Anthony Musson

Chantal Stebbings

The first book to address the way that the broad and inclusive subject of legal history is researched and written.

Approaches and Methodologies

Making Legal History

Unlike the preceding volumes in this series, Law Reporting in Britain has a single, clear theme: the history and development of law reporting in Britain, from the earliest English reports of the second half of the 13th century to the beginnings of the reporting of planning decisions in the 20th century. Law reports are one of the main sources from which legal history is written. They record what lawyers and judges said in court in legal argument arising out of the facts of particular cases and how the judges decided the outcome of those cases. They thus provide vital evidence for what the lawyers and judges of the past believed to be the law of their day. They also demonstrate the ability of those lawyers and judges to shape and develop law through argument and decision-making in individual cases.

Law Reporting in Britain

Nineteenth-century governments faced considerable challenges from the rapid, novel and profound changes in social and economic conditions resulting from the industrial revolution. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated and complex government, from the 1830s the specialist and largely lay statutory tribunal was conceived and adopted as the principal method of both implementing the new regulatory legislation and resolving disputes. The tribunal's legal nature and procedures, and its place in the machinery of justice, were debated and refined throughout the Victorian period. In examining this process, this 2007 book explains the interaction between legal constraints, social and economic demand and political expediency that gave rise to this form of dispute resolution. It reveals the imagination and creativity of the legislators who drew on diverse legal institutions and values to create the new tribunals, and shows how the modern difficulties of legal classification were largely the result of the institution's nineteenth-century development.

Chantal Stebbings

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