A Natural History of the Common Law
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.91 (568 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0231129947 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-02-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A Useful Introduction to a Complex History" according to Alan E. Barber. S.F.C. Milsom, along with fellow Englishman F.W. Maitland, are the two great names in English legal history. Each asked, "Whence sprang the common law, that baffling array of arcane writs, complex tenures in real property, odd rules of evidence, and bewigged barristers and judges?" Maitland, writi
Milsom focuses on the development of English common lawthe intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual casesfrom which American law was to grow. Formal continuity has enabled nineteenth-century assumptions to be carried back, in some respects as far back as the twelfth century. Carpentier Lectures in legal history and criticism, one of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians S. Nobody ever states his assumptions, and a legal writer, addressing his contemporaries, never provided a glossary to warn future historians against attributing their own meanings to his words and therefore their own assumptions to his world. King Henry II, for example, did not intend the changes attributed to him in either land law or criminal law; the draftsman of De Donis did not mean to create the entail; nobody ever dreamed up a fiction with intent to change the law.. Milsom discusses the differences between the development of land law and that of other kinds of law and, in the latter case, how procedural changes allowed substantive rules first to be stated and then to be circumven
The recipient of the Harvard Law School's Ames Prize and the Royal Society of Arts' Swiney Prize, Milsom is past president of the Selden Society, a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge since 1976.. Milsom is professor emeritu
In this book the greatest living English legal historian sums up a lifetime of work. Professor Milsom here makes explicit what has been implicit in much of his previous writing: the mechanisms by which the English common law developed. Students of the law and of its history will welcome the clarity and vigor with which Milsom expounds his general ideas and will need to think long and hard about the extent to which these mechanisms also account for the development of Roman law and, perhaps, other legal systems as well.