Tort Litigation against Transnational Corporations: The Challenge of Jurisdiction in English Courts, by Ekaterina Aristova (Oxford University Press, 2024) 352 pp.

Much mainstream legal comment on human rights law presents an unhelpfully crude picture of disagreement concerning the significance that should be attached to human rights in particular cultural co...

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

David Carnegie and Gary Taylor, eds. The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 420. $65.00. This volume is an account--and a symptom--of what one of the contributors calls fever, a malady of long standing that has had a notable recent outbreak following the appearance of Brean Hammond's edition of Lewis Theobald's play Double Falsehood in the Arden series (2010). A play called Cardenno or Cardenna was performed at the English court in 1613; Humphrey Moseley registered ownership of a manuscript play called The History of Cardenio Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare in 1653; Theobald declared repeatedly that his play, performed in 1727 and published in 1728, was based on a manuscript inherited from a Restoration theater; and the plot of Double Falsehood does indeed follow the narrative strand in Don Quixote that involves a character called Cardenio. This chain of connections is strong, but not so strong that there is not room for doubt whether in fact there are any traces of Fletcher or in Theobald's play. In an interesting turn of events, the question of authentic in Double Falsehood--authentic Shakespeare, rather than authentic Fletcher, because it is of course the link that provides the bacillus of Cardenio fever--has prompted a series of modern revisions of the play that aim to reverse Theobald's posttdated changes and recreate the original. It seems that the best antidote to Theobald's presumed pastiche and adaptation is more pastiche and adaptation. Stephen Greenblatt, Gary Taylor, and Bernard Richards have all worked in this way. Theirs is a remarkable fusion of scholarship, creativity, and performance. Doubtful authorial origins, for instance in collaborative plays, have often stymied interpretation, but the radical uncertainties in the Double Falsehood story have unleashed striking energies of their own. These are charted in lively reviews of performances in the last part of the collection. One interesting question that arises is: how much evidence do the experiments of performance offer for the nature of the original text? Is a play like Taylor's The History of Cardenio moving closer to a postulated original text as it is progressively refined so as to make dramatic sense for a twenty-first-century audience? Methodological purists would answer the question in the negative, but we are moving into an era when making and performing texts are coming closer to the mainstream of scholarship, and releasing all sorts of energies and possibilities. All this is generously covered in the collection. There are twenty-one contributors, and twenty-six essays, dealing with the ghostly 1613 play and its slightly more corporeal performance then, the intervening life of Moseley's listing, the alleged Restoration survival of the manuscript, Theobald's work, and the modern editions, revisions, and performances, as well as the internal evidence in word use and metrics that can be used to try to detect Shakespeare's and Fletcher's hands in Double Falsehood. Taylor, ever the skilled advocate, has a long, detailed essay with a bravura archaeological reconstruction of a section of the lost original History of Cardenio that must have included a song with words by Fletcher and music by Robert Johnson, and a demonstration that the meter and language of a passage from Double Falsehood betray its Shakespearean origins, confirmed by a swag of unique parallels with in phrasing. MacDonald P. Jackson in his essay takes E. H. C. Oliphant's division of the Theobald play among authors as his starting point and finds unmistakable traces of both Fletcher and Shakespeare, but with the difference that hardly any of the latter's lines are likely to have survived unaltered. Richard Proudfoot follows a single line of evidence, the polysyllabic words that appear at the end of decasyllabic lines, and finds that the patterns of Double Falsehood fit the hypothesis of a Fletcher-Shakespeare adaptation better than the notion of a newly created play. …

ABSTRACTThis article offers a reading of Jakob De Roover's important book, Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). It invokes the way in which the English courts have re-described Sikh tradition as religion in order to illustrate the relevance of Jakob De Roover's hypothesis about secularism, explaining its dependence on Christian theology and its inbuilt normative dynamic, which reframes tradition and poses a lethal threat to it.

The Children of Henry VIII, by John Guy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. xv, 258 pp. $27.95 Cdn (cloth), $17.95 Cdn (paper). John Guy's newest work, a biographical analysis of the intersecting lives of the four acknowledged children of Tudor monarch Henry VIII, is an eminently readable monograph that covers familiar territory through a new lens. It focuses on the educational and domestic lives of Mary, Edward, Elizabeth, and Henry Fitzroy, painting a lavish and attentive portrait of their lives in and around the English court. Guy posits that Henry VIII's different treatment of his children was intrinsically connected to his political machinations and that his goals as monarch can be reexamined through his relationship with each child. The text is organized in a combination of chronological and thematic sections, the focus shifting among Henry, some of his wives, and the four children. The prologue sets up the relationships among Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, and their families. It also establishes a background for Henry VIII's anxieties over his lack of an heir, a thread of insecurity that runs throughout the narrative. Chapter one begins with the marriage and early reproductive problems of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, including their multiple neonate deaths and pregnancy losses before and after the birth of Princess Mary. Of particular interest here is the overview of Whiteley and Kramer's 2010 study of Henry VIII's reproductive problems. They bring to light a new possible diagnosis for Henry--if he carried positive Kell antigens, then his ability to produce living offspring with a Kell-negative partner would have been reduced. Henry's fertility troubles, Guy suggests, were at the root of his extramarital affairs as well as his political machinations. Chapter two outlines Princess Mary's childhood, her households, and education as well as the beginning of Henry VIII's infatuation with Anne Boleyn. Even as an infant Mary was to be an extremely useful tool for Henry in his negotiations with other heads of state, and his treatment of her reflected as much. Chapter three describes the establishment of care for Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII's illegitimate son with Bessie Blount. Once it became apparent that Katherine of Aragon was unlikely to have another successful pregnancy, the spectre of the legitimization of Fitzroy loomed large. Fitzroy's education contrasted in purpose and content with Mary's until his death at age seventeen, his curriculum aimed at producing an active leader rather than an educated follower. Chapters four through six detail the remainder of Henry's reign, including his Great Matter and subsequent marriages, extramarital adventures, and divorces. Focus on Elizabeth's household and shifting alliances therein, as well as tensions between Mary and Elizabeth, sets the groundwork for later sections. Edward's education is contrasted with Elizabeth's in chapter six in much the same way as Mary and Fitzroy were set in opposition to each other earlier in the text. Edward was only nine years of age when Henry VIII died, leaving the young king to the mercies of his regency council and their varied priorities. Henry's influence continued to reach past his own death, and the ways in which he moulded his children became apparent through their individual retrenchments after his death. Chapters seven through nine outline the years of Edward's, Mary's, and Elizabeth's reigns, respectively, with brief mention made of their cousin Jane and her equally brief rule. The usual ground is covered here, from marriage negotiations to scandal and religious struggles, with particular emphasis placed on the ever present influence of their father's legacy. Guy depicts a world of mutual jealousies and power plays, where the royal children were set against each other, both deliberately and as accidental side effect of their upbringings. He dismisses any suggestions of affection among them as political ploys, and draws a picture of a collection of isolated and embittered youngsters connected only in their patrimony. …

Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550. <b>By</b>Shannon McSheffrey. Oxford University Press. 2017. xii + 219pp. £60.00.

Legal Risk in the Financial Markets, by Roger McCormick, 2006, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. ix + 297. The use of information and communication technologies, globalization, and the liberalization of financial markets have all gone hand in hand with increasingly complex financial innovations. These new products, the new technologies, and the increased exposure to different, sometimes conflicting, legislation have increased the importance of legal risk. This legal risk in now recognized as a form of operational risk by the Basel II accords. In an innovative, ambitious, path-clearing work, Roger McCormick attempts to clarify what constitutes legal risk in the financial markets and how to manage it. He provides many examples of such risks that, he repeats often, have small probabilities but large impacts, large enough to wipe out a business and create systemic effects for other contracting parties. The examples he provides, as well as the compilation of different definitions and different perspectives to these risks, makes the book an ideal source for generating material for a course on English law in financial markets. In the introduction, McCormick divides this risk into two categories: the risk of being sued (type 1 risk) and the risk of losing money because of technical defects in the way the transaction is done especially if the other contracting party defaults (type 2 risk). According to McCormick writing in 2005/2006, the type 2 kind of risk can create systemic risks, owing largely due to legal uncertainty, but it is occupying the market much less in recent years, reassured by English court decisions. He felt that the market, at that time, was more concerned with type 1 risk and the rise of the opportunism culture of suing or as he aptly terms it, having a go. Recent events show that systemic risk really existed and that indeed the financial market and its actors did not really understand the legal ramifications of all the complex financial products that had been bought, and that there were many technical defects in the way transactions were being conducted. Thus, the importance of his work is reinforced. This financial crisis highlights the importance of the work by McCormick, daring because not even the financial markets understand the legal risks involved, and few lawyers, if any, would really understand the complexity of all the financial products. The book is therefore useful to policymakers, lawyers, and financial actors, besides academics. To heighten the interest of policymakers to the book, McCormick points out that there is competition in the market place on the laws to adopt and if England wants its laws to be adopted, then it would have to create more legal certainty and reduce risk. For this, the government needs to constantly monitor the marketplace for new technologies and new products that have been introduced and ensure that actors involved with these innovations understand the legal ramifications. The first part of the book provides some historical examples of legal uncertainty in financial markets based largely on English law examples, notwithstanding four isolated mentions of cases in other countries. The examples include a case on swaps, another on charge backs in the context of invoice discounting, and a third on settling differences (set-offs/netting) in the context of bankruptcy. McCormick justifies the usefulness of English law as it is, according to a British financial newspaper, the most important law in international financial transactions. In any case, a start has to be made somewhere, and harmonization through directives and imitation may have rendered legislations similar enough for the legal niceties to be comprehensible to a wide Audience even if treated differently in different laws. The second part of the book presents the characteristics of legal risk, using the historical examples as a justification for the importance of the subject. …

English Courts of Law. By H. G. Hanbury, D.C.L. Home University Library, London: Oxford University Press. 1944. 192 pp. (3s. 6d. net.)

H. G. HANBURY, English Courts of Law, Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, London, 1967, 152 pages, $1.50. Un article de la revue Les Cahiers de droit (Volume 9, numéro 2, 1967–1968, p. 115-309) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Despite its long history, statutory nuisance law is still considered important in dealing with localised environmental problems. But it is an area of law that is now beginning to creak - the result of both its historical origins and the attitude of contemporary judges to its modern application. Key recent decisions of the British courts are examined, and the judiciary is shown to have adopted an unduly narrow approach and one that is based on a misinterpretation of legislative intention. A detailed examination of Parliamentary debates in the middle of the nineteenth century during the development of statutory nuisance laws shows that the concept was promoted as being broad, flexible and expansive. Modern courts have singularly failed to adapt statutory nuisance to contemporary needs, a lost opportunity since the statutory nuisance regime can provide an effective means for local government to deal rapidly with environmental problems as well as an accessible remedy for the private individual. © 2006 Oxford University Press.