The Carlyle Lectures 2023 - Custom, Common Law and Civil Law
17 January - 21 February 2023
Speaker: Professor John Hudson (Professor of Legal History, University of St. Andrews; L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law, Michigan Law)
Tuesday 17 January
Maitland, Common Law and Civil Law
This lecture explores English attitudes to Roman and canon law systems, with a particular focus on the works of F.W. Maitland.
Tuesday 24 January
Legal development in Europe: a view from the 1190s
This lecture examines patterns of legal development in England, France and north Italy in the latter part of the twelfth century. It suggests that those patterns do not act as a clear guide to the developments that followed in the thirteenth century.
Tuesday 31 January
Legal learning and learning law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
This lecture examines the English contribution to Roman and canon law learning and considers how interpretation may be affected by moving away from use of Bologna as the main comparator. It also looks at other aspects of learning the law in England and at developing forms of legal reasoning.
Tuesday 07 February
Genius or juristic accident? Policy, legal change and the early Common Law
This lecture considers how far legal change was a matter of policy, how far it was the unintended outcome of limited innovations. It raises issues concerning competition between different models of lordship and landholding and revisits the notion of an 'anti-feudal' policy. It thereby reflects upon the arguments of Maitland and of S.F.C. Milsom.
Tuesday 14 February
'Secreted in the interstices of procedure': actions, ideas, and legal change
This lecture explores the ways in which deliberate legal change came to have unintended effects, especially on substantive law. It considers the interplay of legal learning, legal reasoning, and legal change. In so doing, it ponders Sir Henry Maine's view of substantive law being secreted in the interstices of procedure.
Tuesday 21 February
'Nolumus mutare...': further reflections
This concluding lecture reflects on the problems and possibilities of comparative legal history before moving on to the differences and similarities in patterns of England, France, and north Italy in the period c.1160-1270.
