Analyzes barristers and solicitors as a legal profession in England and Wales.

This book examines the development of legal professionalism in the early English common law, with specific reference to the 13th-century treatise known as Bracton and to its likely authors.

We are currently witnessing an unprecedented transformation in the legal profession and legal education. The Legal Services Act 2007 and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 have both enabled and necessitated dramatic structural changes to the profession, as well as impacting on its ethos and ethicality. The recent Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) promises similarly dramatic change to the provision of legal education, reflecting the shifting landscape of both the legal professional market and Higher Education in general. These transformative changes bring both exciting opportunities and challenges with which everyone involved in the law – from University lecturers, to Senior Partners in leading law firms, to the judiciary – must grapple. This edited collection comprises a selection of papers presented at the 2nd conference of CEPLER, Birmingham Law School's Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research. The aim of the Conference, and thus this collection, was to bring together leading academic scholars, senior figures from professional practice, policy-makers, and representatives of the regulatory authorities, to reflect on the key issues arising from this transformative moment. As such, this volume of essays covers diverse ground, from curriculum development to professional theory, enriched and enhanced by the range of backgrounds and perspectives of its contributors.

How are new technologies changing the practice of law? With examples and explanations drawn from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and other common law countries, as well as from China and Europe, this book considers the opportunities and implications for lawyers as artificial intelligence systems become commonplace in legal service delivery. It examines what lawyers do in the practice of law and where AI will impact this work. It also explains the important continuing role of the lawyer in an AI world. This book is divided into three parts: Part A provides an accessible explanation of AI, including diagrams, and contrasts this with the role and work of lawyers. Part B focuses on six different aspects of legal work (litigation, transactional, dispute resolution, regulation and compliance, criminal law and legal advice and strategy) where AI is making a considerable impact and looks at how this is occurring. Part C discusses how lawyers and law firms can best utilise the promise of AI, while also acknowledging its limitations. It also discusses ethical and regulatory issues, including the lawyer's role in upholding the rule of law.

Offering an important new perspective on medieval political, legal, and social history in England, Anthony Musson examines how medieval people at all social levels thought about law, justice, politics, and their role in society. He provides a history of judicial developments in the 13th and 14th centuries, while interweaving within each chapter a special focus on different facets of legal culture and experience. This illuminating approach reveals a comprehensive picture of two centuries worth of tremendous social change.

Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from Christ as a litigious redemptor to Chaucer's deal-making Host in The Canterbury Tales. Most scholarly work on the subject has been confined either to tracking down representations of legal practices in texts or to examining formal questions relating to legal discourse. In a groundbreaking departure, The Letter of the Law suggests that law and literature should be understood as parallel forms of discourse -- at times complementary, at times antagonistic, but always mutually illuminating. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386.