Throughout this essay all dates are given in New Style. When pamphlets were originally dated Old Style, the new date has been substituted. In all quotations the original seventeenth-century spelling has been retained. A "sic" is placed in the quotation only where it appears to be certain that there has been a misprint in the original. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the late Professor Garrett Mattingly of Columbia University for his inspiration and guidance during the years spent under his sponsorship. It was a rare privilege to study under him. Professor Sidney Burrell of Barnard College offered many constructive suggestions and I am most appreciative of the kind interest he took in the completion of this study. I also wish to thank the editors of The American Journal of Legal History for publishing some of my material on Chancery reform in their Journal. The staff of the North Library of the British Museum was most helpful in making available the many volumes of the Thomason Collection. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Library of Union Theological Seminary who helped in the location of materials from the McAlpin Collection.

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The essays in this text deal with aspects of British legal learning. It traces the tradition of learning dating back to the Middle Ages and how the inns of court provided the equivalent of a legal university. The essays describe how before the middle of the 19th-century there was little formal provision of legal education in Britain and that law in the ancient universities was not intended to have practical value and entrance to the bar was not dependent upon written examination.

This book provides an illuminating commentary of law reform in the early modern era (1500–1740) and views the moves to improve law and legal institutions in the context of changing political and governmental environments. Taking a fresh look at law reform over several centuries, it explores the efforts of the king and parliament, and the body of literature supporting law reform that emerged with the growth of print media, to assess the place of the well-known attempts of the revolutionary era in the context of earlier and later movements. Law reform is seen as a long term concern and a longer time frame is essential to understand the 1640–1660 reform measures. The book considers two law reform movements: the moderate movement which had a lengthy history and whose chief supporters were the governmental and parliamentary elites, and which focused on improving existing law and legal institutions, and the radical reform movement, which was concentrated in the revolutionary decades and which sought to overthrow the common law, the legal profession and the existing system of courts. Informed by attention to the institutional difficulties in completing legislation, this highlights the need to examine particular parliaments. Although lawyers have often been seen as the chief obstacles to law reform, this book emphasises their contributions – particularly their role in legislation and in reforming the corpus of legal materials – and highlights the previously ignored reform efforts of Lord Chancellors.

The constitutional question is of paramount importance in the political and nationalist agenda of late twentieth-century Europe. Professor van Caenegem's new book addresses fundamental questions of constitutional organisation: democracy versus autocracy, unitary versus federal organisation, pluralism versus intolerance, by analysing different models of constitutional government through an historical perspective. The approach is chronological: constitutionalism is explained as the result of many centuries of trial and error through a narrative which begins in the early Middle Ages and concludes with contemporary debates, focusing on Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Special attention is devoted to the rise of the rule of law, and of constitutional, parliamentary, and federal forms of government. The epilogue discusses the future of liberal democracy as a universal model.

This book surveys the channels through which political ideas and knowledge were conveyed to the English people from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the Revolution of 1688. Shapiro argues that an assessment of English political culture requires an examination of all means by which this culture was expressed and communicated. While the discussion focuses primarily on genres such as the sermon, newsbook, poetry, and drama, it also considers the role of events and institutions. Shapiro is the first to explore and elucidate the entire web of communication in early modern English political life.

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs. Two great themes dominate the book: (1) the origins, development, and pervasive influence of the jury system and judge/jury relations across eight centuries of Anglo-American civil and criminal justice; and (2) the law/equity division, from the emergence of the Court of Chancery in the fourteenth century down through equity's conquest of common law in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The chapters on criminal justice explore the history of pretrial investigation, policing, trial, and sentencing, as well as the movement in modern times to nonjury resolution through plea bargaining. Considerable attention is devoted to distinctively American developments, such as the elective bench, and the influence of race relations on the law of criminal procedure. Other major subjects of this book include the development of the legal profession, from the serjeants, barristers, and attorneys of medieval times down to the transnational megafirms of twenty-first century practice; the literature of the law, especially law reports and treatises, from the Year Books and Bracton down to the American state reports and today's electronic services; and legal education, from the founding of the Inns of Court to the emergence and growth of university law schools in the United States.

Originally published in 1968, the documents collected in this volume (all re-set for ease of reading), trace the history of the Puritan Revolution from its roots in the early seventeenth century to the Restoration. They show how the causes and the course of the upheaval were reflected immediately and polemically in the torrent of books, tracts and pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, petitions, paper constitutions and government instruments that accompanied and often precipitated events. The documents substantiate the conviction of many scholars that the English Revolution represented a shaking of society comparable to the French and Russian revolutions. The Introduction discusses the work of historians of modern-day historians of the period and contributes to the debate about the underlying causes of the crisis.

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

In mid-sixteenth-century England, people were born into authority and responsibility based on their social status. Thus elite children could designate property or serve in Parliament, while children of the poorer sort might be forced to sign labor contracts or be hanged for arson or picking pockets. By the late eighteenth century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent rather than on birth status. In By Birth or Consent, Holly Brewer explores how the changing legal status of children illuminates the struggle over consent and status in England and America. As it emerged through religious, political, and legal debates, the concept of meaningful consent challenged the older order of birthright and became central to the development of democratic political theory. The struggle over meaningful consent had tremendous political and social consequences, affecting the whole order of society. It granted new powers to fathers and guardians at the same time that it challenged those of masters and kings. Brewer's analysis reshapes the debate about the origins of modern political ideology and makes connections between Reformation religious debates, Enlightenment philosophy, and democratic political theory.