Category Archives: Legal History
‘A short history of the Copyright Wars’
In a previous post we provided the background of what some call the Copyright Wars, delineating the sides and the parties. While legal conflicts about copyright have been raging since its inception, this post will only cover the modern conflicts that arose after the Internet came into being. This short narrative is centred around online […]
‘Scottish Legal History Group: Annual General Meeting and Conference, 5th October 2024’
The Annual General Meeting of the Scottish Legal History Group will be held in the Reading Room of the Faculty of Advocates Library in Edinburgh on Saturday 5th October 2024. There is a full programme of outstanding speakers who will discuss topics ranging from the early mediaeval to the late modern periods … (more) [John […]
‘A Scotsman caught young’ – The influences which shaped Lord Mansfield: David Neuberger, Lincoln’s Inn, 22 October 2024
Lord Mansfield (1705-93) is one of the giants of English legal history. He was instrumental in the development of English law, and in particular commercial law, and his decisions over the course of his 32 years as Lord Chief Justice included definitions of fundamental legal principles. His decisions are still regularly cited in cases in […]
Warren Swain, ‘The Law of Contract and the Land of Lost Content’
ABSTRACT No respectable legal historian would suggest that an analysis of the law should be undertaken without regard to the society in which it operates. Context should not however exclude all other considerations. Various features of the law of contract in quite different societies show lawyers grappling with some problems which, if not identical, are […]
Giuliana Perrone, ‘Rehearsals for Reparations’
ABSTRACT This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, that […]
Pejo and Kolaneci, ‘The Role of Roman Law in the Formation of the State and Modern Law’
ABSTRACT The research aims to determine the role that Roman law played in the development of modern jurisprudence. Several methods of theoretical cognition were used in the course of the study, such as analysis, synthesis, comparison, specification, and generalization. As a result, some conclusions have been reached, in particular, that the mechanisms and principles of […]
Alan Brener, ‘Policymaking and the Trade Description Act 1968: cultural success and legal failure’
ABSTRACT Many UK tourists started to go on packaged holidays to the Mediterranean in the 1960s. The boom in these types of holidays, sometimes arranged by slightly piratical entrepreneurs, produced many customer complaints both to the press and MPs. As part of a move to bring some order to this chaos the new Labour government […]
Adolfo Giuliani, ‘F Calasso’s idea of the ius commune: Legal historians and the Romanist tradition, 1930-1960′
ABSTRACT On 16th January 1933 the young Francesco Calasso (1904-1965) delivered a prolusion on a subject that was to take the new generation of legal historians by storm: ‘The concept of the ius commune’. His prolusion not only changed the image of the legal past but also gave a new impetus to legal history placing […]
‘Why we all need to collaborate on clinical negligence’
During Covid, we saw the very worst of pressure on the NHS: staff at their very best to provide care in impossible circumstances and patients at their most vulnerable trying to navigate their healthcare. In the clinical negligence field, we knew the impact this would have on our clients’ cases as doctors from all disciplines […]
Edward Lee, ‘Copyright Re-Alignment: The Growth of New Works Outside the Copyright System’
ABSTRACT This Essay introduces the concept of copyright alignment to analyze the history of copyright law. Alignment refers to how the copyright system divides the universe of creative works into two: copyrighted works and uncopyrighted works in the public domain. Copyright law has developed in four periods of alignment: (1) during the 18th century, a […]