3 - English Legal Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century: Institutions and Values

Summary

The chapter surveys the major institutions and values of English law in the era of the first British settlement in New South Wales. The legal order of 18th-century England displayed great complexity and technicality, the result of an extended process of historical growth and adaptation by which new institutions and doctrines were grafted on to existing structures and procedures. Two important points of unity and direction existed.The common law, a system of legal custom developed over centuries by the practices of the royal courts and associated with the historic customs and liberties of the community. And parliamentary statute, which became in the century a frequent and reliable instrument of legal change and governance, shaping matters of criminal justice, commerce and domestic economy, local government and global empire. A major theme of recent scholarship is the myriad and often incremental ways in which statute altered, influenced and weakened England’s complex legal inheritance, as Parliament determined which of English liberties and legal practices would survive or flourish in the localities and in the empire.