to conceptual foundations, exposing their commonality and differences, and each approach is evaluated. This detailed methodology provides a sound basis for decisions and debates about how variability should be brought to individual cases and will be of great value to legal scholars, judges and practitioners interested in judicial review.

This work traces the history of the English law of obligations from the twelfth century to the present day. It aims to cut through technicalities and to be comprehensible to readers other than specialist legal historians. It should be of interest to all those wanting to understand how the English Common law evolves.

Speaking to today's flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of 'common law', the stuff of courtrooms, and 'natural law', a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today's natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.

Each generation of lawyers in common law systems faces an important question: what is the nature of equity as developed in English law and inherited by other common law jurisdictions? While some traditional explanations of equity remain useful - including the understanding of equity as a system that qualifies the legal rights people ordinarily have under judge-made law and under legislation - other common explanations are unhelpful or misleading. This volume considers a distinct and little noticed view of equity. By examining the ways in which courts of equity have addressed a range of practical problems regarding the administration of deliberately created schemes for the management of others' affairs, modern equity can be seen to have a strongly facilitative character. The extent and limits on this characterisation of equity are explored in chapters covering equity's attitude to administration in various public and private settings in common law systems.

Street-Level Sovereignty: The Intersection of Space and Law is a collection of scholarship that considers the experience of law that is subject to social interpretation for its meaning and importance within the constitutive legal framework of race, deviance, property, and the communal investiture in health and happiness. This book examines the intersection of spatiality and law, through the construction of place, and how law is materially framed.

This book is a collection of judgments drawn from the innovative Wild Law Judgment Project. In participating in the Wild Law Judgment Project, which was inspired by various feminist judgment projects, contributors have creatively reinterpreted judicial decisions from an Earth-centred point of view by rewriting existing judgments, or creating fictional judgments, as wild law. Authors have confronted the specific challenges of aligning existing Western legal systems with Thomas Berry's philosophy of Earth jurisprudence through judgment writing and rewriting. This book thus opens up judicial decision-making and the common law to critical scrutiny from a wild law or Earth-centred perspective. Based upon ecocentric rather than human-centred or anthropocentric principles, Earth jurisprudence poses a unique critical challenge to the dominant anthropocentric or human-centred focus and orientation of the common law. The authors interrogate the anthropocentric and property rights assumptions embedded in existing common law by placing Earth and the greater community of life at the centre of their rewritten and hypothetical judgments. Covering areas as diverse as tort law, intellectual property law, criminal law, environmental law, administrative law, international law, native title law and constitutional law, this unique collection provides a valuable tool for practitioners and students who are interested in learning more about the emerging ecological jurisprudence movement. It helps us to see more clearly what a new system of law might look like: one in which Earth really matters.

The common law world (the Commonwealth and United States) operates through statutes applied under a uniform system, the essence of which is uniquely described in this book. Francis Bennion, the renowned Oxford don and legislative draftsman, here distills forty years of prolific writings on statute law and statutory interpretation.

Civil law and common law systems are held to enforce promises differently: civil law, in principle, will enforce any promise, while common law will enforce only those with 'consideration'. In that respect, modern civil law supposedly differs from the Roman law from which it descended, where a promise was enforced depending on the type of contract the parties had made. This 2001 volume is concerned with the extent to which these characterizations are true, and how these and other differences affect the enforceability of promises. Beginning with a concise history of these distinctions, the volume then considers how twelve European legal systems would deal with fifteen concrete situations. Finally, a comparative section considers why legal systems enforce certain promises and not others, and what promises should be enforced. This is the second completed project of The Common Core of European Private Law launched at the University of Trento.

The English common lawyers wielded their greatest influence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with names like Fortescue, Littleton and More. 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 book is a study of their formative impact on the whole of English life. Part I examines the legal profession, its position, recruitment, training and career structure, taking as an example the career of Thomas Kebell, a serjeant at-law from Leicestershire, for whom documentation is unusually complete. Part II analyses legal practice: how the lawyer acquired and kept clients, his relationship with them, the pattern of employment, the nature of practice as revealed in the year books, and the attitudes and approaches of the lawyer to the law. The third part considers the impact of the lawyers on substantive law and legal organization.

Using as a starting point the work of internationally-renowned Australian scholar Sam Ricketson, whose contributions to intellectual property (IP) law and practice have been extensive and richly diverse, this volume examines topical and fundamental issues from across IP law. With authors from the US, UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the book is structured in four parts, which move across IP regimes, jurisdictions, disciplines and professions, addressing issues that include what exactly is protected by IP regimes; regime differences, overlaps and transplants; copyright authorship and artificial intelligence; internationalization of IP through public and private international law; IP intersections with historical and empirical research, human rights, privacy, personality and cultural identity; IP scholars and universities, and the influence of treatises and textbooks. This work should be read by anyone interested in understanding the central issues in the evolving field of IP law.

Nothing is more important in English land law than 'possession'. It is the foundation of all title, rights and remedies. But what exactly is it, and why does it still matter? This book, first published in 2006, is about the meaning, significance and practical effect of the concept of possession in contemporary land law. It explains the different meanings of possession, the relationship between possession and title, and the ways in which the common law and equity do, and do not, protect possession. The rights and remedies of freeholders, tenants and mortgage lenders, between themselves and against third parties, are all to some extent dependent on questions of status and possession. This book shows how. It is designed to provide an understanding of the basic principles for the student, and answers to difficult, real problems for the practitioner.

This book offers a radical challenge to all existing accounts of the common law's development. Contrary to received jurisprudential wisdom, it maintains there is no grand theory which will explain satisfactorily the dynamic interactions of change and stability in the common law's history. Offering fresh and original readings of Charles Darwin's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, the book shows that law is a rhetorical activity that can only be properly appreciated in its historical and political context; tradition and transformation are locked in a mutually reinforcing but thoroughly contingent embrace. In contrast to the dewy-eyed offerings of much contemporary work, it demonstrates that, like life, law is an organic process (i.e., events are the products of functional and localized causes) rather than a miraculous one (i.e., events are the result of some grand plan or intervention). In short, common law is a perpetual work-in-progress - evanescent, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalising, and bottom-up.

This book offers a radical challenge to all existing accounts of the common law's development. Contrary to received jurisprudential wisdom, it maintains there is no grand theory which will explain satisfactorily the dynamic interactions of change and stability in the common law's history. Offering fresh and original readings of Charles Darwin's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, the book shows that law is a rhetorical activity that can only be properly appreciated in its historical and political context; tradition and transformation are locked in a mutually reinforcing but thoroughly contingent embrace. In contrast to the dewy-eyed offerings of much contemporary work, it demonstrates that, like life, law is an organic process (i.e., events are the products of functional and localized causes) rather than a miraculous one (i.e., events are the result of some grand plan or intervention). In short, common law is a perpetual work-in-progress - evanescent, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalising, and bottom-up.

Hong Kong is one of the very few places in the world where the common law can be practiced in a language other than English. Introduced into the courtroom over a decade ago, Cantonese has significantly altered the everyday working of the common law in China's most Westernized city. In "The Common Law in Two Voices," Ng explores how English and Cantonese respectively reinforce and undermine the practice of legal formalism.
This first-ever ethnographic study of Hong Kong's unique legal system in the midst of social and political transition, this book provides important insights into the social nature of language and the work of institutions. Ng contends that the dilemma of legal bilingualism in Hong Kong is emblematic of the inherent tensions of postcolonial Hong Kong. Through the legal dramas presented in the book, readers will get a fresh look at the former British colony that is now searching for its identity within a powerful China.

Hong Kong is one of the very few places in the world where the common law can be practiced in a language other than English. Introduced into the courtroom over a decade ago, Cantonese has significantly altered the everyday working of the common law in China's most Westernized city. In "The Common Law in Two Voices," Ng explores how English and Cantonese respectively reinforce and undermine the practice of legal formalism.
This first-ever ethnographic study of Hong Kong's unique legal system in the midst of social and political transition, this book provides important insights into the social nature of language and the work of institutions. Ng contends that the dilemma of legal bilingualism in Hong Kong is emblematic of the inherent tensions of postcolonial Hong Kong. Through the legal dramas presented in the book, readers will get a fresh look at the former British colony that is now searching for its identity within a powerful China.