How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550-1640

1982 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. J. Levy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Good Knowledge ◽  
Grammar School ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Information Spread ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.

The New Private Law and Intellectual Property

2020 ◽  
pp. 408-426
Author(s):  
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Concepts And Categories ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Legal Concepts

This chapter studies intellectual property (IP). A hallmark of the New Private Law (NPL) is attentiveness to and appreciation of legal concepts and categories, including the traditional categories of the common law. These categories can sometimes usefully be deployed outside of the traditional common law, to characterize, conceptualize, and critique other bodies of law. For scholars interested in IP, for example, common law categories can be used to describe patent, copyright, trademark, and other fields of IP as more or less “property-like” or “tort-like.” Thischapter investigates both the property- and tort-like features of IP to understand the circumstances under which one set of features tends to dominate and why. It surveys several doctrines within the law of copyright that demonstrate how courts move along the property/tort continuum depending on the nature of the copyrighted work at issue—including, in particular, how well the work’s protected contours are defined. This conceptual navigation is familiar, echoing how common law courts have moved along the property/tort continuum to address disputes over distinctive types of tangible resources.

Legal Dilemmas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Herzog
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Law ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
Tort Claims

The chapter launches with Star Chamber proceedings against Lewis Pickering: in the sixteenth century, defaming the dead could be a crime. And that remains true even in today’s United States. But as the common law sharpened the distinction between tort and crime, it rejected the view that such defamation could be a tort. Tort claims extinguished when either plaintiff or defendant died. And when aggrieved survivors sued, the law held they hadn’t been wronged, even if they had been harmed, so they couldn’t recover, either.

The Context of Common Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 227-358
Author(s):  
Uwe Kischel
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Individual Decisions ◽  
Working Out

This chapter focuses on common law. The common law is distinguished as a legal system developed by cases—that is, by judicial decisions. Put simply, the common law judge derives the law from previous decision of other judges. Even more importantly, common law courts typically do not create abstract legal rules to decide future cases. The method of the common law is not focused on deductively deriving results from general legal principles, but rather on inductively working out principles from individual decisions. This means that only judges themselves remain as creators of law. According to this view, common law would actually be judge-made law, a view also common among comparative lawyers.

THE FIRST VIRTUE OF THE LAW COURTS AND THE FIRST VIRTUE OF THE LAW

Legal Theory ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-128
Author(s):  
Hanoch Sheinman
Keyword(s):  
Justice Department ◽  
Bipolar Structure ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Comparative Justice ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Do So

Justice, you might think, is the first virtue of the law. After all, we call our judges justices, the administration of law the administration of justice, and the government's legal department the Justice Department. We should reject this Priority of Justice for the Law in favor of the more moderate Priority of Justice for the Courts, the view that justice is the first virtue of the law courts. Under its comparative conception, justice is distinguishable by its concern with the relative positions of subjects. I claim that legal duties divide into primary and secondary, that primary legal duties are not essentially comparative, and that this impugns the Priority of Comparative Justice for the Law. Still, the bipolar structure of litigation appears to suggest that comparative justice is the first virtue of the courts. I explain why that is not so. I then introduce a desert-based conception of justice I dub requitative justice. I argue that the Priority of Justice for the Law cannot draw succor from this conception of justice because primary legal duties are no more requitative than they are comparative. However, the special affinity between law courts and secondary legal duties suggests that requitative justice is the first virtue of the courts. Finally, I concede that the Priority of Justice for the Courts gives us reason to accept the Priority of Justice for the Law after all, if we accept the common Priority of Courts for the Law, the view that the courts are the first institution of the law. We should not do so, however.

The Common Law Courts and the Law of the Sea

1923 ◽  
Vol 36 (7) ◽  
pp. 777 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gorham Palfrey
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts

“He Creditted More the Printed Booke”: Common Lawyers' Receptivity to Print, c.1550–1640

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Common ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Legal Arguments ◽  
Common Learning

The printing press was recognized by early modern commentators, just as it has been by historians, as an important invention that had profound effects on the arts and sciences. Legal historians have not missed the potentially transformative effects of printing—not only might lawyers found heterodox arguments upon the precise words of printed texts, rather than relying upon the “common learning,” but the absence of texts from the “common learning” in the printed canon meant legal historians themselves labored for many years under a misapprehension as to the nature of medieval English law. However, little work has been undertaken on the precise impact of printing upon the English legal profession, particularly in the shorter term. Common lawyers, particularly in the sixteenth century, were a group who increasingly relied upon, and cited, textual material as the foundation of their arguments on all points of law. Over the course of the sixteenth century, lawyers came increasingly to rely upon prior cases, and particularly prior judged cases, as the basis of legal arguments and of the correctness of those arguments. Advocates and judges were all faced with a large, and still growing, body of manuscript material, and a sizeable collection of printed works. Attitudes towards printed material is an important topic for historians of early modern law for suggesting which sources of legal ideas were given more prominence in the period.

Marx and the “law of value”: Critical appraisal on the occasion of his 200th birth anniversary

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. Kurz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Transformation Problem ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

The paper celebrates Karl Marx’ 200th birthday in terms of a critical discussion of the “law of value” and the idea that “abstract labour”, and not any use value, is the common third of any two commodities that exchange for one another in a given proportion. It is argued that this view is difficult to sustain. It is also the source of the wretched and unnecessary “transformation problem”. Ironically, as Piero Sraffa has shown, prices of production and the general rate of profits are fully determined in terms of the same set of data from which Marx started his analysis.

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

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