Category Archives: Legal History
Clare Davidson, ‘Cultivation and Commodification: Regulating Gendered Status and Settler Colonial Title to Land’
ABSTRACT The processes by which settler colonial rights to manage land were assigned to legal persons were structured by the South Australia Act 1834 and the Real Property Act 1858. Colonial corporations – including the Crown – managed land and natural resources by regulating how rights were held by the family as a gendered, property-holding […]
Laura Flannigan, ‘Narrating Disputes: litigation and its retellings in fifteenth-century England’
ABSTRACT Litigation was on the rise across late-medieval Europe, and historians have long argued that the result was widespread law-mindedness. Seeking a more individual perspective on these trends, this article looks outside of the formal legal records that have been the cornerstone of social and legal histories. It assesses two first-person narratives which describe life-long […]
Stephen Crosswell, ‘The Common Law and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’
ABSTRACT Adam Smith developed a theory of the ‘four-stage’ advancement of society as England was entering the Industrial Revolution (the fourth stage) and becoming the leading commercial centre in the world. That transition was raising new and novel legal issues that required legal solutions more complex than the earlier three stages in human advancement, as […]
Ciara Kennefick, ‘Roman Law on the Just Price in Nicolaus Bernoulli’s Mathematics’
ABSTRACT It must be rare that discoveries which transform mathematics also undermine legal rules. Yet this is precisely what happened when probability was first developed in the second half of the 17th century and the first decades of the following one. The focus of this article is a doctoral thesis in law written in 1709 […]
‘Winner, Berkowitz, Snepp, Blake & Bissonette – stripping the profits of authors who breach national security pre-clearance agreements’
In an article in today’s Guardian, I read that the punishment of US whistleblower Reality Winner (pictured right) was not only a conviction and sentence to 63 months in prison, but also a prohibition that she ‘can never be paid for telling her life story – whether in a book or through the several movies […]
Alice Wickens, ‘From calico to catwalk: Addressing the UK’s enduring issue of fashion piracy’
INTRODUCTION While the famous quote, oft attributed to Oscar Wilde, that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ seems final on the matter, the debate as to whether the fashion industry benefits from copying has recently been revamped. In part, this is due to the rise of the internet, social media and fast-fashion, which have […]
Cristina Tilley, ‘The Power Of All: Tort In The Age Of Constitution’
ABSTRACT Life in a multicultural nation can be fraught. The United States is a case in point, with hostile tension between members of competing identity groups playing out today on streets, in offices, and across the media. Modern Americans assume that bridging race, gender, and class inequity is the stuff of public – constitutional – […]
‘“Pryket, Pryket, Pryket”: The Persistence of Orality in Fifteenth-Century English Legal Culture’
Unlike many other places in Europe, notaries public did not take hold and proliferate in England after the twelfth-century Legal Revolution. While judge-led law in the newly instituted inquisitorial system of justice implemented by the church and some Continental states necessitated a vast army of notaries to take down depositions and record court proceedings, in […]
Łukasz Jan Korporowicz, ‘Comparative legal teaching in eighteenth-century Oxford: an analysis of Thomas Bever’s Appendix to his lectures’
ABSTRACT In the 1760s and 1770s, Thomas Bever, a once-eminent but today nearly-forgotten English civilian, was delivering a course of lectures devoted to civil law at Oxford. The final part of those lectures, known as the Appendix, was of a different character from the earlier parts. In the Appendix Bever discussed the development of the […]
‘Hillbilly Equity: Woollums v Horsely as Mountain Melodrama’
When I began teaching contracts, I used the Dawson, Harvey, and Henderson Contracts casebook. As do many casebook authors, Dawson chose cases whose entertainment value enhanced their pedagogical effects. The defense of unconscionability was illustrated by Woollums v Horsley, 20 SW 781 (Ky App 1892), a masterpiece of the melodramatic genre of appellate opinion-writing. The […]