Making Legal History

Anthony Musson is Professor of Legal History at the School of Law and a Director of the Bracton Centre for Legal History Research at the University of Exeter. He is also a Barrister of the Middle Temple and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Chantal Stebbings is Professor of Law and Legal History at the School of Law and a Director of the Bracton Centre for Legal History Research at the University of Exeter. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Taxation by thesis and Professeur Invité at the University of Rennes I, France.

Introduction Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings; Foreword: reflections on 'doing' legal history Sir John Baker; 1. Editing law reports and doing legal history: compatible or incompatible projects Paul Brand; 2. The indispensability of manuscript case notes to eighteenth-century barristers and judges James Oldham; 3. Judging the judges: the reputations of nineteenth century judges and their sources Patrick Polden; 4. Benefits and barriers: the making of Victorian legal history Chantal Stebbings; 5. The historical turn in late nineteenth-century American legal thought David M. Rabban; 6. The methodological debates in German speaking Europe (1960–90) Marcel Senn; 7. Exploring the minds of lawyers: the duty of the legal historian to write the books of non-written law Dirk Heirbaut; 8. Comparative legal history: a methodology David Ibbetson; 9. 'They put to the torture all the ancient monuments': reflections on making eighteenth-century Irish legal history Sean Donlan; 10. The politics of historiography and the taxonomies of the colonial past: law, history and the tribes Paul McHugh; 11. Lay legal history Wilf Prest; 12. Antiquarianism and legal history Michael Stuckey; 13. Re-examining King John and Magna Carta: reflections on reasons, methodology and methods Jane Frecknall-Hughes; 14. Visual sources: mirror of justice or 'through a glass darkly'? Anthony Musson; 15. Sanctity, superstition and the death of Sarah Jacob Richard Ireland.