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The 1935 judgment in Woolmington v Director of Public Prosecutions established the 'golden thread' principle that, in general, the prosecution bears the burden of proof in criminal trials. This is the 'cardinal principle of the criminal law', not just in England and Wales, but right across the common law world. It is a principle that is now largely taken for granted, but when Woolmington was decided, it represented a sharp and largely unexpected break with past authority. Drawing on a 'legal archaeology' methodology, this paper steps outside the limited and, in some respects, misleading facts contained in the official law reports and considers Woolmington in its broader socio-economic and political context, and with particular reference to important gender issues that arise. It seeks, thereby, to improve our understanding of this revolutionary judgment and how it came to be made at this juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When widows claimed dower they were normally claiming part of the lands which their husband had possessed during their marriage. But the medieval common law also allowed widows to claim lands which the husband had never held if they had been in the possession of a close relative of the husband at the time of the marriage provided the relative had been present at the marriage and given consent to the endowment made by his or her heir apparent. This paper analyses the sixty or so actions of dower ex assensu found on the plea rolls for the period down to 1307 and in associated law reports. That assent was recorded in a written charter in relatively few cases. In most the court relied in part or in whole on the evidence of witnesses present at the ceremony. Sometimes their evidence alone was decisive. More commonly witnesses were added to a jury which gave a collective verdict on whether consent had been given. These cases provide a valuable reminder that witness evidence was already in the thirteenth century a regular and accepted feature of at least one form of common law action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Lent Term 1668/9, John Vincent, a bencher of Gray’s Inn, gave a reading on the Merchants’ Assurances Act 1601 (43 Eliz. I, c.12). The notes of the law reporter, Joseph Keble, record this observance of the centuries-old tradition of readings, which was destined to expire within the next two decades. This paper situates Vincent’s reading within the changing tradition of readings in the seventeenth century. It highlights the role readings continued to play in disseminating sophisticated legal learning, particularly in relation to newer areas of practice such as marine insurance, which were largely uninformed by statute, common law precedent or reference works, and would have been difficult to master through book-study alone. It examines a selection of issues discussed during the reading, focussing on legal outcomes grounded in the ‘customs’, usages, practices and understandings of merchants, and illustrating how these were perceived as exceptional by comparison to the ordinary rules of the common law. The nature and jurisdiction of London’s court of assurances, reconstituted and empowered by the 1601 Act, are also discussed. More generally, this paper demonstrates the value of post-Restoration readings for historians of English law in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century untilMorisonvMoat(1851), described by theOxford History of the Laws of Englandas ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions could no longer be enforced in the guild courts by the late seventeenth century, or within the wider jurisdiction of the courts of the City of London. Instead, as the second half of the paper shows, it was the law courts proper that came to provide succour to those working trade secrets, allowing them to both restrain employees from using secrets for their own benefit and/or to sell secrets to other parties. This was a halting process, but one that had certainly begun prior to Morison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Roman empire was legally pluralistic. But what exactly does this entail in concrete terms? With the growth in historical studies of legal pluralism in the Roman empire, some significant differences in approach have emerged. This article tests and clarifies some of the limits in the current 'legal pluralism' conceptual landscape, focussing on disputes and dispute resolution. It is argued that a clearer distinction should be drawn between 'normative' and 'jurisdictional' pluralism, though both approaches still raise certain conceptual problems. The place of disputes within the family within this wider institutional picture is then taken as a case study in the final part of the paper, and it is suggested that while family disputes can evidence 'legal pluralism' in the 'norms' sense, there is less to suggest that there were a multitude of officially sanctioned legal fora available for resolving family disputes. As a result, many went beyond the law. This has wider implications for the study of legal pluralism in antiquity and the problem of integrating alternative dispute resolution (ADR) into the pluralistic picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the acquisition of manuscripts related to Scottish law, including some of the papers of Charles Wren, Thomas Adams, and Robert Thorp.

The article reports on the 2017 conference of the Scottish Legal History Group on October 7, 2017 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It presents summaries of the papers offered at the meeting, including ones on punishment of rebellion in Scotland, manuscript transmission of "Regiam Majestatem," and King Charles !'s reform of church finance in Scotland.

A widely accepted view is that, for Bentham, legal interpretation was a mechanical or technical matter. This paper reconstructs Bentham’s complex theory of legal interpretation and challenges the above view. It demonstrates that Bentham’s theory of legal interpretation consists of three major theses. First, when there are different interpretations of a law, the authoritative interpreter ought to be the sovereign legislature. Second, strict interpretation attributes to the legislature the will it actually has when making the law. The strict interpretation of a law ought to take the text of the law itself as the standard, and then be guided by its purpose. Third, liberal interpretation attributes to the legislature a will that it would have had if it had been aware of the case before the court, but which it in fact failed to have through inadvertency. Liberal interpretation is a necessary evil, and must be checked: liberal interpretation ought to be made according to the pattern and materials of the old laws, and be subject to the authority of the sovereign legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars of emotion and the law have sought to demonstrate the significant role emotion plays in shaping the operation of courtrooms, the development of legal theory and practice, and the possibilities for justice. This paper contributes to the discussion by exploring what happens when emotion is ignored or underplayed in trial narratives, seeking to demonstrate that whose emotion is considered to be important can shed light on power dynamics, law and the cultures in which law operates. It does so through a case study of women on trial for murdering their husbands in early nineteenth-century Ireland. It argues that emotion is not simply another species of evidence that can be used in criminal processes, but itself a type of narrative – emotion is constructed and performed by actors in legal dramas and forms a competing story to others in the courtroom space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstracts of papers delivered at the October 1, 2016 36th annual conference of the Scottish Legal History Group in Edinburgh, Scotland are presented on topics including murder cases of the Justiciary Court from 1625 to 1650, the history of Scotland's High Court of Admiralty from 1681 to 1830, and the nineteenth-century history of animal welfare in Scotland.

While Craig's relationship to, and emergence from, the French legal humanist tradition has always been widely recognized, this paper constitutes a deeper analysis of the specific threads connecting Craig to the humanist literature of the sixteenth century. It examines the first chapter to the Jus feudale and, by studying Craig's aetiology of law and society, assesses the literary and cultural influences on his historiographical product. It demonstrates that Craig's understanding of the earliest human society and of law's evolution was highly dependent on continental humanist literature and, above all, on the writings of Jean Bodin. Yet it also shows that Craig was capable of independent thought and rigorous critical analysis of sources. The article examines Craig's relationship to the writings of his fellow Scot and humanist, George Buchanan, whose De jure regni apud Scotos constitutes a vital intertextual frame for many aspects of Craig's thought, particularly as it relates to sovereignty, monarchy and the limits of royal power. Moreover, it will be seen that the first chapter, though seemingly an antiquarian digression, actually reflects Craig's thoughts on many significant political issues that were current in Scotland at the time he was writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 38th annual conference and Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Scottish Legal History Group which was held on October 6, 2018 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it mentions the next conference on October 5, 2019. Abstracts are provided for papers such as "Supplications to the Papacy in Late Medieval Scotland" by Dr. Alan MacQuarrie and "Continuity and Change: the Highland Estate and the Regality Court of Grant" by Charles Fletcher which were presented at the 2018 event.

David Millon argued in a 1989 article that medieval and early modern legal historians had been beguiled into supposing that civil litigation in these periods was decided in accordance with the ‘official’ legal doctrine found in law reports, plea roll arguments and Inns of Court readings when in reality their outcome was generally determined by juries exercising their own normative discretion in reaching their verdicts. This paper challenges this pessimistic conclusion, at least for the period around 1300. It demonstrates from evidence drawn from plea rolls and mainly manuscript law reports the degree of judicial control over juries exercised within the courtroom and the way in which jury verdicts were considered, and not just accepted, by courts. It also argues that the application of substantive legal rules by judges for the decision of litigation was a more important phenomenon than Millon supposed and that legal rules were also regularly invoked and applied in the preliminary pleading in cases and thereby shaped and determined the issues which went for jury decision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Court of Appeal judgment of Rochefoucauld v Boustead [1897] 1 Ch. 196 through use of archive records, rarely cited law reports and nineteenth-century academic opinion. A full and hitherto untold account of the facts of the case is presented. It is revealed that the land which was the subject matter of the dispute was sold under the direction of the Ceylon District Court, and that the plaintiff was an accomplished individual who utilized various means to frustrate her former husband's attempts to obtain the land. The Court of Appeal's rulings that the defendant was a trustee of the land for the prevention of fraud, and that the trust was to be treated as an express trust, are also analysed with the aim of establishing how these issues were understood at the time of the judgment. It is argued that both of these aspects of the judgment were regarded as uncontroversial because there was a settled concept of equitable fraud, and because trusts imposed for the prevention of such fraud were an established category of trust in their own right, separate from express, resulting or constructive trusts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duke of Somerset v Cookson (1735) occupies an important place in English legal history as a leading authority for Chancery jurisdiction to order specific delivery of movable property where an award of damages would be inadequate. The property at issue was the Corbridge lanx, now in the British Museum, but then claimed as treasure trove by the duke of Somerset as lord of the manor of Corbridge. This paper re-examines Cookson as the first reported English decision relating to treasure trove, and uses later treasure trove claims by the duke of Somerset's successors to the manor of Corbridge, the dukes of Northumberland, to shed fresh light on the 1735 decision and on the development of treasure trove practice from the eighteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the thirty-fifth annual conference and annual general meeting (AGM) of the Scottish Legal History Group (SLHG) which was held in Edinburgh, Scotland on October 3, 2015, and it provides abstracts of several papers by authors such as Dauvit Broun, Joanna Tucker, and Dr. Jenny Wormald which were presented at the event. According to the article, an additional SLHG conference will be held on October 1, 2016. Scottish judicial records and declaratory power are assessed.

The article presents information on the thirty-fourth annual conference and annual general meeting of the Scottish Legal History Group which was held on October 4, 2014 at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it also provides several abstracts of papers which were delivered at the event. Professor John Finlay's report entitled "Consulting Counsel in Eighteenth-Century Scotland" is mentioned, along with "Walter Scott and Scottish Judicature Reform 1806-10" by Dr. Kathryn Chittick.