The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 276
Author(s):  
Daniel Klerman ◽  
J. W. Tubbs
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common

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.

Emotions, Power and Popular Opinion about the Administration of Justice: The English Experience, from Coke’s ‘Artificial Reason’ to the Sensibility of ‘True Crime Stories’

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-90
Author(s):  
David Lemmings
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
The Common ◽  
True Crime

This article discusses emotions and power in the administration and representation of criminal justice in early modern England. In the early seventeenth century, professional lawyers insisted that only they were competent to understand the ‘artificial reason’ of the common law; and lay opinion was associated with unreliable emotional engagement with the protagonists in trials. ‘Popular jurisprudence’ received renewed impetus from the post-Reformation emphasis on conscience and divine providence, however, and this kind of common sense interpretation often featured in popular accounts of law proceedings. Moreover, the ‘low law’ administered at grass roots level by JPs was less professionalised because most magistrates were not lawyers. The development of popular and emotional jurisprudence is demonstrated in the eighteenth century by analysis of judges’ charges, popular novels, and the reportage of ‘true crime’. Ultimately, and despite further ‘lawyerisation’ of trials, this article argues that the rise of the novel and increased press reporting of criminal justice generated more vicarious engagement with the administration of justice. And this was emotional engagement: eighteenth-century popular jurisprudence represented justice as variously awesome, theatrical and unreasonably oppressive.

Personal Actions in the High Court of Battle Abbey 1450–1602

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Great Increase ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
High Court ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
The Common ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between the jurisdictions of local courts and central courts in late-medieval and early-modern England remains largely unexplored. It is nevertheless important to an understanding of the development of the common law, because of the prevailing notion that the great increase in litigation in the royal courts in the early Tudor period was connected with a decline in the use made of local courts. A massive transfer of business to the centralised royal courts might have affected the common law in ways other than the purely numerical, in that it could have brought a reception of legal ideas and remedies already well known out in the country. On that footing, the appearance of new kinds of action in the central courts at this period may represent transfers of jurisdiction rather than changes in legal thinking.

The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions. J. W. Tubbs

Speculum ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1009
Author(s):  
Kenneth Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common

The significance (and insignificance) of precedent in early Stuart parliaments

2018 ◽  
pp. 153-171
Author(s):  
Simon Healy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Disputes

Precedents were frequently invoked in early modern parliaments, particularly by lawyers, whose profession used ‘artificial reason’ to elucidate legal precedents, and who attempted to impose this paradigm upon constitutional debates. If laws and precedents were straightforwardly bastions of the subject’s liberties (as lawyers claimed), then they might have been deployed only in specific contexts. However, many invocations of precedent occurred along the ill-defined borderlands between the common law and the prerogative. This essay considers the role of precedent in four important parliamentary debates of the early Stuart period: over the proposed union of England and Scotland, over impositions, over impeachment, and over the liberty of the subject in relation to the Five Knights’ Case and the Petition of Right. It stresses how ineffectual precedents proved in resolving political disputes, and argues that more pragmatic considerations were paramount.

The Laws of Comedy

2018 ◽  
pp. 262-280
Author(s):  
Carolyn Sale
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Common Reason ◽  
Collective Rationality ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Judicial Authority ◽  
The Law

Much of the pleasure of Shakespeare’s comedy for early modern audiences derived from its invitation to them to understand the English common law as a law of ‘common reason’ arising from the people in their aggregate. The Comedy of Errors appeals to the audience to construe the ‘errors’ of the law in order to affirm the collective rationality of audiences as law-maker, while The Merchant of Venice’s trial scene affirms the importance of the ideals of common law jurisprudence by showing them abused. And in Measure for Measure’s extended spectacle of judicial authority in Act 5, the audience experiences the importance of the common law as a ‘discoursive’ phenomenon dependent upon the participation of the community for its vitality. Together the plays put audiences into active relation to law as it appeals to them as the common law’s makers.

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