Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T08:29:51.381Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

44 - Law books

from III - SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

Michael F. Suarez, SJ
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Michael L. Turner
Affiliation:
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Get access

Summary

Definitions

In January 1786, as he prepared for a mid-life career change from Scots advocate to English barrister, James Boswell ‘read in Blackstone for some days’. Some years later another Edinburgh lawyer hoped that William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), still regarded by English common lawyers as ‘the magnum opus of the eighteenth century’, might yield ‘a certain degree of Information in the English Laws’ to complement ‘the best Books (though we have none nearly so good) on Scots Jurisprudence’.

The title of this volume notwithstanding, there was – and arguably still is – no such thing as British law. While facilitating some cross-border traffic of cases and practitioners, the first Act of Union (6 Anne c. 11) preserved the autonomy of English common law and Scottish Roman or civilian legal institutions. Nor did the second union of 1800 incorporate Ireland’s transplanted common-law jurisdiction (39 & 40 George III c. 67), although appeals from Dublin, as from Edinburgh, went henceforth to the House of Lords at Westminster. Irish courts and lawyers followed precedents and procedures laid down by English law books, many of which were reprinted in Dublin, like the pirated 1775 ‘sixth’ edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, since no copyright legislation applied in Ireland until 1801 (41 George III c. 107). Yet English and Irish law were not identical. The 1780s also saw the first printed volumes of Irish law reports since the early seventeenth century; these heralded ‘a profusion of nominate Irish reports’, while not immediately ending complaints about the fated oblivion of Irish judicial decisions. That eighteenth-century Irish law publishing involved more than merely reprints for export to England and its colonies is, however, indicated by the appearance of such works as Matthew Dutton’s Law of masters and servants in Ireland (Dublin, 1723), ‘the earliest textbook in English in the field of labour law’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker, J. H. 2002a ‘English law books and legal publishing’, in II Morgan, N. and Thomson, R.M. (eds.) The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, vol. II: 1100–1400, Cambridge, 2008 IV.Google Scholar
Baker, J. H. 2002b An introduction to English legal history, 4th edn, London.
Bell, I. A. 1991 Literature and crime in Augustan England, London.
Bellot, H. 1933Parliamentary printing, 1660–1837’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birks, M. 1960Stevens and Sons: 1810–1960’, The Law Society’s Gazette, July 1960 –7.Google Scholar
Blackstone, W. An Analysis of the Laws of England (Oxford, 1756)
Blackstone, W. 17651769 Commentaries on the laws of England, 4 vols., Oxford.
Bridgman, R. W. 1807 A short view of legal bibliography: containing some critical observations on the authority of the reporters and other law writers; collected from the best authorities, and intended as a companion to the Author’s Reflections on the study of law, London.
Brooks, C. W. 1998 Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450, London.
Browne, J. Browne’s general law list for the year 1800 (London, 1800)
Buller, F. An introduction to the law relative to trials at nisi prius (London, 1793)
Butterworth, H. A general catalogue of law books (London, 1815)
Cameron, W. J. and Carroll, D. J. 1966 Short title catalogue of books printed in the British Isles …1701–1800 held in the libraries of the Australian Capital Territory, Canberra.
Clark, G. Memoranda legalis: or an alphabetical digest of the laws of England: adapted to the use of the lawyer, the merchant, and the trader (1800)
Cochrane, J. A. 1964 Dr Johnson’s printer: the life of William Strahan, London.
Cooper, M. 1997The Worcester book-trade in the eighteenth-century’, Worcestershire Historical Society, occasional publications.
Daniel, W. T. S. 1884 The history and origin of the law reports, together with a compilation of various documents shewing the progress and result of proceedings taken for their establishment, and the condition of the reports on the 31st December, 1883, London.
Devereaux, S. 1996The City and the Sessions Paper: “public justice” in London, 1770–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 33.Google Scholar
Eaves, T. C. D. and Kimpel, B. D. 1971 Samuel Richardson: a biography, Oxford.
Eller, C. S. 1938 The William Blackstone Collection in the Yale Law Library: a bibliographical catalogue, New Haven, CT.
Feather, J. 1985 The provincial book trade in eighteenth-century England, Cambridge.
Ferdinand, C. Y. 1999Constructing the frameworks of desire: how newspapers sold books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Raymond 1999a –75.
Ford, P. and Ford, G. 1972 A guide to parliamentary papers, 3rd edn, Shannon, Co. Clare.
Gibson, S. and Holdsworth, W. S. 1930Charles Viner’s General abridgment of law and equity’, Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers, 2.Google Scholar
Hansard, L. 1991 The auto-biography of Luke Hansard, printer to the House, 1752–1828, ed. Myers, R., London.
Hansard, L. G. 1962 Luke Graves Hansard his diary, 1814–1841: a case study in the reform of patronage, ed. by , P. and Ford, G., Oxford.
Hoeflich, M. H. 1998Legal history and the history of the book’, University of Kansas Law Review, 46.Google Scholar
Holdsworth, W. S. 19221966 A history of English law, 2nd edn, 16 vols., London.
Ibbetson, D. 1999Charles Viner and his chair: legal education in eighteenth-century Oxford’, in Bush and Wijffels 1999 –28.
Johns, A. 1998 The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making, Chicago, IL.
Jones, H. K. 1980 Butterworths: history of a publishing house, London.
Lambert, S. 1968Printing for the House of Commons in the eighteenth century’, Library, 5th ser., 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langley, B. A sure method of improving estates (1728)
Lemmings, D. 2000 Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century, Oxford.
Linebaugh, P. 1991 The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century, London.
Lobban, M. 1991 The common law and English jurisprudence 1760–1850, Oxford.
Lobban, M. 1997The English legal treatise and English law in the eighteenth century’, in Dauchy, Monballyu and Wijffels 1997.
Macnair, M. 1994Sir Jeffrey Gilbert and his treatises’, Journal of Legal History, 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxted, I. 1977 The London book trades, 1775–1800: a preliminary checklist of members, Folkestone.
Maxwell, M. W. 1974The development of law publishing, 1799–1974’, in Sweet and Maxwell 1974.
Melton, F. 1985Robert and Sir Francis Gosling: eighteenth-century bankers and stationers’, in Myers and Harris 1985.
Mumby, F. A., and Norrie, I. 1974 Publishing and bookselling, 5th edn, London.
O’Higgins, P. 1986Law printing in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Law Librarian, 7.Google Scholar
Osborough, W. N. 1993Puzzles from Irish reporting history’, in Birks 1993.
Pearce, T. The poor man’s lawyer: or, laws relating to the inferior courts laid open (London, 1755)
Philip, I. G. 1957 William Blackstone and the reform of the Oxford University Press in the eighteenth century, Oxford.
Pollard, M. 1989 Dublin’s trade in books, 1500–1800, Oxford.
Prest, W. R. (ed.) 1993Law reform in eighteenth-century England’, in Birks 1993 –23.
Rayner, J. Observations on the statutes relating to the stamp duties (London, 1786)
Ridgeway, W. 1794 Reports of cases … King’s Bench and Chancery … Lord Hardwicke …, London.
Robinson, R. B. 1991, ‘The two institutes of Thomas Wood: a study in eighteenth-century legal scholarship’, American Journal of Legal History, 35.Google Scholar
Ross, R. 1998The commoning of the common law: the Renaissance debate over printing English law, 1520–1640’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruggles, T. The barrister (1792)
Sale, W. M. 1950 Samuel Richardson: master printer, Ithaca, NY.
Schmidt, A. J. 1996A career in the law: clerkship and the profession in late eighteenthcentury Lincolnshire’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 31.Google Scholar
Simpson, A. W. B. 1981The rise and fall of the legal treatise: legal principles and the forms of legal literature’, University of Chicago Law Review, 48.Google Scholar
Speck, W. A. 1982Politicians, peers and publication by subscription 1700–1750’, in Rivers 1982a.
Stovin, A. The law respecting horses (Hull 1794)
Tomlins, T. A familiar explanation of the law of wills and codicils (1801)
Vernon, G. W. and Scriven, J. B. 17871789 Irish reports; or, reports of cases determined in the King’s Courts, Dublin, with select cases in the House of Lords of Ireland. 2 vols., Dublin.
Wallace, J. W. 1882 The reporters arranged and characterized with incidental remarks, 4th edn, Edinburgh.
Winfield, P. H. 1925 The chief sources of English legal history, Cambridge, MA.
Worrall, J. Bibliotheca legum: or a new and compleat list of all the common and statute law books of this realm, and some others relating thereunto, from their first publication to Trinity term 1756 (London, 1756)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×