The Common Law Illusion: Literary Justice in Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Mark L. Barr
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church

Sovereignty and Common Law Judicial Office in Taylor's Case (1675)

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kearns
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Ecclesiastical Law ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Spiritual Nature ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Law Making

This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King's Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, Parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it counters the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor's, Hale located Taylor's offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale's judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside King and Parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office, and should not ground accounts of the Restoration regime.

The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)

2008 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Visconsi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The Common

This article provides an account of the emergence of the common law jurisdiction over blasphemy, arguing that the blasphemy laws first developed in Rex v. Taylor had an explicitly secular purpose. Instead of understanding this crucial decision as an emblem of the early modern fusion of church and state, this article reads Sir Matthew Hale's axiom that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England" as a step toward the emergence of an English civil religion.

Cardinal Gasquet (1846–1929): An English Roman

1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 552-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Bellenger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Memory ◽  
The Church

In the monastic refectory at Downside the two portraits of the abbey’s great Victorian prelates, William Bernard Ullathorne and Francis Aidan Gasquet, dominate the scene, placed as they are above the abbot’s table on either side of the crucifix. Ullathorne, in the prime of life, looks alert and full of purpose. Gasquet, in decline, looks sour and tired. ‘The Cardinal,’ wrote the Venerabile obituarist, ‘used to walk down the corridor (of the English College) with tightly compressed lips and irritable-looking lines above his nose, while his eyes, which were partly hidden beneath frowning brows, scanned us searchingly the while: in a word, with none of that graciousness of age which is the common memory of all who knew him.’ Gasquet, the only English Cardinal to make a significant impact in the Roman curia in the twentieth century, remains an ambiguous character, now little known and if remembered at all associated with poor historical scholarship. Yet, Gasquet’s influence was considerable and owed much to his amiable personality and ready wit, his ability to make friends and to influence those in the highest echelons of church and state. Indeed, in 1903 Francis Aidan Gasquet was very nearly appointed as the first Benedictine Archbishop of Westminster. Instead, the somewhat colourless Francis Alphonsus Bourne succeeded Cardinal Vaughan and Gasquet had to be content with a life as varied and interesting as the church could offer.

KANONICZNA OCHRONA KARNA RELIGII, JEDNOŚCI, AUTORYTETÓW KOŚCIELNYCH I WOLNOŚCI KOŚCIOŁA KATOLICKIEGO

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Florian Lempa
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Harmfulness ◽  
Penal Sanctions ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
The Church

The article presents the most important values criminally protected in the Catholic Churchby CIC/1983 and CCEO/1990. They are: the religion, the unity, the church authorities and thefreedom of the Church. About their prime position in the hierarchy of goods legally protected bythe provisions of penal canon law testifies that the crimes against them are put in the first and inthe second title of CIC/1983, also the threat of severe penal sanctions. These sanctions result fromthe exceptional social harmfulness of the crimes. In the degree of ailment they are analogical inthe canon law of the Latin rite and in the common law of Eastern Catholic Churches.

The English Law of Sanctuary

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 8-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church

Although the protection of churches and holy places was embodied froman early date in Canon law, the law of sanctuary as it applied in England was necessarily part of the secular common law. The Church never had the physical power to resist the secular authorities in the administration of justice, and although those who violated sanctuary were liable to excommunication the Church could not in cases of conflict prevent the removal from sanctuary of someone to whom the privilege was not allowed by the law of the land. The control of the common law judges was, indeed, tighter than in the case of benefit of clergy. The question whether an accused person was or was not a clerk in Holy Orders was ultimately a question for the ordinary, however much pressure might be put upon him by the judges; but the question of sanctuary or no sanctuary was always a question for the royal courts to decide, upon the application of a person who claimed to have been wrongly arrested in a privileged place. The present summary is confined to the position under English law.

The Persecutions: some Links between Judaism and the Early Church

1958 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. C. Frend
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The West ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Church

Each generation of historiographers has had its own interpretation of the persecutions. In their hour of triumph in the years following the Council of Nicaea, Christians in both halves of the Roman Empire looked back to these events as the heroic age of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the Church were linked to the sufferings of the children of Israel and this time, too, anti-Christ and his abettors, the pagan emperors, their officials and the mobs had been worsted. Like the Egyptians they had perished miserably. But, as so often happens, victory dissolved the common bonds which united the victors. In the next centuries the relations between Church and State in the East and West were to follow different paths. In the East the ‘martyrdom in intention’ of the monastic life tended to replace the martyrdom in deed in opposition to the emperor. In the West, the martyr tradition was to underline that same opposition. Tertullian, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory VII, Boniface VIII embody a single trend of ideas extending over a thousand years.

scholarly journals Language and Anglican Canon Law – Dabbling Briefly into Another Legal World

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 387
Author(s):  
Bill R Atkin
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Westminster Model ◽  
Legal Nature ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church

Canon law is a body of rules that govern churches. It has a venerable history and has at times marched in step with the common law. It has a specialised vocabulary – even the word canon – much of which is derived from Greek. It also has sophisticated legislative systems, which vary from denomination to denomination and from place to place. In the case of the Anglican Church of New Zealand, the system is in part based on the Westminster model but has been modified when thought appropriate, with the result that the language used is partly familiar to the average lawyer but partly not. The exact legal nature of canon law is uncertain and may depend in part on whether the church is the established religion or not. In New Zealand where there is no establishment, a comparison could be made, inter alia, with customary law.

Persons

2019 ◽  
pp. 517-539
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Divorce Law ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

This chapter is devoted to the history of the law of marriage. The formation of marriage was for many centuries a matter for the Church and its law. In medieval times marriage was held to be a sacrament and indissoluble. Divorce a vinculo matrimonii meant a decree of nullity, not dissolution. Divorce a mensa et thoro, or judicial separation, was available on grounds of misconduct, but the parties were not free to remarry. Bastardy, the status of children born outside marriage, was also for the canon law. The second part of the chapter goes into the common law of coverture, the status of married women, and the slow progress towards giving wives the right to own property and make contracts. It ends with the piecemeal reforms of divorce law, following the establishment of a secular divorce court in 1857.

A Consistory Court in the Middle Ages

1963 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.

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