Baker and Milsom's Sources of English Legal History is the definitive source book on the development of English private law. This new edition has been comprehensively revised and udpated to incorporate new sources discovered since the original publication in 1986, and to reflect developments in recent scholarship.
All the sources included are translated into modern English, offering an accessible inroad to the leading primary materials for students of the history of the common law.
The sources themselves - revealing the operation of courts across a wide range of personal and economic disputes - offer a rich resource for historians researching the development of the English government, society, and economy. Their significance in shaping the common law spans beyond England, and ensures the collection is an essential reference point for all those interested in the history of the common law in any jurisdiction.

This book brings together past and present law commissioners, judges, practitioners, academics and law reformers to analyse the past, present and future of the Law Commissions in the United Kingdom and beyond. Its internationally recognised authors bring a wealth of experience and insight into how and why law reform does and should take place, covering statutory and non-statutory reform from national and international perspectives. The chapters of the book developed from papers given at a conference to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Law Commissions Act 1965.

In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte created the Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish lands that had been ceded to France by Prussia. His Civil Code was enforced in the new Duchy too and, unlike the Catholic Church, it allowed the dissolution of marriage by divorce. This book sheds new light on the application of Napoleonic divorce regulations in the Polish lands between 1808-1852. Unlike what has been argued so far, this book demonstrates that divorces were happening frequently in 19th century Poland and even with the same rate as in France. In addition to the analysis of the Napoleonic divorce law, the reader is provided with a fully comprehensive description of parties as well as courts and officials involved in divorce proceedings, their course and the grounds for divorce.

The 1866 Civil Rights Act is one of the most monumental pieces of legislation in American history, figuring into almost every subsequent piece of legislation dealing with civil rights for the next century. While numerous scholars have looked at it in the larger social and political context of Reconstruction and its relationship with the Fourteenth Amendment, this will be the first book that focuses on its central role in the long history of civil rights. As George Rutherglen argues, the Act has structured debates and controversies about civil rights up to the present. The history of the Act itself speaks to the fundamental issues that continue to surround civil rights law: the contested meaning of racial equality; the distinction between public and private action; the division of power between the states and the federal government; and the role of the Supreme Court and Congress in implementing constitutional principles. Slavery, Freedom, and Civil Rights shows that the Act was not just an archetypal piece of Radical Republican legislation or merely a precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment. While its enactment led directly to passage of the amendment, their simultaneous existence going forward initiated a longstanding debate over the relationship between the two, and by proxy the Courts and Congress. How extensive was the Act's reach in relation to the Amendment? Could it regulate private discrimination? Supersede state law? What power did it endow to Congress, as opposed to the Courts? The debate spawned an important body of judicial doctrine dealing with almost all of the major issues in civil rights, and this book positions both the Act and its legacy in a broad historical canvas.