This volume is a collection of essays written by Samuel E. Thorne, former legal historian and professor at the Harvard Law School. Professor Thorne was considered an authority on English legal history and common law up to the 12th century. Bringing together essays on topics such as Henry I's coronation charter, English feudalism, the early history of the Inns of Court, sovereignty and the conflict of laws and Tudor social transformation, as well as the life and writings of key figures such as Henry de Bracton and Sir Edward Coke, this collection is the essential companion to Professor Thorne's work in the field.

American Political Science Review (APSR) is the longest running publication of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It features research from all fields of political science and contains an extensive book review section of the discipline.

"The issue of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism has been debated endlessly, but few scholars have seriously continued Weber's own research into the Reformation sources of seventeenth-century England. David Little's study was one of the first to do so, and remains an important contribution."—Guenther Roth, University of Washington

Fully revised and updated, this classic text provides the authoritative introduction to the history of the English common law. The book traces the development of the principal features of English legal institutions and doctrines from Anglo-Saxon times to the present and, combined with Baker and Milsom's Sources of Legal History, offers invaluable insights into the development of the common law of persons, obligations, and property. It is an essential reference point for all lawyers, historians and students seeking to understand the evolution of English law over a millennium. The book provides an introduction to the main characteristics, institutions, and doctrines of English law over the longer term - particularly the evolution of the common law before the extensive statutory changes and regulatory regimes of the last two centuries. It explores how legal change was brought about in the common law and how judges and lawyers managed to square evolution with respect for inherited wisdom.

The phrase 'Jus Uncommon' summarizes England's claim to independence from Europe, a claim supported by its unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre, and their strong interconnexion. Elizabethan tragedy begins at the Inns of Court. It was no mere coincidence, but a result of the long history of intersecting processes of law, politics, and theatre. This book sets out to contextualize and explore such legal and literary intersections, charting the emergence of Elizabethan legal culture from its various English and European sources over the course of the four hundred years running from Magna Carta to Shakespeare. It encompasses the major strands of legal history and culture that formed the background to Elizabethan political drama, republican tradition, theories of monarchical sovereignty, ?European and English theories of?imperium, ?pedagogical and rhetorical practices of the Inns of Court, ?legal-antiquarian research, parliamentary privilege, and Tudor political pamphleteering. Legal texts, discourses, and social practices constructed a pervasive intellectual culture from which Elizabethan drama - like Shakespeare's - emerged. Shakespeare is not the central object of this study, but he is central to its argument. What he knew about law was what collective memory had stored from centuries past at home and abroad. The issues, characters, themes, theories, and metaphors dramatized by the Elizabethan playwrights followed the way opened at the Inns. Emblematic figures of lawyers-writers and their Senecan patterns paved the way to Gorboduc and to Shakespeare's histories.