Of the two great legal systems produced by Western civilization, the English common law is by far the younger. Nearly a thousand years passed between the classical period of Roman law and the birth of English law as a national institution. Many scholars have viewed the reign of Henry I (d. 1189), the medieval English king most associated with legal reform, as pivotal in the development of the common law. 1 The English common law came into its own in the twelfth century, long after the
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This is the first book covering those who abused and misused the legal system in medieval England and the initial attempts of the Anglo-American legal system to deal with these forms of legal corruption. Maintenance, in the sense of intermeddling in another person's litigation, was a source of repeated complaint in medieval England. This book reveals for the first time what actually transpired in the resultant litigation. Extensive study of the primary sources shows that the statutes prohibiting maintenance did not achieve their objectives because legal proceedings were rarely brought against those targeted by the statutes: the great and the powerful. Illegal maintenance was less extensive than frequently asserted because medieval judges recognized a number of valid justifications for intermeddling in litigation. Further, the book casts doubt on the effectiveness of the statutory regulation of livery. This is a treasure trove for legal historians, literature scholars, lawyers, and academic libraries.
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This essay recounts my beginning teaching of legal history. My experience is likely distinctive because at almost 60 years old and after over three decades as a law professor, I became interested English legal history. My initial activities were limited to scholarship and did not involve teaching. But I thought I should also start teaching in this field. Thus, after about five years writing articles and over three decades of teaching traditional law school courses (Contracts, Antitrust, Professional Responsibility, and Law and Economics), I decided that I should teach a course in English legal history.
Journal Article The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All Get access Linebaugh Peter. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 376 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Jonathan Rose Jonathan Rose Arizona State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 51, Issue 3, July 2011, Pages 541–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/51.3.541 Published: 01 July 2011
This article pursues two themes. First, it argues that there is a commonality between the general interest in the past, the interest of historians, and the interest of legal historians. Second, it shows that several ideas about the past commonly appear in all three contexts. In pursuing these themes, the article begins by reviewing the initial study of the past and the emergence of history and legal history in academia. It explores the various reasons why the early historians and later academic historians and legal historians studied the past and the different ways in which they used it. The article then pursues in more detail the development of Anglo-American legal history as a scholarly tradition. It identifies three types of academic legal history: classical, liberal, and critical, and discusses their natures and different uses of the past. Finally, the article explores the substantial legal history scholarship and its relevance to scholars who are not legal historians. The article concludes by stressing the importance of studying the legal past.
Sir John Fastolf was a wealthy fifteenth-century knight and a successful military commander in the wars with France. During the last decade of his life, he was involved in a number of legal disputes with his East Anglian adversaries, the supporters of the Duke of Suffolk. This paper studies one of those disputes, which involved conspiracy and attaint actions between John Andrew, a Suffolk adherent, and Thomas Howes and John Porter, two Fastolf servants. This dispute is interesting for two reasons. Most importantly, it shows that one cannot fully understand the operation of the fifteenth-century legal system without an awareness of the social and political context of litigation. Some contemporary litigation had a clear political nature and political considerations influenced the resolution of legal issues. All aspects of this litigation illustrates the interrelation between the operation of the legal and political systems. Often, legal actions and institutions were vehicles and arenas for political disputes. This litigation also offers an opportunity to explore some fifteenth-century legal issues, especially those that arose in attaint actions. There is very little existing scholarship on actions of attaint. This paper, by studying an actual attaint in detail, provides further detail on this area of medieval English legal history. The paper is based on numerous primary sources in the plea rolls and Year Books.
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Defamation has been a subject of considerable interest to legal historians. It did not become actionable in the royal courts until the early 16th century. As the secular cause of action for defamation developed, there were a number of actions instituted by lawyers. Defamation suits by lawyers accused of being ambidexters, the contemporary term for conflict of interest, constituted a large category of these lawyer defamation suits. Medieval discipline of lawyers for ambidexterity, a common form of lawyer misconduct, likely contributed to making these accusations actionable defamation. The purpose of this article is to study these defamation suits and their interrelationship with legal ethics, the public and professional images of lawyers, and professional reputation. The article is divided into three parts. The first part studies 45 early modern defamation cases involving accusations of lawyers of ambidexterity. The discussion analyzes the initial and evolving defamatory language and its judicial treatment. The cases show that accusing a lawyer of being an ambidexter was clearly and unequivocally actionable as defamation and that nothing was more defamatory than charging a lawyer with disloyalty to a client. Moreover, the word, ambidexter, signified substantial opprobrium. The second part studies public and professional images of lawyers to understand why such an accusation and the word, ambidexter, were so clearly defamatory and had such substantial stigma . This portion first discusses the concept of a disloyal lawyer by exploring the existence of a loyalty norm in the common learning and inherited wisdom of the contemporary legal profession and by studying late medieval and early modern religious ideas and discourse, contemporary literary images, and more general social and political norms. The analysis then turns to a study of the word, ambidexter. The discussion begins with a history of the word and its legal use and then explores its religious and literary uses. The second portion concludes that the concept of disloyalty and the word, ambidexter, appeared often with in the usages of legal system, in religious discourse, and to portray lawyers as characters in literary works. All these usages likely created in the social and political milieu a very perjorative image of the disloyal lawyer and the ambidexter. Thus, these images contribute to the association of accusations of ambidexterity with serious profession opprobrium and help explain why they were so clearly and significantly defamatory. The final portion of the article notes that cultural changes and legal developments in the 16th and 17th centuries made professional reputation especially vulnerable to attack. Attitudes toward honor, an increasing importance of reputation, and changes within the legal profession combined to create a climate conducive to defamation suits against lawyers and to explain the beneficial nature of these suits to those accused of ambidexterity.
This article examines the history of the regulation of the English legal profession in medieval England. Two interrelated reasons make this a worthwhile endeavor: both the legal profession and its initial regulation emerged during this period. The primary objectives of this article are to identify and study the important legislation from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century regulating the admission of lawyers to practice and the conduct of practicing lawyers. Critical regulations were adopted during this period. In addition, judges used their inherent power to control the admission of lawyers and sanction their misconduct. In studying this medieval regulation, this article discusses the problems and forces that led to the enactment of the various statutes and ordinances and identifies their objectives, analyzes the meaning and effect of these regulations, and attempts to appraise their historical and current significance. In addition to the historical interest in these matters, studying medieval regulation of the legal profession offers an important opportunity to discover the extent to which this initial regulation and the concerns that prompted it are similar to modern regulation and concerns regarding lawyers.Before turning to an examination of the medieval regulation, this article provides some historical background regarding the origins and emergence of the English legal profession and the general climate of opinion in the latter half of the thirteenth century.
