Legal History of Australia and the United Kingdom

In the 1700s, William Blackstone produced his Commentaries on the Laws of England, in which 'the common law's tortuous complexities were outlined in a manner at once authoritative, clear, elegant and even engaging' (Blackstone, Sir William, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (UniMelb access)). Blackstone's work also paved the way for the development of legal treatises which sought to relate the substantive content of law to coherent explanatory principles.

Source: 'Legal Literature in English Common Law' in Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History

A discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries with Wilfrid Prest of the University of Adelaide and Michael Widener, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law School. How can Blackstone's life and legacy be understood not in strict chronological terms but rather in terms of plots drawn from standard Hollywood genres?

Most legal literature in the late medieval and early modern periods taught the student how to find and arrange the law, rather than setting out its substance. These included guides to practice and pleadings, including the late-thirteenth-century Brevia placitata (Writs Pleaded) and Anthony Fitzherbert's New Natura Brevium (Nature of Briefs, 1534), and John Lilly's Modern Entries (1723). From the fifteenth century onward, abridgments of law began to circulate, which digested and organised case law for the student. The Abridgements contained complete statements of the law as it was known at the time, and are arranged by topic, often alphabetically.  Source: 'Legal Literature in English Common Law' in Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History

Some of the more well known abridgments include those listed below. Henry Bracton De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliae (approx 1250) "attempts to describe rationally the whole of English law, a task that was not again undertaken until Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in the eighteenth century. The work is remarkable both for its wealth of detail and for its attempts to make sense out of English law largely in terms of the ius commune, the combination of Roman and canon law that was taught in the universities in Bracton's time." Source: Bracton Online.

Anthony Fitzherbert La Graunde Abridgement (first edition approx 1514) is a massive digest of 13,845 cases from the year-books arranged under alphabetical headings.

 

Robert Brooke La Graunde Abridgement (approx 1573) contains "over 20,000 entries digested under a wider range of titles, and had useful marginal notes guiding the reader more readily to the contents. Contemporaries found it easier to use than Fitzherbert, and it is still a valuable reference tool. Although the abridgement was primarily derived from the medieval year-books, Broke added a number of cases from his own observation, some statutes and other sources, and even a few extracts from readings in the inns of court."

 

Edward Coke Institutes of the Laws of England (approx 1628) is one of the most influential jurisprudential work of the seventeenth century, which contained his commentary on Littleton's Tenures. Coke's jurisprudence is not set out as a continuous argument but is to be found in his isolated observations in his glosses on the medieval text.

 

Matthew Hale

 

Thomas Wood

 

Matthew Bacon

 

Charles Viner A general abridgment of law and equity / Viner's abridgment (approx 1742) is the exhaustive arrangement of legal materials under alphabetical headings, based on the works of his predecessors Robert Brooke and Henry Rolle. It was the most comprehensive attempt to render accessible the legal materials of the period.

 

John Comyns Digest of the laws of England (first edition approx 1762) 

William Blackstone Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) (see column to left).

Other sources

Contemporary dictionaries support a wide range of scholarship involving the meaning of a word or phrase, as well as the development of the meanings of works and phrases over time.

 

Other sources of legal scholarship can be found in the following databases: