Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

For nineteenth-century Britons, the rule of law stood at the heart of their constitutional culture, and guaranteed the right not to be imprisoned without trial. At the same time, in an expanding empire, the authorities made frequent resort to detention without trial to remove political leaders who stood in the way of imperial expansion. Such conduct raised difficult questions about Britain's commitment to the rule of law. Was it satisfied if the sovereign validated acts of naked power by legislative forms, or could imperial subjects claim the protection of Magna Carta and the common law tradition? In this pathbreaking book, Michael Lobban explores how these matters were debated from the liberal Cape, to the jurisdictional borderlands of West Africa, to the occupied territory of Egypt, and shows how and when the demands of power undermined the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Written in memory of Christopher W. Brooks, this collection of essays by prominent historians examines and builds on the scholarly legacy of the leading historian of early modern English law, society and politics. Brooks's work put legal culture and legal consciousness at the centre of our understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society, and the English common law tradition. The essays presented here develop a number of strands found in his work, and take them in new directions. They shed new light on central debates in the history of the common law, exploring how law was understood and used by different communities in early modern England, and examining how and why people engaged (or did not engage) in litigation. The volume also contains two hitherto unpublished essays by Christopher Brooks, which consider the relationship between law and religion and between law and political revolution in seventeenth-century England.

Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

This book explores the intellectual contexts in which the development of tort law took place in Europe. With contributions from legal theorists, social and intellectual historians and comparative lawyers, it examines how conceptions of community and responsibility changed over time, providing a context both for new notions of the role of the state in protecting its citizens and for new interpretations of older private law concepts. The book also examines how the law of tort was shaped and applied by judges in the codified and uncodified systems, comparing the common law system of England with the systems in France and Germany, whose codes were created in very different contexts. The book includes chapters that look at the role of experts in shaping the law's response to workplace hazards and concludes with a discussion of the role of academic networks in developing the notion of a European private law.

Written in memory of Christopher W. Brooks, this collection of essays by prominent historians examines and builds on the scholarly legacy of the leading historian of early modern English law, society and politics. Brooks's work put legal culture and legal consciousness at the centre of our understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society, and the English common law tradition. The essays presented here develop a number of strands found in his work, and take them in new directions. They shed new light on central debates in the history of the common law, exploring how law was understood and used by different communities in early modern England, and examining how and why people engaged (or did not engage) in litigation. The volume also contains two hitherto unpublished essays by Christopher Brooks, which consider the relationship between law and religion and between law and political revolution in seventeenth-century England.

This collection of original essays brings together leading legal historians and theorists to explore the oft-neglected but important relationship between these two disciplines. Legal historians have often been sceptical of theory. The methodology which informs their own work is often said to be an empirical one, of gathering information from the archives and presenting it in a narrative form. The narrative produced by history is often said to be provisional, insofar as further research in the archives might falsify present understandings and demand revisions. On the other side, legal theorists are often dismissive of historical works. History itself seems to many theorists not to offer any jurisprudential insights of use for their projects: at best, history is a repository of data and examples, which may be drawn on by the theorist for her own purposes. The aim of this collection is to invite participants from both sides to ask what lessons legal history can bring to legal theory, and what legal theory can bring to history. What is the theorist to do with the empirical data generated by archival research? What theories should drive the historical enterprise, and what wider lessons can be learned from it? This collection brings together a number of major theorists and legal historians to debate these ideas.

Volume 8, the third of the historical volumes of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, offers a history of legal philosophy in common-law countries from the 17th to the 19th century. Its main focus (like that of Volume 9) is on the ways in which jurists and legal philosophers thought about law and legal reasoning. The volume begins with a discussion of the 'common law mind' as it evolved in late medieval and early modern England. It goes on to examine the different jurisprudential traditions which developed in England and the United States, showing that while Coke's vision of the common law continued to exert a strong influence on American jurists, in England a more positivist approach took root, which found its fullest articulation in the work of Bentham and Austin.

This collection of original essays brings together leading legal historians and theorists to explore the oft-neglected but important relationship between these two disciplines. Legal historians have often been sceptical of theory. The methodology which informs their own work is often said to be an empirical one, of gathering information from the archives and presenting it in a narrative form. The narrative produced by history is often said to be provisional, insofar as further research in the archives might falsify present understandings and demand revisions. On the other side, legal theorists are often dismissive of historical works. History itself seems to many theorists not to offer any jurisprudential insights of use for their projects: at best, history is a repository of data and examples, which may be drawn on by the theorist for her own purposes. The aim of this collection is to invite participants from both sides to ask what lessons legal history can bring to legal theory, and what legal theory can bring to history. What is the theorist to do with the empirical data generated by archival research? What theories should drive the historical enterprise, and what wider lessons can be learned from it? This collection brings together a number of major theorists and legal historians to debate these ideas.

New analysis and interpretation of law and legal institutions in the "long eighteenth century". Law and legal institutions were of huge importance in the governance of Georgian society: legislation expanded the province of administrative authority out of all proportion, while the reach of the common law and its communal traditions of governance diminished, at least outside British North America. But what did the rule of law mean to eighteenth-century people, and how did it connect with changing experiences of law in all their bewildering complexity?This question has received much recent critical attention, but despite widespread agreement about Law's significance as a key to unlock so much which was central to contemporary life, as a whole previous scholarship has only offered a fragmented picture of the Laws in their social meanings and actions. Through a broader-brush approach, The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century contributes fresh analyses of law in England andBritish settler colonies, c. 1680-1830; its expert contributors consider among other matters the issues of participation, central-local relations, and the maintenance of common law traditions in the context of increasing legislative interventions and grants of statutory administrative powers. Contributors: SIMON DEVEREAUX, MICHAEL LOBBAN, DOUGLAS HAY, JOANNA INNES, WILFRED PREST, C.W. BROOKS, RANDALL MCGOWEN, DAVID THOMAS KONIG, BRUCE KERCHER

In this book, Michael Lobban argues that a proper understanding of English law and jurisprudence in the period is needed to clarify the nature of common-law practice and the way in which it was envisaged by its practitioners. He questions some commonly-accepted views of the nature of the common law itself and argues that attempts - notably those by Blackstone and Bentham - to expound or to criticize common law in essentially theoretical terms were mistaken. His approach is not a philosophically-based one, but he is concerned with the evolution and spread of judicial ideas which were grounded upon the work of moral and political philosophers, and makes a valuable corrective contribution to our historical understanding of a critically important period in legal history.

What can legal theorists learn from legal historians? What guidance can historians take from theorists? What theoretical questions underlie legal historical investigations? These are the questions explored and answered by the articles selected in this volume. Taken together, these papers show that the future of historical jurisprudence is a bright one. This is a jurisprudence that can yield insights about how to conceptualise legal change, how to give voice to those operating outside of legal officialdom, and how to understand the relationship between law and politics. The papers selected range from the challenge to legal positivism from the perspective of the history of the common law, to the latest methodological debates in socio-historical jurisprudence. The volume contains a substantive introduction and a detailed bibliography.

Law and History contains a broad range of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers. Largely theoretical in focus, the volume covers a broad range of issues, including discussions of norms in medieval England, the works of Montesquieu, Maine, and Weber, and of the nature of legal argument in nineteenth-century England, and in twentieth- century war crimes trials.

This major new study examines the use of political trials by the apartheid regime in South Africa against its opponents in the 1970s, the decade when the ideology of apartheid was reaching its apogee. After tracing the early history of the South African Students Organization and the Black People's Convention, it shows how the state reacted to the threat posed by the black consciousness movement by launching a major trial of ideas, using the notorious Terrorism Act. It examines how, at the same time, the authorities sought to crack down on white dissent by prosecuting the leaders of the National Union of South African Students. By making a detailed study of trial transcripts in addition to other materials, it explores how the state sought to infiltrate and crush nascent ANC and PAC structures which were reemerging in the mid 1970s within South Africa. It shows how the prosecution policy and legal strategy of the state changed during the decade as the nature of the threats it faced altered, culminating in the trial of the leaders of the Soweto Students Representative Council in 1979 for sedition. Arguing that the political trial was perhaps the only venue where white ideology had to engage directly with black protest, this original and thought-provoking account demonstrates how the trials became platforms competing views of society and politics which give a unique insight into the conflict between the political ideals held by blacks and whites in this era. It also reveals how large a part politics played in securing the conviction of many dissidents, and the extent to which events beyond the courtroom affected the detention and torture of many activists.