Category Archives: Legal History
‘Less Freedom and More Equality’
Carla Spivack and Deborah Gordon, ‘Donative Freedom, Disrupted’, 91 Brooklyn Law Review (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (5 February 2025). Donative freedom is the guiding principle of inheritance law. This is something that many of us who teach the subject tell students every semester, at the outset of a Wills and Trusts class. We keep […]
‘Contract Law: Past, Present and Future’: University College London, 12 June 2026
The first edition of Chitty on Contracts was published in 1826. To mark its 200th anniversary, the Private Law Group at University College London is hosting a one-day conference on Friday 12 June 2026. There will be papers on Chitty’s place in legal history, on current issues in contract law and on developments that may […]
Fatjon Kaja, ‘The Asking Price of Incorporation: State Leverage and the Evolution of Corporate Purpose’
ABSTRACT This article advances a new perspective on corporate purpose, grounded in the institutional conditions under which corporate privileges are granted. Using a novel dataset of historical UK royal charters and a mixed-methods empirical strategy, the study shows that early corporations articulated specific, enforceable, and public facing purpose clauses because incorporation was a scarce privilege […]
Haris Durrani, ‘Before Invention’
ABSTRACT This Article is the first comprehensive historical account of a foundational doctrine of US patent law: conception. Conception supplies the meaning of invention at the root of the patent system. It is a mental act, the formation of the idea of an invention before it is made. Considered ‘the touchstone of inventorship’, conception can […]
Jonathan Ainslie, ‘The Irrevocability of Jus Quaesitum Tertio: Stair and the Roman-Dutch Law’
ABSTRACT Prior to the enactment of the Contract (Third Party Rights) (Scotland) Act 2017, Scots law permitted third parties to derive an enforceable benefit from a contract via a jus quaesitum tertio which was irrevocable from its creation. This article examines the historical reasons for the irrevocability requirement, focusing on the formulation of jus quaesitum […]
Dirk Heirbaut, ‘Reflections on Codification History’
If we do not count constitutions, codifications are the most important texts of a nation’s legal system, at least in those countries which have codifications. Sometimes, a code may even surpass the constitution as a national symbol. Thus, since 1789, France has had so many regime changes and subsequent new constitutions that Jean Carbonnier has […]
Hancock and Contreras, ‘Who Speaks For an Industry? Codifying Professional Roles In The Design And Building Construction Sector Through Contracts’
ABSTRACT Contractual template documents enable diverse players within an industry to transact with one another in an efficient and equitable manner. In this article, we evaluate the template agreements that have evolved in the US design and building construction sector over the past 150 years, with the goal of identifying the features of contractual document […]
Jessica Lake, ‘Professional authority and institutional integrity: men’s suits for sexual misconduct defamation in nineteenth-century America’
ABSTRACT Since the #MeToo movement, prominent men accused of sexual misconduct have frequently brought defamation claims against their accusers and media companies that have published the allegations. This trend has generated a wealth of debate and scholarship, but little research has placed such cases within a historical context. This article seeks to fill this gap […]
Nick Trehan, ‘The Uncertainty of the Criterion of Enforceability in Contracts’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the evolution of the enforceability of contracts across common law jurisdictions. It traces the shift from an objective approach, which focuses on the outward expressions of agreement between parties, prevalent in the early to mid-20th century, to a more subjective and equitable approach employed in the late 20th century, which considers […]
Daniel O’Gorman, ‘Saving the Common Law of Contracts from Politics and Codification: Holmes, Langdell, and Legal Science’
INTRODUCTION In the late nineteenth century, the common law of contracts needed saving. Or so Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, and Christopher Columbus Langdell believed. The threat to the common law of contracts was twofold. First, it might become infected by the popular trends in political philosophy. Second, the state legislatures might bring an end to […]