The Life of the Law : Proceedings of the Tenth British Legal History Conference, Oxford, 1991

Hambledon Press, London, first edition, 1993. Cloth, 8vo, 24 cm,. viii, 267 pp. Papers from the 10th British Legal History Conference (held at Oxford in 1991), edited by Peter Birks. Contents include: 1 'Nothing Which is New or Unique'? A Reappraisal of Judicium Essoniorum', by Paul Brand; 2 Country Lawyers? The Composers of English Chancery Bills, by Timothy S. Haskett; 3 Wager of Law and Judgment Default in Pleas of Dower in the Royal Courts of Late Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England, by Sue Sheridan Walker; 4 'Under Her Own Lock and Key': Women's Position in Early Medieval Law and Society, by Rebecca V. Colman; 5 Law Books at Cambridge, 1500-1640, by Alain Wijffels; 6 Puzzles from Irish Law Reporting History, by W.N. Osborough; 7 Law Reform in Eighteenth-Century England, by Wilfrid Prest; 8 The Independence of the Judiciary in Eighteenth-Century England, by David Lemmings; 9 The Origins of the Glasgow Law School. The Professors of the Civil Law, 1741-61, by John W. Cairns; 10 The Vinerian Chair: An Atlantic Perspective, by M.D. Gordon; 11 Strikers and the Law, 1825-51, by Michael Lobban; 12 An Episode in Criminal Law Reform through Private Initiative, by K.J.M. Smith and Stephen White; 13 History in Eclipse? The Role of the Past in Books on the English Legal System, by Raymond Cocks. "Law as we know it is unthinkable without books. The life of the law is worked out in the law library. The law library in its turn is renewed from age to age by change in the world outside. Litigation is the principal but not the only vehicle by which change in the world is transmitted to the books. In the common law it was in the past almost the only such vehicle, though the courts have increasingly had to share their monopoly not only with the legislature but also, from small beginnings, with jurists in the university law schoo1s. An Englishman easily finds the root of this last development in Blackstone and the Vinerian Chair, but the papers in this volume by John Cairns and Michael Gordon ward off that anglocentric conviction. The volume is in the nature of series of snapshots of the process of interaction between the law library and changing conditions and attitudes in the world beyond. It moves through the centuries of the law's development n these islands, from the thirteenth to the twentieth, opening windows on its books and the social and intellectual ambience in which they were formed. " - from the introduction. As New.