This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs. Two great themes dominate the book: (1) the origins, development, and pervasive influence of the jury system and judge/jury relations across eight centuries of Anglo-American civil and criminal justice; and (2) the law/equity division, from the emergence of the Court of Chancery in the fourteenth century down through equity's conquest of common law in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The chapters on criminal justice explore the history of pretrial investigation, policing, trial, and sentencing, as well as the movement in modern times to nonjury resolution through plea bargaining. Considerable attention is devoted to distinctively American developments, such as the elective bench, and the influence of race relations on the law of criminal procedure. Other major subjects of this book include the development of the legal profession, from the serjeants, barristers, and attorneys of medieval times down to the transnational megafirms of twenty-first century practice; the literature of the law, especially law reports and treatises, from the Year Books and Bracton down to the American state reports and today's electronic services; and legal education, from the founding of the Inns of Court to the emergence and growth of university law schools in the United States.

This first booklength survey of the 800-year evolution of Anglo-American common law contract begins in 12th-century England and extends to contemporary America, focusing on how procedural, economic, intellectual, and social considerations tempered the form of contract law and analyzing the thought of lawyers and judges throughout the period. Covers Plantagenet royal courts in England to contract law in the context of American urban, industrialized society; reviews public policy, consumerism, and codification; and poses questions about the future direction of contract law.

This study analyzes the development of criminal law during the first several generations of American life. Its comparison of the substantive and procedural law among the colonies reveals the similarities and differences between the New England and the Chesapeake colonies. Bradley Chapin addresses the often-debated question of the “reception” of English law and makes estimates of the relative weight of the sources and methods of early American law. A main theme of his book is that colonial legislators and judges achieved a significant reform of the English criminal law at a time when a parallel movement in England failed. The analysis is made specific and concrete by statistics that show patterns of prosecutions and crime rates. In addition to the exciting and convincing theme of a “lost period” of great creativity in American criminal law, Chapin gives a wealth of detail on statutory and common-law rulings, noteworthy criminal cases, and judicial views of how the law was to be administered. He provides social and economic explanations of shifts and peculiarities in the law, using carefully arranged evidence from the records. His treatment of the Quaker cases in Massachusetts and the witchcraft prosecutions in New England throws new light on those frequently misunderstood episodes. Chapin's book will be of interest not only to scholars working in the field but also to anyone curious about early American legal history.

A History of Law in Canada is an important three-volume project. Volume One begins at a time just prior to European contact and continues to the 1860s, Volume Two covers the half century after Confederation, and Volume Three covers the period from the beginning of the First World War to 1982, with a postscript taking the account to approximately 2000. The history of law includes substantive law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal culture. The authors assume that since 1500 there have been three legal systems in Canada – the Indigenous, the French, and the English. At all times, these systems have co-existed and interacted, with the relative power and influence of each being more or less dominant in different periods. The history of law cannot be treated in isolation, and this book examines law as a dynamic process, shaped by and affecting other histories over the long term. The law guided and was guided by economic developments, was influenced and moulded by the nature and trajectory of political ideas and institutions, and variously exacerbated or mediated intercultural exchange and conflict. These themes are apparent in this examination, and through most areas of law including land settlement and tenure, and family, commercial, constitutional, and criminal law.

Deals with the Professional Tradition of the historical development of English law as it influences the historians of Anglo-American law.