Essays In Law And History

xv, 302 pp. Originally published: Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946. Compiled and edited by A.L. Goodhart and H.G. Hanbury, editors of the last four volumes of Holdsworth's History of English Law, this volume presents a selection of seventeen essays by the great legal scholar. Highlights from his long and prolific career, they address such topics as martial law, the English constitution, case law, equity, trusts, libel, law reporting, contracts and land law. "These essays tend to enlarge the mind and to stir the imagination. They are the work of one of the most distinguished of the great line of English legal historians." --Bernard L. Shientag, Columbia Law Review 47 (1947) 1255 WILLIAM S. HOLDSWORTH [1871-1944] was a professor of constitutional law at Cambridge from 1903-1908 and the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1922-1944. He is well-known for his monumental History of English Law (1st ed. 1908) and other works, such as Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1929) and Some Makers of English Law (1938). ARTHUR LEHMAN GOODHARD [1891-1978] was an American-born British academic jurist and lawyer. He was editor of the Cambridge Law Journal from 1921 to 1925, editor the Law Quarterly Review in 1926, a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University from 1931-1951 and the first American to be the master of an Oxford College. HAROLD GREVILLE HANBURY [1898-1993] was a Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1921-1949 and All Souls College, Oxford, from 1949-1964. His works include Modern Equity: Being the Principles of Equity (1935), The Principles of Agency (1952) and The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (1958).

This fifth volume in the distinguished series on the history of Canadian law turns to the important issues of crime and criminal justice. In examining crime and criminal law specifically, the volume contributes to the long-standing concern of Canadian historians with law, order, and authority. The volume covers criminal justice history at various times in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. It is a study which opens up greater vistas of understanding to all those interested in the interstices of law, crime, and punishment.

The African Canadian Legal Odyssey explores the history of African Canadians and the law from the era of slavery until the early twenty-first century. This collection demonstrates that the social history of Blacks in Canada has always been inextricably bound to questions of law, and that the role of the law in shaping Black life was often ambiguous and shifted over time. Comprised of eleven engaging chapters, organized both thematically and chronologically, it includes a substantive introduction that provides a synthesis and overview of this complex history. This outstanding collection will appeal to both advanced specialists and undergraduate students and makes an important contribution to an emerging field of scholarly inquiry.

Written by the eminent German legal historian, Michael Stolleis, these two ‘Essays on Legal History’ offer an original and compelling history of the symbolism through which law is characterised as being 'above' us. In ‘The Eye of the Law’, the history of this metaphor is followed from antiquity through to the present day: from the Greek Eye of Justice, the eye of the impartial judge of the Underworld, the Eye of God watching past, present and future, the Eye of the Prince, guiding his subjects, to the almighty Eye of the Law. While our belief in the law may have become brittle, nothing escapes what is now the Eye of Big Brother. ‘In the Name of the Law’ takes up the various formulas used to legitimate the decisions of the courts, from the times of absolutism over the 19th century until today. The speaker who speaks in the name of a higher being underlines his function: his authority comes from above. And it is ‘in the name of’ god, king, people, state, nation, or law, that a weak, earthly, justice receives its support.

A critical catalogue of how lawyers use history - as authority, as evocation of lost golden ages, as a nightmare to escape and as progress towards enlightenment.

Covering a broad range of topics, this volume examines developments over the last two hundred years in the legal profession and the judiciary, nineteenth-century prison history, as well as the impact of the 1815 Treaty of Paris.