English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield

James Oldham.

Published July 2004. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5532-4.

In the eighteenth century, the English common law courts laid the foundation that continues to support present-day Anglo-American law. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, 1756-1788, was the dominant judicial force behind these developments. In this abridgment of his two-volume book, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, James Oldham presents the fundamentals of the English common law during this period, with a detailed description of the operational features of the common law courts. This work includes revised and updated versions of the historical and analytical essays that introduced the case transcriptions in the original volumes, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the law.

While considerable scholarship has been devoted to the eighteenth-century English criminal trial, little attention has been given to the civil side. This book helps to fill that gap, providing an understanding of the principal body of substantive law with which America’s founding fathers would have been familiar. It is an invaluable reference for practicing lawyers, scholars, and students of Anglo-American legal history.

Endorsements

“A proper understanding and appreciation of the role of this immensely important chief justice are essential for any scholar of English and American legal history. James Oldham has provided both, with erudition and skill.”
– David Konig, Washington University at St. Louis

“Until Oldham’s original two-volume Mansfield Manuscripts was published, the legal history of the eighteenth century was something of a black hole, the subject having been very patchily investigated. This new volume makes Oldham’s work on Mansfield more readily accessible, providing a history of English law in the age of Mansfield. Given the fact that contemporary Anglo-American common law has been developed out of that body of law, this volume is bound to be welcomed by the scholarly community.”
– A. W. Brian Simpson, University of Michigan Law School
Related Titles:

Heart versus Head: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America (Sep 13, 1997)
Peter Karsten. Published September 1997. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-2340-8. Challenging traditional accounts of the development of American private law, Peter Karsten offers an important new perspective on the making of the rules of common law and equity in nineteenth-century courts. The central story of that era, he finds, was a struggle …
Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Nov 30, 2004)
Douglas Hay, Paul Craven. Published November 2004. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-2877-9. Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and …
Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers (Sep 19, 1981)
A. G. Roeber. Published 1981. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-9766-9. Until the mid-1700s, law was not thought of as a science or profession. Most Virginians adhered to the English country tradition that considered law to be a local and personal affair. The growth of cities and business, however, guaranteed that disputes would spill over county …
Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Jul 2, 1980)
Micheal Stephen Hindus. Published July 1980. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 9-780-8078-1417-8. This broad, comparative study examines the social, economic, and legal contexts of crime and authority in two vastly different states over a one hundred year period. Massachusetts–an urban, industrial, and heterogeneous northern state–chose the penitentiary in …
Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050-1150 (Sep 19, 1988)
Stephen D. White. Published 1988 (Out of Print). Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-6640-5. White combines an intensive study of medieval law with insights from anthropology, religion, and social history to create a picture of French society in the Middle Ages which is impressive in its breadth and illuminating in its detail. By examining the …