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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.

This paper is a response to John Barton's posthumous paper on the date and authorship of the English thirteenth-century legal treatise Bracton. That paper was an extended critique of sections of a much shorter paper I had published in 1996 on these and related topics. It responds to the main criticisms Barton makes of my paper. It accepts a few of these but not others, and does not accept his main arguments against assigning a date prior to 1240 for significant parts of the treatise nor his renewed assertion of the claims of Henry de Bracton to be the sole author of the treatise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 regulation of market activities, by both local and central authorities, has been studied in some detail, but the interrelationship between the two has received considerably less attention. This paper examines market regulations and their enforcement in London prior to the Black Death, including measures to control prices, wages, forestalling, product quality, etc. It argues that, although London officials were often obliged to enforce royal orders relative to market activities, the economic policies elaborated by the mayor and aldermen had a significant impact on those adopted by the Crown and applied throughout the realm, particularly on the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on papers that were delivered at the annual conference of the Scottish Legal History Group on October 2, 2010 in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh, Scotland by historians such as Gero Dolezalek, Andrew Simpson, and Rab Houston. Topics discussed include the office of coroner in Scotland, medieval law in Scotland, and common law.

The article presents a list of accessions to repositories related to legal history in Great Britain including client deeds, court registers, and family and estate papers.

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.

Abstracts of papers delivered at the annual conference of the organization the Scottish Legal History Group on October 5, 2013, in Edinburgh, Scotland, are presented.