INTRODUCTION
… For both More’s predecessor Cardinal Wolsey and More himself ‘conscience remained front‐and‐centre as far as Chancery was concerned’. The cusp of the Reformation saw the medieval order ‘yielding to an intellectual and economic revolution’, and Christendom ‘rent by the divisions between Protestant and Catholic’. Thomas More’s conscience smashed, with devastating effect, against the first brutal vestiges of modernity and it cost him his life. More also guided Equity towards modernity by, for example, insisting on injunctions ‘to prevent unconscientious use of legal rights’, an early example of the doctrine of unconscionability that remains indicative of Equity’s relative flexibility and discretion within the Common Law …
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Robert Herian, The Conscience of Thomas More: An Introduction to Equity in Modernity, Heythrop Journal. First published: 20 February 2020. https://doi-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/heyj.13507.
First posted 2020-03-27 07:49:40
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