A natural history of the common law / S.F.C. Milsom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Milsom, S. F. C. (Stroud Francis Charles), 1923-2016.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Common law--England--History.

Common law.

Common law--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (175 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York ; Chichester : Columbia University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? In this collection of discussions from the James S. Carpentier Lectures in legal history and criticism, one of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians S. F. C. Milsom focuses on the development of English common law-the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases-from which American law was to grow. 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 circumvented. He examines the invisibility of early legal change and how adjustment to conditions was hidden behind such things as the changing meaning of words. Milsom points out that legal history may be more prone than other kinds of history to serious anachronism. 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. Formal continuity has enabled nineteenth-century assumptions to be carried back, in some respects as far back as the twelfth century. This book brings together Milsom's efforts to understand the uncomfortable changes that lie beneath that comforting formal surface. Those changes were too large to have been intended by anyone at the time and too slow to be perceived by historians working within the short periods now imposed by historical convention. The law was made not by great men making great decisions but by man-sized men unconcerned with the future and thinking only about their own immediate everyday difficulties. 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chronological List of Publications

I. MAKING LAW: LAWYERS AND LAYMEN

II. CHANGING LAW: FICTIONS AND FORMS

III. MANAGEMENT, CUSTOM, AND LAW

IV. HISTORY AND LOST ASSUMPTIONS

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613627803

9781280597978

1280597976

9780231503495

0231503490

OCLC:

826476414