Lawyers, Litigation & English Society Since 1450Legal history has usually been written in terms of writs and legislation, and the development of legal doctrine. Christopher Brooks, in this series of essays roughly half of which are previously unpublished, approaches the law from two different angles: the uses made of courts and the fluctuations in the fortunes of the legal profession. Based on extensive original research, his work has helped to redefine the parameters of British legal history, away from procedural development and the refinement of legal doctrine and towards the real impact that the law had in society. He also places the law into a wider social and political context, showing how changes in the law often reflected, but at the same time influenced, changes in intellectual assumptions and political thought. Lawyers as a profession flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. This great age of lawyers was followed by a decline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting both a decline in litigation and the perception of the law as slow, artificially complicated and ruinously expensive. In Lawyers, Litigation and Society, 1450-1900, Christopher Brooks also looks at the sorts of cases brought before different courts, showing why particular courts were used and for what reasons, as well as showing why the popularity of individual courts changed over the years. |
Contents
1 | |
9 | |
Civil Litigation in England 16401830 | 27 |
4 Litigation and Society in England 12001996 | 63 |
5 The Decline and Rise of the English Legal Profession 17001850 | 129 |
6 Apprenticeship and Legal Training in England 17001850 | 149 |
Other editions - View all
Lawyers, Litigation & English Society Since 1450 Christopher Brooks,Michael Lobban Limited preview - 1998 |
Lawyers, Litigation & English Society Since 1450 Christopher Brooks,Michael Lobban No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
actions apprenticeship articled clerks assizes attorneys and solicitors Barnard's Inn barristers Bench and Common Cambridge cent central courts Chapter civil committee common law Common Pleas county courts court business court usage courts of requests decline disputes Early Modern England early seventeenth century early Stuart economic eighteenth century Elizabethan England English Law English Legal evidence example fees gentry Ibid important inns of chancery inns of court J. H. Baker judges Judicial Statistics juries jurisdictions Justice king King's Bench large numbers Law Society lawsuits lawyers lectures legal aid legal education Legal History legal inns legal profession legal thought London Lord lower branch Magna Carta manorial manorial courts middling sort nineteenth century Observer and Journal Oxford parliament period Pettyfoggers and Vipers political population practice practitioners professional Record Office royal rule of law Selden Society significant Sir Christopher Yelverton sixteenth century social statute Thomas urban William Lambarde