The Dearest Birth Right Of The People Of England

Legal scholars from Britain and the US have revised 11 presentations they made to the 14th British Legal History Conference on Parliaments, Juries, and the Law, held in Edinburgh in July 1999. Among their topics are the civil jury in modern Scottish legal history, Medieval Wales, English manorial courts, the origins of the confrontation right and hearsay rule, jury research in the English Reports on CD-ROM, forgery and the jury at the Old Bailey from 1818 to 1821, and malicious prosecution as a test case for the fate of the civil jury in late Victorian England. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

While much fundamental research in the recent past has been devoted to the criminal jury in England to 1800,there has been little work on the nineteenth century, and on the civil jury . This important study fills these obvious gaps in the literature. It also provides a re-assessment of standard issues such as jury lenity or equity, while raising questions about orthodoxies concerning the relationship of the jury to the development of laws of evidence. Moreover, re-assessment of the jury in nineteenth-century England rejects the thesis that juries were squeezed out by judges in favour of market.

"This book is an account of the evolution of the jury and jury trial from early times to the present day including changes brought in by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that widen the categories of people undertaking jury service." "The Criminal Jury Old and New traces the genesis of the historic system of 'trial by peers' from its roots as a replacement for trial by ordeal through all its great legal and political landmarks. It shows how the jury changed and developed across the centuries to become a key democratic institution capable of resisting monarchs, governments, pressure and interference - and, on occasion, the plain words of the law. It also looks at such intriguing concepts as 'jury nullification', 'perverse verdicts' and 'pious perjury'."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection brings together a selection of the most cited articles published by Professor John W. Cairns. Essays range from Scots Law from 16th and 17th century Scotland, through to the 18th century influence of Dutch Humanism into the 19th century, a

Punitive damages are private law's most controversial remedy. This book traces the development of the jurisdiction from the foundational decisions of Huckle v Money and Wilkes v Wood in England, to leading modern cases such as Harris v Digital Pulse Pty Ltd in Australia, Whiten v Pilot Insurance Co in Canada, Couch v AG (No 2) in New Zealand, PH Hydraulics and Engineering Pte Ltd v Airtrust (Hong Kong) Ltd in Singapore and Mathias v Accor Economy Lodging, Inc and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co v Campbell in the United States. Many of the decisions addressed are not only landmarks regarding punitive damages but are among the most important judgments delivered in private law more generally. The essays, which are written by leading scholars from a wide range of jurisdictions, cast new light on the cases covered. They do so by examining their historical antecedents and the impact that they have had on the development of the law. The full spectrum of issues regarding punitive damages is addressed including the insurability of punishment, constitutional constraints on the remedy's availability and whether the award should be confined to particular causes of action. The collection will be of interest to all scholars and students of private law. It concentrates on common law cases although civilian perspectives, drawn from France and Germany, are also offered.

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.

Enlightenment, Legal Education, and Critique deals with broad themes in Legal History, such as the development of Scots Law through the major legal thinkers of the Enlightenment, essays on Roman law and miscellaneous essays on the literary and philosophic

In recent years a strand of thinking has developed in private law scholarship which has come to be known as 'rights' or 'rights-based' analysis. Rights analysis seeks to develop an understanding of private law obligations that is driven, primarily or exclusively, by the recognition of the rights we have against each other, rather than by other influences on private law, such as the pursuit of community welfare goals. Notions of rights are also assuming greater importance in private law in other respects. Human rights instruments are having an increasing influence on private law doctrines. And in the law of unjust enrichment, an important debate has recently begun on the relationship between restitution of rights and restitution of value. This collection is a significant contribution to debate about the role of rights in private law. It includes essays by leading private law scholars addressing fundamental questions about the role of rights in private law as a whole and within particular areas of private law. The collection includes contributions by advocates and critics of rights-based approaches and provides a thorough and balanced analysis of the relationship between rights and private law.