Chapter 4 turns to an elucidation of a plaintiffs pleading burden in alledging a public nuisance claim. In modern 20th century jurisprudence, as defined by the ALI Restatement (Second) of Torts, a public nuisance claim involves four elements that a plaintiff must prove: (1) the defendants affirmative conduct (2) caused an unreasonabel interference (3) with a right common to the general public (4) this is abatable. The ALI Restatement (Second) public nuisance elements are derived from the common law extant at the time of drafting the restatement. Many states have codified these elements, or similar elements, in thier general public nuisance statutes. This chpater examines the competing ways in which courts have interprtede these elemts, particularly what constitutes a commonly held publci rigt. Courts also have diagreed concerning what constitutes an unreasonable interference with a public right. The chapter concludes with an exploration of of the judicial trend towards greater flexibility in defining public nusiance more expansively than the common law doctrine and statutory interpretations.

Chapter 8 illuminates the intermediary stages of litigation before the early Tudor kings. It takes up the little-studied perspective of defendants in cases heard by the king’s Court of Requests and examines the potential for even this most authoritative kind of justice to be resisted. The chapter begins by studying the testimonies of messengers, recorded in Requests’ order books, for evidence of accused parties evading or rejecting the initial summons into court. It then reconstructs the process by which defendants made formal answers to petitions, and outlines the arguments they raised in their own defence. In line with debates ongoing contemporarily in Parliament and Council, defendants’ answers often contrasted extraordinary royal justice with the due process enshrined in English law. These lines of contestation were crucial to the increasing definition of royal justice under the early Tudor regimes, this chapter argues.

This chapter shows how the ties between office and household were loosened from the early seventeenth century by a new legal approach to officeholding. The authority of certain officers began to be treated as separable from their personal identity, meaning they no longer had to be ‘independent’ heads of household. MPs passed statutes to protect officers from lawsuits, providing they acted in accordance with the authority granted to them by higher powers. Judges developed a distinction between ‘judicial’ and ‘ministerial’ officers: the first required personal qualities associated with independence, the second did not. ‘Ministerial’ officers wielded an impersonal form of authority which had nothing to do with their individual identities. In interactions with other people, they conjured this authority with an array of special words and props, which granted them legal protection as servants of the state. This was especially clear in homicide law, where the question of whether or not an officer had properly conjured authority could determine the outcome of a trial. The impersonal model of official authority laid the foundations for a new style of masculine officeholding.

Peine forte et dure was the sentence imposed on suspected felons who stood mute, that is, who refused to plead. Chapter 2 speaks to the process of standing mute in the courts of medieval England, with the underlying goal of assessing the challenges an accused felon faced in negotiating the legal process sufficiently to develop a solid defense strategy. Not only were there multiple means of standing mute, but silence only sometimes functioned as a refusal to plead. Distinctions were made based on venue, process, and the nature of the charge. Historians have often assumed that medieval justices, like their early modern counterparts, did not permit silence upon appeal or treason. The medieval evidence demonstrates that these rules developed late and were enforced at the discretion of the justices. Gender also mattered in the formulation of a defense strategy: women rarely opted to stand mute, but those who did were in dire straits. The one redeeming feature for the defendant is that the king’s justices acted as counsel for the defendant, meaning that they were tasked with explaining the intricacies of pleading procedure to the defendant so that he might make an informed decision.

This chapter begins by explaining the pleading requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Next, this chapter explores how Supreme Court caselaw has shaped those rules, emphasizing the Court’s recent decisions in Twombly and Iqbal. Then, this chapter outlines the results of numerous research studies that examine the current state of employment discrimination in our society. Building on this research, this book proposes a unified analytical framework for pleading intent in employment discrimination claims brought under Title VII. The chapter then explains how the proposed pleading model comports with the federal rules, as interpreted by Twombly and Iqbal. The chapter further explores the best approach to pleading claims arising in the technology-sector context.