Renowned as a great scholar, teacher, and legal historian, Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906) advanced the cause of legal history, opposing the idea that legal history was law and not history, yet believing in the advantage of legal training. He was Downing Professor of Law at Cambridge, helped to found the Selden Society, and himself edited Henry de Bracton's Notebook and four Year Books of Edward II. With Sir Frederick Pollock he wrote the brilliant work that is still a standard, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I . He edited Memoranda de Parliamento, and wrote Domesday Book and Beyond, Township and Borough, and Roman Canon Law as well as many papers on legal history and law. His lectures on Equity, on The Forms of Action at Common Law, and on Constitutional History of England were published after his death. C. H. S. Fifoot has written this biography of Maitland with care and devotion in a style that is lucid and eloquent. He traces the origin and development of Maitland's works, using them to reveal the man himself and his qualities of mind and spirit. Mr. Fifoot places his subject in the context not only of his age, but also of his family and friends. He has drawn on Maitland's letters as well as unpublished letters of his friends, private papers, manuscripts, and recollections, much of which would otherwise have perished. The many quotations of Maitland he has incorporated are delightful and revealing.

Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) was lawyer, governor of New York, Supreme Court Justice, presidential candidate in 1916, Secretary of State in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, a member of the World Court, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 until his retirement in 1941. To some, Hughes appeared larger than life. Robert H. Jackson once said of him, "\[He\] looks like God and talks like God." But to those who knew him well, he was quite human, extraordinarily gifted, but human nonetheless. His Autobiographical Notes portray him as no biography could and provide comment on almost a century of American history as seen by one who played a part in shaping its course. Hughes' notes reveal two sides of his personality—a serious side when he was at work, and a genial, sometimes humorous, side when he was relaxing or with friends and family. When he writes of unofficial life—especially his boyhood, college years, and early years at the bar—he is raconteur telling his story with a certain amount of humor; when he writes of his official life he tends to be matter-of-fact. The early chapters describe the formative influence which shaped his his loving but intellectually demanding parents and deeply religious training; his unusual early education, which took place mostly at home and gave full scope to his precocity. Hughes' accounts of college life in the 1870s at Madison (now Colgate) and Brown University and of his career as a young lawyer in the New York City of the 1880s and 1890s are valuable portraits of an era. Brought up to a high sense of duty, Hughes, from the start of his career, felt bound to take worthy legal cases and it was his reputation for integrity and thoroughness that led to his selection as counsel in the gas and insurance investigations of 1905-1906. This was the turn of events that precipitated him into the public eye and, subsequently, into politics. The culmination of his career came in 1937 when he led the Supreme Court through a constitutional crisis and confronted Franklin Roosevelt in the Court packing battle. In the intervening thirty years, Hughes was a major figure in American political and legal circles. His Notes record his impressions of presidents, statesmen, and justices. His reflections on the diplomacy of the 1920s and on the causes leading up to the Second World War are of immense historical importance. The editors have supplied an introduction to the Notes, commenting on Hughes' personality and public image, his political style and rise to fame. They have remained unobtrusive throughout, intervening only to clarify references and provide necessary details. For the rest, they let Hughes speak for himself in the crisp and clear style that reveals his unusual intelligence and the retentive and analytical mind that distinguished his conduct of affairs. Justice Felix Frankfurther wrote of "I have known or know about most of the leading men of my time both here and in England enough to justify me in forming a judgment. There isn't the slightest doubt that C.E.H. is among the few really sizable figures of my lifetime. He is three-dimensional and has impact." Here, in these Notes, is this great man drawn in life-size proportions.

Challenges the historical bases of modern claims of executive privilege and cites the dangers of executive secrecy

Our present system of criminal prosecution originated in England in the sixteenth century. Langbein traces its development, which was at its most intense during the reign of Queen Mary. He shows how the common law developed a system of official investigation and prosecution that incorporated the medieval institution of the jury trial. He places equal emphasis on the role of the justices of the peace as public prosecutors. The second half of the book compares the English system with those of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and France. He concludes by refuting the popular opinion that the English were strongly indebted to continental models. "This is an excellent work of scholarship, exhibiting wide research, erudition and analytical ability." —Joseph H. Smith, Harvard Law Review 88 (1974-1975) 485 JOHN LANGBEIN is Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He has held academic positions at Stanford University, Oxford University, the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte and the Max-Planck-Institut für Ausländisches und Internationales Strafrecht. Langbein is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Comparative Law, the International Association of Procedure Law, and other organizations in the fields of legal history and comparative law. Some of his most distinguished publications and articles include History of the Common The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009), Torture and the Law of Europe and England in the Ancient Regime (1977), and "The Supreme Court Flunks Trusts," Supreme Court Review (1991).

Book by Dargo, George

Americanization of the Common Law remains one of the standard works on the transformation of law in America from the late colonial period to the end of the early republic. In a straightforward manner, William E. Nelson analyzes the profound ideological movement that grew out of the American Revolution and caused substantial structural change in the legal and social order of Massachusetts and, by extension, in the nation at large. The Revolution, Nelson argues, transformed a hierarchical and communitarian legal and social order into an egalitarian and individualistic one. For this edition, Nelson has written a new preface in which he discusses the book's initial reception and the relevant historiographical issues that have arisen since it was first published in 1975.

American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776-1876 focuses on the interactions between law, lawyers, and American society taking into account not only the influence that bench and bar wielded over the lay public, but also the equally important restraints that societal norms imposed upon the thinking and behavior of the professional classes.

Distinguished by the critical value it assigns to law in Puritan society, this study describes precisely how the Massachusetts legal system differed from England's and how equity and an adapted common law became so useful to ordinary individuals. The author discovers that law gradually replaced religion and communalism as the source of social stability, and he gives a new interpretation to the witchcraft prosecutions of 1692. Originally published 1979. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

So commonplace has the term rule of law become that few recognize its source as Dicey's "Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution." Cosgrove examines the life and career of Dicey, the most influential constitutional authority of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, showing how his critical and intellectual powers were accompanied by a simplicity of character and wit. Dicey's contribution to the history of law is described as is his place in Victorian society. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This broad, comparative study examines the social, economic, and legal contexts of crime and authority in two vastly different states over a one hundred year period. Massachusetts—an urban, industrial, and heterogeneous northern state—chose the penitentiary in its attempt to minimize the role of informal and extralegal authority while South Carolina—a rural southern slave state—systematically reduced its formal legal institutions, frequently relying on vigilantism. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Means provides the first major study of both the historical development of private law in a Latin American country and the shifting role of business corporations or share companies in Latin American development. He shows that Colombia's corporate law provisions for commercial codes held only a tenuous relationship to reality and that, even today, Colombia's commercial development continues to be affected by a paucity of legal scholars, case reports, and legal journals.

Until the mid-1700s, law was not thought of as a science or profession. Most Virginians adhered to the English country tradition that considered law to be a local and personal affair. The growth of cities and business, however, guaranteed that disputes would spill over county boundaries. As law proliferated and became more complex, it encouraged the growth of a legal profession composed of men who shared specialized knowledge of law and the courts. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Book by Reid, John Phillip

Investigating a wide range of problems in the development of English law, this collection of original essays honors the contributions of Samuel D. Thorne to the study of English legal history from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. The essays combine close study of legal texts and doctrines in their own setting with broader analysis of the interaction of legal and social change. Although each essay has its own historiographical context, a substantial unity is achieved. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Reprint of the first and only edition. Originally Chapel The University of North Carolina Press, 1981. xii, 378 pp. Finkelman describes the judicial turmoil that ensued when slaves were taken into free states, and the resultant issues of the conflict of laws, comity and cooperation between the states, their Constitutional obligations, and the threat of the nationalization of slavery.

Nelson identifies three principal institutions involved in conflict the twon meeting, the church congregation, and the courts of law. He subsequently determines the type of cases over which each institution had jurisdiction and studies the procedures by which each functioned. He examines the tendency after 1800 to bring disputes to the court and sees this as a response to the introduction of new, nontraditional values not held by local institutions. Originally published 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Focusing on a single county at a time when the population grew from 24,000 to 246,000, the authors combine statistical analysis of documentary sources, contemporary newspaper accounts, and exploration in criminal case files to give a detailed reconstruction of the operations of the county's entire criminal justice system. By tracing the process from arrest to trial, sentencing, and punishment, this study will have a profound effect on our perception of American criminal justice. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In this first general history of legal education, Stevens traces the development of law schools, the legal profession, and legal thought, relating their evolution to intellectual, political, and social trends. He describes how the establishment gained power over education after 1920 and how, in the past two decades, both students and the practicing profession have questioned this authority. He also examines the implications of the "legal revolution" and new opportunities for women and minorities.

For more than one hundred years, Harvard's use of the case method of appellate opinions dominated legal education. Deploring the attempt to reduce law to an autonomous system of rules and principles, the realists at Yale developed a functional approach to the discipline—one that stressed the factual context of the case rather than the legal principles it raised, one that attempted to address issues of social policy by integrating law with the social sciences. Originally published 1986. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

From the trial of John Peter Zenger in the eighteenth century to the recent libel cases of William Westmoreland and Ariel Sharon, political defamation cases have attracted considerable attention. As Norman Rosenberg shows, cases like these raise fundamental questions about how much criticism of public leaders a supposedly open, liberal society will permit. Drawing upon a wide variety of historical sources, Protecting the Best Men argues that there exists no natural, evolutionary history of free speech. It also challenges interpretations that rest upon discovering an "original understanding" about the First Amendment. Instead, this interpretive history of the law of libel highlights the complexity and historically rooted nature of legal concepts and legal consciousness in the United States. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

White combines an intensive study of medieval law with insights from anthropology, religion, and social history to create a picture of French society in the Middle Ages which is impressive in its breadth and illuminating in its detail. By examining the practice whereby gifts of land were approved by the giver's relatives, he suggests novel ways of looking at early medieval law, kinship, land tenure, and gift exchange. White shows that laudatio parentum can be properly analyzed only within a combined social, legal, and religious context. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Perhaps the greatest problem of medieval property law was that third parties and even grantors themselves often challenged transactions, making the lives of grantees miserable with lawsuits or forcible seizures. By the eleventh century, many devices for attempting to forestall or defeat claims were in use and others were in the process of being invented. Tabuteau considers the nature and efficacy of these devices as well as the degree to which the consent of interested parties was necessary or advisable. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Allen Steinberg brings to life the court-centered criminal justice system of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, chronicles its eclipse, and contrasts it to the system—dominated by the police and public prosecutor—that replaced it. He offers a major reinterpretation of criminal justice in nineteenth-century America by examining this transformation from private to state prosecution and analyzing the discontinuity between the two systems. Steinberg first establishes why the courts were the sources of law enforcement, authority, and criminal justice before the advent of the police. He shows how the city's system of private prosecution worked, adapted to massive social change, and came to dominate the culture of criminal justice even during the first decades following the introduction of the police. He then considers the dilemmas that prompted reform, beginning with the establishment of a professional police force and culminating in the restructuring of primary justice. Making extensive use of court dockets, state and municipal government publications, public speeches, personal memoirs, newspapers, and other contemporary records, Steinberg explains the intimate connections between private prosecution, the everyday lives of ordinary people, and the conduct of urban politics. He ties the history of Philadelphia's criminal courts closely to related developments in the city's social and political evolution, making a contribution not only to the study of criminal justice but also to the larger literature on urban, social, and legal history. Originally published in 1989. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor—labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon—Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery.

We sell Rare, out-of-print, uncommon, & used BOOKS, PRINTS, MAPS, DOCUMENTS, AND EPHEMERA. We do not sell ebooks, print on demand, or other reproduced materials. Each item you see here is individually described and imaged. We welcome further inquiries.

Robert Palmer's pathbreaking study shows how the Black Death triggered massive changes in both governance and law in fourteenth-century England, establishing the mechanisms by which the law adapted to social needs for centuries thereafter. The Black Death killed one-third of the English population between 1348 and 1351. To preserve traditional society, the king's government aggressively implemented new punitive legal remedies as a mechanism for social control. This attempt to shore up traditional society in fact transformed it. English governance now legitimately extended to routine regulation of all workers, from shepherds to innkeepers, smiths, and doctors. The new cohesiveness of the ecclesiastical and lay upper orders, the increase in subject matter jurisdictions, the growth of the chancellor's court, and the acceptance of coercive contractual remedies made the Black Death in England a transformative experience for law and for governance. Palmer's book, based on all of the available legal records, establishes a genuinely new interpretation and chronology of these important legal changes.

Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which—had they prevailed—40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting—individual states—as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture—that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used. Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which English monarchs held the throne, relatively little has been focused on the means that enabled them to occupy it in the first place. In The Right to be King, Howard Nenner explores the rules and assumptions that governed the succession to the throne in late Tudor and Stuart England. It is a story of high political drama that illuminates the competing modes of inheritance, election, nomination, conquest, and prescription. Nenner provides a careful analysis of exclusion and abdication and examines the mysterious course of the succession of William and Mary in 1689. By tracing the slow process by which Parliament wrested control of succession from the monarch, he sheds new light on the history of Parliamentary sovereignty. In addition, he argues that contemporaries constructed much of the evolving public law of succession from familiar legal forms in the private sphere, such as property, inheritance, and contract law.

Challenging traditional accounts of the development of American private law, Peter Karsten offers an important new perspective on the making of the rules of common law and equity in nineteenth-century courts. The central story of that era, he finds, was a struggle between a jurisprudence of the head, which adhered strongly to English precedent, and a jurisprudence of the heart, a humane concern for the rights of parties rendered weak by inequitable rules and a willingness to create exceptions or altogether new rules on their behalf. Karsten first documents the tendency of jurists, particularly those in the Northeast, to resist arguments to alter rules of property, contract, and tort law. He then contrasts this tendency with a number of judicial innovations—among them the sanctioning of 'deep pocket' jury awards and the creation of the attractive-nuisance rule—designed to protect society's weaker members. In tracing the emergence of a pro-plaintiff, humanitarian jurisprudence of the heart, Karsten necessarily addresses the shortcomings of the reigning, economic-oriented paradigm regarding judicial rulemaking in nineteenth-century America. Originally published in 1997. A UNC Press Enduring Edition—UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their "property," or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. In Working Knowledge, Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies—including DuPont, Rand McNally, and the American Tobacco Company—Fisk makes a highly technical area of law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.