The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitutionalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common ◽  
Fundamental Law ◽  
English Law ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Popular Constitutionalism

AbstractDespite having a powerful influence on the historiography of radicalism and nineteenth-century politics for the past several decades, the language of the constitution has not recently received scholarly attention. In Chartist and radical historiography, the constitution is usually treated as a narrative of national political development. This article extends the horizons of Chartist constitutionalism by exploring its similarities with American constitutionalism. By doing so, it also opens up questions regarding the ideas of the movement. Like the Americans sixty years before, the Chartists were confronted by a parliament that they believed had superseded its constitutional authority. This perception was informed by a belief that the constitution rested on the authority of the fixed principles of fundamental law, which they argued placed limits beyond which Parliament had no power to reach. As a result, the Chartists imagined that the British constitution functioned like a written constitution. To support this claim, they drew on a sophisticated interpretation of English law that argued that the common law was closely related to natural law.

Bentham, Bacon and the Movement for the Reform of English Law Reporting

Utilitas ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick Munday
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Rational System ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
Law Reports ◽  
Variable Quality

The disordered state of English law reporting has for long been a favoured theme of writers on the common law. The volume of printed case law, the casual nature of its publication and its variable quality have all been frequently criticized. If earlier centuries had been largely content to express intermittent displeasure, in the nineteenth century concrete solutions were found, the obvious product of this bid to achieve a rational system of law reporting being the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting and its authoritative series of Law Reports. But if ultimately reform of the system was only realized once the profession seized the initiative in the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be an error to suppose that schemes for reform had not been conceived in earlier times. After all, only by a miracle could anything as blatantly haphazard as the quality of law reporting have escaped the strictures of major reformers.

The Forms of Action

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-77
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Formulary System ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common ◽  
Administrative Regulation ◽  
English Law

This chapter is concerned with writs, and principally with the ‘original’ writs which commenced an action at common law. Though designed as a means of administrative regulation, a decision to stop inventing new ones made them definitive of the common law. The procedures initiated by each type of writ – the ‘forms of action’ – dominated English law until the nineteenth century. The principal varieties of writ were praecipe (demanding a right) and trespass (complaining of wrong). The latter were at first limited to trespasses with force against the king’s peace, but this requirement was dropped around 1350 and writs of trespass ‘on the case’, tailored to a plaintiff’s facts, enabled the common law to begin its escape from the formulary system and to develop a wide range of new remedies. Some account is also given of judicial writs, which controlled process once a suit had been originated.

King John and the Historians

1961 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Warren Hollister
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Distinguished Scholar ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
King John

King John Lackland was surely one of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule England. The dramatic ambivalence of his personality, the passions that he stirred among his own contemporaries, the very magnitude of his failures, have made him an object of endless fascination to historians and biographers. Whose interests would not be piqued by the man who was recently described by a distinguished scholar as “cruel and ruthless, violent and passionate, greedy and self-indulgent, genial and repellant, arbitrary and judicious, clever and capable, original and inquisitive”?As one might expect, King John has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Nearly every historian who touches on any aspect of his reign feels compelled to offer his own judgment of John's puzzling character, his effectiveness, even his personal morality. The present century has seen, in addition to numerous specialized studies of various facets of John's reign, no less than three major biographies of that indefatigable but luckless king. The first of these, by Miss Kate Norgate, was published in 1902 and reflects the traditional viewpoint of the late nineteenth century. The second, Sidney Painter's work of 1949, stresses the monarch's relations with his baronial and administrative subordinates and presents a more genial and sophisticated interpretation of John himself. Hopes for a promised companion volume dealing with military and naval institutions and the development of the common law under John have been shattered by Painter's untimely death.

Common Lawà l'americaine

1966 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Apelbom
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Clear Line

Eighteen years after attaining independence Israel remains essentially a common law country. Introduced by the British Mandatory administration to supplement the Ottoman legislation in force at the time of the British occupation of Palestine, the common law has been retained by the Israeli legislator, so far as not modified or replaced by local legislation. But this common law, far from being residual only, also embraces a considerable body of interstitial law developed by two generations of judges, British, Palestinian and Israeli, in the process of applying and interpreting statute law—whether Ottoman, Mandatory or Israeli—according to common law methods. On the other hand the importation of common law institutions was neither wholesale nor systematic and in a number of fields no clear line of demarcation can be drawn between domestic and English law.

Nature Versus the Common Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Schorr
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Water Law ◽  
Public Ownership ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

This article recovers a debate, played out over the course of a century, in courts across the « common law world », over whether nature had normative force in water law. It explores areas of water law, such as the extent of public ownership in rivers and the effects of shifting watercourses on ownership, in which some courts, not without controversy, departed from the established rules of English law in order to make rules more appropriate, as they saw it, to the local environment.

scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF THE NON-JUSTICIABILITY OF RELIGIOUS DEFAMATIONS

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Smith
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Civil Case ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

English law has long held the principle that religions should be free from interference by the state in certain matters. The original 1215 edition of the Magna Carta proclaimed, as its first article, ‘THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.’This article was intended to protect the established Catholic Church from the powers of the state, specifically from interference in church elections by the executive in the form of the person of the monarch. The notion that religions were institutions with practices and beliefs that were outside the control of the state in certain respects was adopted by the common law and is found in modern times in the principle of non-justiciability on the matter of religion in certain types of civil case. 

Law Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 206-238
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
Inns Of Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Learning ◽  
Law Making

This chapter examines the history of case-law, legislation, and equity, with particular reference to legal change. The common law was evidenced by judicial precedent, but single decisions were not binding until the nineteenth century. It was also rooted in professional understanding, the ‘common learning’ acquired in the inns of court. It was based on ‘reason’, operating within a rigid procedural framework. Legal change could be effected by fictions, equity, and legislation, but (except during the Interregnum) there was little systematic reform before the nineteenth century. Legislation was external to the common law, but it had to be interpreted by common-law judges and so there was a symbiotic relationship between statute-law and case-law. Codification has sometimes been proposed, but with limited effect.

The Authority of the Administration

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Janet McLean
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Public Trust ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The authority claims of the administration have undergone radical change with consequences for the shape and content of administrative law. In the seventeenth century, authority was claimed in office, as a means to limit the imposition of the King’s will and to secure the independence of officials, especially the judges. In the eighteenth century, virtue, property, and independence became the basis for office, and the common law sought to enhance such authority through notions of public trust. After the nineteenth-century transition to more centralised and bureaucratic hierarchy, democracy became the new source of authority for the administration, reinforced by the ultra vires doctrine. In each era, the authority claims of the administration have been reflected in the frameworks for judicial supervision. In this way the common law has simultaneously constituted and controlled authority. In the present day we are in the process of rethinking whence administrators derive their legitimate authority and the theoretical foundations of judicial review. Beginning with the authority claims of the administration and framing a juridical response which reflects and tests such claims would be a good place to start.

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