
The Library
Law’s empire : English legal cultures at home and abroad [Review Article]
Tools
Finn, Margot C. (2005) Law’s empire : English legal cultures at home and abroad [Review Article]. Historical Journal, Vol.48 (No.1 ). pp. 295-303. doi:10.1017/S0018246X04004315 ISSN 0018-246X.
![]()
|
PDF
WRAP_Finn_LAWS_EMPIRE_ENGLISH_LEGAL_CULTURES_AT_.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (78Kb) |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X04004315
Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians’ understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s classic study. The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law’s pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law’s empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subjects: | K Law [Moys] > KF Common Law, British Isles > KF England and Wales | ||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Common law -- History , Common law -- English influences | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Historical Journal | ||||
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 0018-246X | ||||
Book Title: | Baker, J.H. (2000). The common law tradition : lawyers, books and the law. London: Hambledon. | ||||
Official Date: | 21 March 2005 | ||||
Dates: |
|
||||
Volume: | Vol.48 | ||||
Number: | No.1 | ||||
Number of Pages: | 9 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 295-303 | ||||
DOI: | 10.1017/S0018246X04004315 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
![]() |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year