The Expansion of the Common Law (1904)

Seitenzahl:

100

Gewicht:

159 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II, The Scales of Justice, Under the rude and inadequate forms of the ancient popular courts we have been able to discern principles of lasting value, which are still at the very foundation of our judicial system and of our public law, and of which little is said on any common occasion, just because we accept them as matters of course. Now the popular courts were wholly incompetent to adapt themselves to a new state of society, and therefore, to maintain themselves and their traditions either for better or worse. Their constitution was essentially provincial, archaic and unprogressive. No system of national justice could ever come out of them; nor is there anything that strikes a student of our legal history more forcibly than the swiftness of their decline, after the thirteenth century, into insignificance and all but total oblivion (a). They were supplanted, as is notorious, for greater matters by the king's courts or the palatine courts which had unlimited legal franchises, and for smaller matters partly by the courts of private jurisdictions, enjoying immunities and exercising powers of every lower degree, and partly by the privileged jurisdictions of cities and boroughs. For the present purpose it is needless to dwell on the complicated, sometimes anomalous, and always interesting distinctions which are to be observed among these various authorities. Whatever might be their particular historical origin and legal warrant, the local courts agreed, in fact, with very few exceptions of any importance, in imitating the king's courts. The procedure and methods of the king's judges became the general model. So far did the Bishop of Durham carry the logic of his regalities that he found no difficulty in issuing, as temporal lord, prohibitions addressed to himself as bishop. It may...

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Mehr von:  Frederick Pollock, Cambridge Scholars Publishing