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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]

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]

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]

Information about several papers at the 28th annual conference sponsored by the Legal Scottish History Group on October 4, 2008 at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland on matters regarding the law reports is presented. Topics include the long-term project for publication of Sinclair's "Practicks," the earliest Scottish form of law reports, the parliamentary process in the reign of James VI and a re-analysis of the "duel under the law of Clann Duib."

There is hardly any legal institution which better characterizes the thinking and everyday practice of the common law family than the legal institution of the trust. The English common law developed it during the Middle Ages, and it remains popular to this day. The institution of the trust is a unique phenomenon of the common law. Surprisingly, the Zoroastrian community of the Sassanian period in Persia developed some legal techniques which are very close to the common law trust. In this paper I will show the peculiarities and history of what I call the Zoroastrian trust, and hope to establish the basic similarity between the two. What makes this comparison easier is the fact that the two legal institutions developed independently from each other, since there is no possibility of historical interactions between Sassanian Persia (third-seventh centuries AD) and England during the Middle Ages. It is also impossible to speak about common or similar religious, cultural and legal backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the chapter headings of the manuscript of L'Esprit des lois in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris enables us to follow the different phases of a twenty-year redaction process. The main tendencies in Montesquieu worth noting are his concern with the conciseness and simplification and the recurrent concern to give the headings a greater degree of generality, the better to bring out the principles that constitute the real heart of the spirit of the laws. This paper looks more closely at the heading of a particularly strategic chapter in L'Esprit des lois, 'De la constitution d'Angleterre' (XI, 6); the eight stages through which this astonishingly simple heading passed are like a journey, undertaken between 1739 and 1745. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]