Dennis R. Klinck - Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England
Here you can read online Dennis R. Klinck - Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2016, publisher: Routledge, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England
- Author:
- Publisher:Routledge
- Genre:
- Year:2016
- City:London
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Judicial equity developed in England during the medieval period, providing an alternative access to justice for cases that the rigid structures of the common law could not accommodate. Where the common law was constrained by precedent and strict procedural and substantive rules, equity relied on principles of natural justice - or conscience - to decide cases and right wrongs. Overseen by the Lord Chancellor, equity became one of the twin pillars of the English legal system with the Court of Chancery playing an ever greater role in the legal life of the nation. Yet, whilst the Chancery was commonly - and still sometimes is - referred to as a court of conscience, there is remarkably little consensus about what this actually means, or indeed whose conscience is under discussion. This study tackles the difficult subject of the place of conscience in the development of English equity during a crucial period of legal history. Addressing the notion of conscience as a juristic principle in the Court of Chancery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book explores how the concept was understood and how it figured in legal judgment. Drawing upon both legal and broader cultural materials, it explains how that understanding differed from modern notions and how it might have been more consistent with criteria we commonly associate with objective legal judgement than the modern, more subjective, concept of conscience. The study culminates with an examination of the chancellorship of Lord Nottingham (1673-82), who, because of his efforts to transform equity from a jurisdiction associated with discretion into one based on rules, is conventionally regarded as the father of modern, systematic equity. From a broader perspective, this study can be seen as a contribution to the enduring discussion of the relationship between formal accounts of law, which see it as systems of rules, and less formal accounts, which try to make room for intuitive moral or prudential reasoning.
Dennis R. Klinck: author's other books
Who wrote Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Dennis R. Klinck
Andrew Wommack
Creveld
J. Budziszewski
Paul Strohm
Serge-Christophe Kolm
Peter Charles Hoffer
Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
CONSCIENCE, EQUITY AND THE COURT OF CHANCERY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
To the memory of my father who, for better or for worse, instilled in me an acute sense of the demands of conscience
Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England
DENNIS R. KLINCK
McGill University, Canada
McGill University, Canada
First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 2010 Dennis R. Klinck
Dennis R. Klinck has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Klinck, Dennis R., 1946
Klinck, Dennis R., 1946
Conscience, equity and the Court of Chancery in early modern England.
1. Equity England History 16th century. 2. Equity England History 17th century. 3. Great Britain. High Court of Justice. Chancery Division Rules and practice. 4. Judicial opinions England History 16th century. 5. Judicial opinions England History 17th century. I. Title
346.4200409031dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klinck, Dennis R., 1946
Klinck, Dennis R., 1946
Conscience, equity and the Court of Chancery in early modern England / Dennis R. Klinck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6774-2 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Equity England History. 2. England and Wales. Court of Chancery History. 3. Great Britain. Court of Chancery History. I. Title.
KD674.K58 2009
347.42026dc22
2009020348
ISBN 9780754667742 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315573465 (ebk)
ISBN 9781315573465 (ebk)
Contents
Preface
My initial encounter with judicial equity occurred when, as a somewhat reluctant mature first-year law student at the University of Saskatchewan in 1979, I received an information package telling me that I should read Glanville Williamss Learning the Law in preparation for the start of classes. Reading the book, I was particularly struck by the revelation that there were, at least historically, two parallel jurisdictions in English law, the common law and equity. This was something totally unexpected for me, something about which I had no previous inkling. As an erstwhile student of literature, I was struck as well by Williamss reference to Ashburners account, by way of metaphor, of the ostensible effect of the Judicature Act: the two streams of law and equity run side by side in the same channel, but they do not mix their waters.
Throughout my legal studies, I continued to encounter allusions to equity, but I had no very clear idea what it was, and, at that time, I did not really think about it very searchingly. Later, when I began my law teaching career at McGill University, I was asked (quite fortuitously, since at that time I thought of my interests as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Criminal Law), to teach a course entitled Equity and Trusts. Frankly, when first teaching the course, I treated it as a rather doctrinal exposition of the law of trustsmuch like the course Trusts which I had taken as a studentand I did not pay much explicit heed to the equity part.
However, when a proposal was brought forward to change the name of the course from Equity and Trusts to Trusts and Estates, I was moved to think a little more deeply about equity. The argument advanced by some colleagues of a rather pragmatic persuasion was that equity, at least in this context, was an obsolete and meaningless concept, and that we should be teaching the actual, practical law. Having, before reading the law, completed a doctorate in English literature, concentrating on early seventeenth-century drama, I reacted instinctively against the idea that because something was old, or old-fashioned, it was to be discarded. This was probably the real inception of my continuing efforts to come to some understanding of judicial equity and its role in the contemporary legal dispensation. As is so often the case, I found that the more one actually explores a subject, actually gets into it, the more complex or even mysterious it appears. I shall not attempt to chronicle my still inconclusive efforts to come to grips with equity.
One cannot delve very far into judicial equity without encountering the notion of conscience. The Court of Chancery was, historically, a court of conscience; the Chancellor was the keeper of the sovereigns conscience; certain kinds of conduct were sanctioned by the Court because they were against conscience. This struck me as vaguely interesting, but I was, at least at first, content to consign it to the realm of historical curiosity. But something else struck me as wellthe fact that conscience kept appearing as an ostensibly living part of the modern discourse of equity. This I found rather anomalous. Like many others, I suppose, I thought of conscience very much as the individual persons subjective sense of right and wrong, not as some kind of objective standard of conduct, imposed from without, as the law tends to be. Indeed, many of the contexts in which I had encountered conscience tended to oppose it to law: so, for example, the Canadian Charter protects freedom of conscience. This suggests to me that laws unreasonably interfering with the diversity of personal conscience might be inoperative. Conscience is personal moral intuition, insulated from the intrusiveness of law.
This led me to contemplate how consciencewhich on one view can be idiosyncratic moral judgment, which provides the criteria specific to the individual by which that individual assesses his or her conductcan be reconciled with law. My questions in this regard were hardly original: like every other student of the common law (at least until recently), I had encountered John Seldens complaint that equity is a roguish thing and that judgment according to the individual Chancellors conscience could be analogized to measurement according to the length of the individual Chancellors foot. Indeed, I ultimately co-authored, with one of my research assistants, Loris Mirella, a paper examining aspects of the invocation of the metaphor of the Chancellors foot in modern Canadian case law. One aspect of this matter that particularly engaged my attention was the tendency of at least some modern courts to speak of conscience in the context of equity as if it was essentially the same concept as that which might have been invoked by a medieval ecclesiastical Chancellor. It seemed at least problematic to me to assume that the concept had endured more or less unchanged over the centuries.
This is the background to the present study, which is an attempt to elaborate, fairly comprehensively, the contexts for understanding conscience in the early period, and particularly to interrogate whether earlier understandings of conscience might have been more accordant with its being a juristic principle. I use the expression fairly comprehensively deliberately. Various aspects of the question have, of course, been examined before. Part of my aim is to bring together what is known into one volume. I hope that, while covering the ground, I have been able to dig more deeply. My treatment is also
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England»
Look at similar books to Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Andrew Wommack
Creveld
J. Budziszewski
Paul Strohm
Serge-Christophe Kolm
Peter Charles Hoffer
Reviews about «Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England»
Discussion, reviews of the book Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.